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

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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