This paper reviews two main historical approaches to creativity: the Romanticist approach, based on the culture of the irrational, and the Enlightenment approach, based on the culture of the objective. It defends a paradigm of creativity as a sum of rich semiotic systems that form the basis of distributed knowledge and learning, reviews historical ideas of the university, and identifies two conflicting mainstream models in regards to understanding of the university as a public good: the ‘Public’ University circa 1960–1980, and (...) the ‘post-historical’ university. Based on practical experiences, and on previous works by Peters and Jandrić, it develops the new model of ‘the creative university as digital public university’, and argues that it provides a useful philosophical goal for directing present and future practices of the contemporary university. (shrink)

The geography of contemporary bohemia is integral to Richard Florida’s thesis of the rise of a new creative class in the USA. The strong correlation between the presence of bohemians and innovative high-tech industries in a number of American cities stands in sharp contrast to the historical image of a bohemian subculture of artists and intellectuals, defined by their antagonistic relationship to bourgeois society. Rather than a sign of social marginality, bohemian life-styles have now become a marker of the ‘new (...) economy’, variously labeled the creative, the cultural or the aesthetic economy. In my paper I want to compare and contrast these two opposed images of bohemia – the 19th-century idea of bohemia as the libertarian other of liberal-bourgeois society and the new, highly topical economic geography of bohemia – with the following questions in mind: How and why does the 19th-century artistic critique of capitalism mutate into an expression of the new spirit of capitalism? Does this change from an antagonistic to an affirmative relationship signal the emergence of a new spirit of art that can be related to the new spirit of capitalism? (shrink)

Higher education institutions in the Arabian Gulf region today, which have mushroomed and proliferated in the past ten to fifteen years, have been constructing themselves along models of Western universities at the levels of governance, programs, and structure. At the outset of the twenty-first century, universities have globally experienced a drastic shift in their governance from ‘republics of scholars’ to stakeholder organizations. In this paper, we discuss and deconstruct some of the consequences of that drastic shift, paramount among which is (...) the downsizing and neglect of some sciences/fields. We discuss some of the major problems that the Market Model of the University is facing in the West through a literature review. We also explore the academic view on some problems and challenges facing University governance today in the globe at large and specifically in the Arabian Gulf Region. We believe that universities in this region in their present state face the serious challenge of generating indigenous knowledge that fulfills the needs of citizens within this region, knowledge that draws upon the culture, history, and geography of the area and responds to the specific needs of citizens in this area. (shrink)

Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli tutkia sisäistä yrittäjyyttä luovuuden kautta työkierron kontekstissa suomalaisen keskisuuren kaupungin liikelaitoksessa. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostui teemahaastattelun menetelmällä kerätystä aineistosta, joka analysoitiin abduktiivisen sisällönanalyysin menetelmällä. Tutkimus pyrki syventämään ymmärrystä liikelaitoksen työntekijöiden ja toimihenkilöiden luovuuteen liittyen. Tutkimus käsitteli henkilöstöryhmien luovuutta, luovuuden mahdollistavaa kulttuuria sekä luovuuden kehittämistä ja niiden eroavaisuuksia henkilöstöryhmien välillä. Tutkimuksen perusteella selvisi, että henkilöstöryhmien välillä on eroa siinä, missä määrin he kokevat voivansa vaikuttaa omaan luovuuteensa töissä. Toimihenkilöiden kohdalla aktiivinen subjektin rooli oli yleisempi, kun taas työntekijät kokivat olevansa (...) useissa yhteyksissä objekteja. Tutkimuksen perusteella voidaan päätellä, että luovuuden kaltainen abstrakti ilmiö voidaan pilkkoa pienempiin palasiin. Ilmiön ymmärtäminen on tärkeää, jotta organisaatiossa voidaan ajatella luovuutta strategisena kohteena ja että sitä voidaan johtaa. (shrink)

This paper employs aspects of Hannah Arendt’s thought to explore different but interrelated questions that haunt contemporary music education. We see the importance of a return to Arendt now more than ever as we find ourselves, three authors in three different countries, trying to contribute to democratic music education practices and to researching the conceptual base of such practices, in countries where technocratic approaches to policy development prevail. More specifically in this article we address the following questions: how can we (...) re-think the political and creative dimensions of music education pedagogies in the face of recent educational policy trends? How can we go beyond linearity in our everyday educational encounters? How can we create forms of music education practice and research that induce a continuous interplay between acting and thinking? We pursue these questions through reference to three specific forms of music education practice: research seminars for PhD-students and senior researchers, pre-service music teacher education, and teaching music improvisation. In the first part of the paper, Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist elaborates upon how Hannah Arendt’s thinking influences our teaching, taking an on-going research seminar in music education as an example of a common place. In the second part, Cathy Benedict writes of ‘meeting’ Arendt and coming to an awareness of how Arendt can help us interrogate practices we have come to assume as ‘the right ones’. Seeking to create together with her students an epistemological space of appearance she challenges common teaching strategies that seem to ‘work’. Working within a teacher preparation program she comes to realize that students must also reflect on these moments so as to name what has occurred; thus they need to engage in acts of performative listening, setting aside their own desire and need to speak and be heard first. Finally, in the third part, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos raises the complex issue of how we should respond to the current deluge of entrepreneurial approaches to creativity, its use value, and its role in education. Based on the proposition that acts of musical improvisation belong to the realm of action, Kanellopoulos revisits Arendt’s notion of conservatism with the aim of outlining a possible way through which contemporary improvisation pedagogy might be re-thought. Taken together these three sets of reflections serve to offer a framing of Arendt’s thinking for music educators in different contexts, showing how Arendt's ideas might serve as a fertile ground for thinking over our own teaching, our curricular decisions, and the choices we daily make over space and time that connect us through our distinctness. (shrink)