Counter-conduct in creative university research: deliberations on freedom

ABSTRACT

This article describes how a political assemblage currently at work in higher education is re-articulating academic subjectivities. This assemblage draws together entrepreneurial and humanist concepts of creativity into an intellectual resource that can change national economies. Academics are urged to use their creativity to counteract the narrowing funding base of the university. The article first introduces a history of the concept of creativity and explains how governmental agendas for creative industry and creativity in education emerged. Second, it describes a practice-based research project that grapples with the difficulties of knowledge transfer between the ‘creative’ and ‘social science’ academic disciplines. This raises questions about creative knowledge and reveals some ethical tensions in the performance of academic research. The research project is then positioned as a ‘counter-conduct’, used to short-circuit the procedures implemented for the conduct of creative research in the creative, entrepreneurial university.

KEYWORDS:

• Counter-conduct
• creative university
• creativity
• governmentality
• neoliberalism
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their keen comments on the draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The organization responsible for funding all of New Zealand’s post-compulsory education.

2. For an in-depth discussion, see Bill (2009).

3. For a recent attempt to break this habit, see Sawyer (2014).

4. The tertiary education sector in New Zealand combines what is known in Britain as higher education and further education.

5. Cupples and Pawson (2012) give a very useful overview of the introduction of the PBRF to New Zealand.

6. See the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC, 2005) for a discussion of the problems involved in defining creative research.

7. ‘Digitally produced’ because this is at the most ‘innovative’ end of the creative industry spectrum and ‘textile’, because this was the trade in which I originally trained as a designer.