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[ecrea] Call for abstracts: CREATIVITY AND CREATIVE APPROACHES IN HUMAN SCIENCE

Fri Dec 06 16:14:45 GMT 2013



CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

ACADEMIC QUARTER: JOURNAL OF RESEARCH FROM THE HUMANITIES #8

Theme: CREATIVITY AND CREATIVE APPROACHES IN HUMAN SCIENCE

Guest Editors: Professors Steen Halling, Seattle University, USA and FinnThorbjørn Hansen, Aalborg University, Denmark



Creativity is a buzz word in modern society which has often been characterized as a “knowledge economy,” depending for its continued existence on innovation and the generation of new ideas and products. But creativity is much more than a fashionable concept in industry and management; it also points to fundamental features of human existence that have been studied by human scientists, often in relation to the idea of Bildung [dannelse], or the creative formation of people, who may become co- creators of personal and social life themselves or witnesses to a creation in and of life, that they take part in.

Originally, in Western culture, creativity was the exclusive province of God, the Creator, but in a secular world there is an imperative for everyone to become creators in and of their lives. How we evaluate this imperative depends to a large extent on how we conceptualize creativity as a human phenomenon, in everyday life as well as in the sciences.

All human sciences exist in a tension between tradition and renewal. At the 32th International Human Science Research Conference at Aalborg University in August 2013 more than 230 human scientists from all over the world participated. The theme was creativity and creative approaches in human science and the organizers’ hope was that participants would discuss how to renew the human sciences creatively, and also to present ideas about what creativity is as a basic human phenomenon. How can phenomenological, hermeneutic, and other human science traditions be respected and yet renewed in creative directions? How – and how much – should human scientists experiment with creative methodological practices when researching human phenomena? What role can the arts play? Are there limits to creativity? Can human beings become too creative – in life as well as in research? And what can human scientists actually contribute to the current creativity discourse?

At the Pre-Conference to IHSRC, where two of the keynote speakers – professor Max van Manen (Canada) and professor Steen Halling (USA) – participated as well, the theme was on the ‘experience of transcendence’ in phenomenology and hermeneutics: How do we – as researchers – put words to that which seems too enigmatic and too saturated with meaning to be captured by scientific language? How do we as human scientists in broad terms work with the more tacit, intuitive, existential, embodied and practical knowledge and insights and those unique, singular and ‘only once-occurrent events’(Bakhtin, 1993) of dialogue and creation and ‘insider- and on-the-edge-inspirations’ that guides the artists as well as the researcher? How, for example, are we to understand and practice our research if Hans-Georg Gadamer is right in saying that in the face of such profound ‘human experiences’, “…Hence, together with the experience of philosophy, the experience of art is the most insistent admonition to scientific consciousness to acknowledge its own limits” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1989, p. xxi.)? In what way may we as human scientists, broadly speaking, be inspired by a more philosophizing and artistic attitude towards our ways of listening to the phenomena or subject matter, that our research is oriented toward? What kind of ‘Bildung’ or ‘tactfulness’ is called for in order for the researcher to be able to ‘stand-in-the-openness’ and think and wonder not only from the outside but also from within the relation, practice or phenomena that the researcher is engaged in? What may be the relation between on the one hand creativity, wonder and Being (presence) and on the other hand methodology, knowledge production and empirical and scientific writings?



This issue of the next Academic Quarter (Vol. 8, Spring 2014) invites human scientists, broadly understood, both from the Human Science Research Conference in Aalborg 2013 but also other researchers to give their thoughts on this topic. The number of articles will be limited to a maximum of 20 where about half of the articles will from researchers who do not come from Denmark. And the criteria for submitting an article will be that the article focuses on one of the themes of:

a) Research in creativity – What is creativity? or

b) Research in creative approaches in human science methodology, or

c) Research in ‘practices’ or learning spaces for ‘Bildung’ that may create in the researcher a more creative, artistic and wondrous attitude.

We encourage writers to form their article in a way that strive for connecting theory, methods and experiences through a more practice-based and practice-situated or situation-specific research approach. And the article should be written in English and in a way that is accessible to not only expert in the narrow research field but also to fellow researchers in other disciplines in human science.

Suggestions for articles:



Suggestion for articles, including an abstract of 150 words should be emailed to Finn Thorbjørn Hansen ((finnth /at/ hum.aau.dk)) by December 15, 2013. Articles will then be reviewed anonymously. The articles should be around 15,000-25,000 keystrokes (around 3,500 words). Please visit the website for further information: http://akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/UK/index.php. Academic Quarter has been approved according to the Danish bibliometrical system for 2011 and forward.


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