Expanding human possibility: A sociocultural approach to creativity

During the nineth seminar organised by My Experience Molise project, Professor Vlad Glaveanu (Dublin City University) presented a talk intitled Expanding human possibility: A sociocultural approach to creativity. 

During his presentation, Prof. Glaveanu explained how creativity is considered today a key 21st century skill and a highly sought after human ability. However, this appreciation is a relatively new historical phenomenon. For much of human history, the capacity to bring about novelty, especially radical novelty, has been regarded as potentially dangerous. To understand why we value creativity and why we define it the way we do nowadays, we need to consider history and culture. Culture has an important part to play in the creative process as well. Far from an image of ‘creativity in the head’, sociocultural approaches to this phenomenon offer a dynamic, systemic, relational or distributed perspective on what it means to create in a world of objects, places and spaces, norms and values, institutions and, most of all, other people. The talk explored the sociocultural approach in terms of its paradigmatic position, its assumptions and theoretical models. It ended by arguing that sociocultural perspectives help us understand how creativity contributes to the our understanding of humans as beings dwelling in the realm of the possible, the ’not (yet) here’, and of the future that is to come.