Social entrepreneurship and experiential learning

Social entrepreneurship is a growing, but currently ill-defined area of innovation and business development. It is about accountability not just to commercial imperatives but to the wide range of stakeholders in a social enterprise, potentially an area of great tension. Social responsibility is about a commitment to society, entrepreneurship is usually understood to provide a business outlook on the enterprise – it needs to be sustainable commercially.

To educate the modern or millennial learner (born after about 1980 and grappling with burgeoning youth needs for creative employment development) into developing a small to medium enterprise with a social responsibility, modern postgraduate coursework programs have looked closely at experiential learning. This provides a performative learning through transforming theory into applied situations. The workplace based projects used for the postgraduate programs are effective immersive learning. This paper will include a case study of two postgraduate coursework units New Ventures in Creative Enterprise, and Building Creative Teams, part of a Masters in Communication/Creative Enterprise. These provide experiential learning about strategic planning for startup creative businesses, and work-based projects which build on interpersonal skills for ongoing success.
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Kristevan aesthetics, performativity and the production of situated knowledge

In this paper, I will draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that performativity can be understood in terms of a materialist ontology that underpins creative production and the knowing subject. To understand this, we need to examine the relationship between individual history, biology and culture and processes through which creative practice attributes value by translating psychic representations of affect and drive into verbal and visual signs. Kristeva's aesthetics does not plunge us into an obscure metaphysics, but provides a model for articulating material-discursive practices that emerge from corporeal responses. Enactments, predicated by desire give rise to agency and judgement allowing practice to test theory through the production of situated knowledge.

Kristeva's psychoanalytical position reveals the necessity of linking material and individual practices of art with the social through language and interpretation. Material-discursive practices can only acquire meaning through their relationship between the speaking subject and addressees. Art itself provides us with the means for discovering the knowledge it produces. In and through material practice, the work of art is capable of transferring back to the artist as viewer, structures of meaning that have hitherto been hidden. In practice, this involves a constant movement between the biological self (the self as 'other') and the social self, the ego. In artistic research, it can be said that the first addressee is the artist her/himself, as social other. Constant movement between the two in creative practice can thus be understood as a performative production of knowledge.

Social entrepreneurship and experiential learning

Social enterprises and entrepreneurship are about accountability not just to commercial imperatives but to the wide range of stakeholders in a social enterprise, potentially an area of great tension. Social responsibility is about a commitment to society or community, entrepreneurship is usually understood to provide a business outlook on the enterprise - it needs to be sustainable commercially and balanced carefully.
To educate the modem or millenniallearner (born after about 19t1O and grappling with burgeoning youth needs for creative employment developmem) into developing a small to medium enterprise with a social responsibility, modem postgraduate coursework programs have looked closely at experiential learning. This provides a transformative learning through workplace-based projects and strategic business conceptuaUsing. This paper will include a case study of two postgraduate coursework units New Ventures in Creative Enterprise, and Building Creative Teams, part of a Masters in Communication/Creative Enterprise. These provide experiential learning about strategic planning for startup creative businesses, and work-based projects which build on interpersonal skills for ongoing success.

Radical practice? Writing 'beyond' system

Might writing be at once the context or system that restricts and forms us but also, in some instances, the means to evade or transform this very system? The question posed in the call for papers for this conference outlines the very grounds upon which the writing subject may be seen as negotiating questions posed by artistic practice and creative research. Here these are formulated around ‘encounters’ between seemingly autonomous or pre-determined realms: between subjects and objects, between knowing and being, between aesthetic systems however defined. This view accepts the fragmentary definitional world of capitalist social relations. What I suggest is that the kind of subject that is at stake in creative practice and research has much in common with a kind of radical subjectivity. What I suggest is that writing is a practice that can be seen through the lens of Karl Marx’s notion of purposeful activity. Writing, in other words, is a critical/creative practice founding a radical view of subjectivity that attempts to overcome the dualism of subject and object via the category of human practice. Against an individual expressivist paradigm, or modes of thought that envision writing (and language) objectively, this might be called radical practice in that writing is a critical/creative practice: critical in that it is against what exists, and creative in that it seeks to move beyond it.

Click if you like this, or OCCUPY as spectacle : a technological derive

This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media, and the proliferation of digital images play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. It explicitly addresses the connections between global capitalism, public space and digital technology by responding to selective quotations from Debord’s book in creative and anecdotal registers.

Geelong fringe festival : the new wilderness

I coordinated a series of workshops - involving researchers Merinda Kelly, Dr Jondi Keane and David Fitzsimmons - on object, space and performance which led to a major exhibition outcome for participating artists. Specifically I led a workshop with installation artist David Fitzsimmons on spatial practices.

Light the towel: narrative and the negotiated unconscious

The thesis consists of a creative component: a novel in multiple first-person voices, and a theoretical component: investigating the interaction between conscious and unconscious processes, in creative writing. The concept of alterity as ‘otherness’, at the heart of the theoretical inquiry, derives its momentum from the experience of the operation of the ‘other’ in the ‘I’ in narrative composition.

Creativity and education :teaching the unfamiliar

The development of capacities of creativity has long been important in creative arts education (Morgan, 2012) and is increasingly becoming important to other fields in higher education (McWilliam and Haukka, 2008, Csikszentmihalyi, 2006, Edward, McGoldrick & Oliver, 2006). To develop such capabilities at least two factors need to be addressed: defining 'creativity' and thinking about how to teach it. This paper has two aims; firstly to consider the idea that creativity is a process (Morgan, 2012) of changing habits (Koestler, 1964, McWilliam and Sandra Haukka, 2008) that is inherently traumatic (Peirce, 1940) because it involves taking risks with habits which have previously proven useful and comforting. The centrality of trauma and risk raises concerns if creativity is to become a standard graduate attribute; concerns for students asked to take risk and the concern that the university is traditionally adverse to risk-taking. Secondly, a technique for teaching how to be creative derived from Russian Formalism is considered. Ostranenie, or making strange might be deployed with the aim of teaching students a technique for habit breaking

Understanding Australian ethnic minority artists' careers

This article examines the degree to which Australian ethnic minority artists possess or do not possess the career capitals necessary to develop their artistic journey. We listened to stories of career experiences that show how artists learn to negotiate their way by developing their career paths. The study found that ethnic minority artists possess more cultural capital than economic and social capitals, thus limiting their career to attain hierarchy and power in creative institutions. Ethnic minority artists can use strategies to manage career, boosting economic, social capitals and to a lesser extent cultural capital. This article adds to the current literature on the utility of Bourdieu’s forms of capital, contextualising voices of artists to account for their experiences in managing the process of advancement which both facilitates and limits their career-related opportunities.

Turning Gigabytes into Gigs: “Songification” and Live Music Data

Complex data is challenging to understand when it is represented as written communication even when it is structured in a table. How- ever, choosing to represent data in creative ways can aid our under- standing of complex ideas and patterns. In this regard, the creative industries have a great deal to offer data-intensive scholarly disci- plines. Music, for example, is not often used to interpret data, yet the rhythmic nature of music lends itself to the representation and anal- ysis of temporal data.Taking the music industry as a case study, this paper explores how data about historical live music gigs can be analysed, extend- ed and re-presented to create new insights. Using a unique process called ‘songification’ we demonstrate how enhanced auditory data design can provide a medium for aural intuition. The case study also illustrates the benefits of an expanded and inclusive view of research; in which computation and communication, method and media, in combination enable us to explore the larger question of how we can employ technologies to produce, represent, analyse, deliver and exchange knowledge.

Arts governance: people, passion, performance

Since the crisis in governance which led to a shortage of capable board members, recent years have seen the emergence of the enterprising arts organisation - a development which has led to the need for new types of board members who have a greater understanding of 'mission, money and merit' within a cultural construct. This innovative book explores the world of the arts board member from the unique perspective of the cultural and creative industries. Using a wide range of research techniques including interviews with board members and stakeholders, board observations and case studies this book provides a rich and deep analysis from inside the boardroom. It provides in-depth insight into the changing pressures on arts boards after the financial crisis, and focuses uniquely on the role of passion on arts boards. Part of the Routledge Research in Creative and Cultural Industries Management series, written specifically for people seeking to develop their careers in cultural and creative management, this book is also for people working in and with arts organisations, in government and non-profit arts organisations. It will also be of interest to academics and researchers working in the wider corporate governance field.

New opportunities for quantitative and time efficient 3D MRI of liquid and solid electrochemical cell components: Sectoral Fast Spin Echo and SPRITE.

The ability to image electrochemical processes in situ using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers exciting possibilities for understanding and optimizing materials in batteries, fuel cells and supercapacitors. In these applications, however, the quality of the MRI measurement is inherently limited by the presence of conductive elements in the cell or device. To overcome related difficulties, optimal methodologies have to be employed. We show that time-efficient three dimensional (3D) imaging of liquid and solid lithium battery components can be performed by Sectoral Fast Spin Echo and Single Point Imaging with T1 Enhancement (SPRITE), respectively. The former method is based on the generalized phase encoding concept employed in clinical MRI, which we have adapted and optimized for materials science and electrochemistry applications. Hard radio frequency pulses, short echo spacing and centrically ordered sectoral phase encoding ensure accurate and time-efficient full volume imaging. Mapping of density, diffusivity and relaxation time constants in metal-containing liquid electrolytes is demonstrated. 1, 2 and 3D SPRITE approaches show strong potential for rapid high resolution (7)Li MRI of lithium electrode components.

After Romanticism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism: new paradigms for theorising creativity

 While Romanticism, psychoanalysis and postmodern theory have provided the dominant paradigms for understanding creativity in the humanities in the past century, this paper argues that interdisciplinary engagement with sociobiology and the cognitive sciences might provide ground-breaking perspectives. Against the ‘supra-rational’, masculinist and solipsistic visions of creativity that have prevailed, the work of the sociobiologist Ellen Dissanayake and of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio invite new ways of thinking about the role of the feeling body, femininity and mutuality in creative practice. This paper will survey Dissanayake’s and Damasio’s research to explore the possibility and desirability of a paradigm shift when it comes to understanding creativity, with poetry as a strategic focus for its argument. This paper is not interested in putting forward a new methodology for writing poetry but in recognising the embodied condition from which all poetry fundamentally arises.

The gainers

Performed over 3 nights, The Gainers is an exploration of object-led creative practice within a psychophysical performance approach. Exploring Gibbs (2005) proposition that places the body as central to perception, the research questioned the relationship between object, task and movement when devising and investigated how the inherent structure within each purpose (object’s purpose, the purpose of the task, and purposeful movement) interacted to support greater divergence within the creative work, and similarly acted to provide additional coherence in convergent stages. Perception, Gibbs claims, ‘is not something that only occurs through specific sensory apparatus (e.g. eyeballs and visual system) in conjunction with particular brain areas, but is a kinesthetic activity that includes all aspects of the body in action’ (12). The research, through practice, found that solo bodied are cohered around shared task and object purposes bringing a shared embodied vocabulary to the ensemble and enhancing the way the actor/s invest meaning between their bodies. Just one outcome from The Charlie Project in which the forms of Charlie Chaplin provide the context and are investigated as structures for inter-textual performativity and design led performance making, The Gainers was developed in February-June 2015, and played to three general public audiences: 3, 4, 5 June.

Lord of the ring: redressing the ‘White Oliphant’

 The doctoral work is divided into two parts: an exegesis dealing analytically with the idea of writing nonfiction works about scientists and a creative nonfiction work on the Australian scientist Sir Mark Oliphant encompassing also the practice of science, its culture, its politics and its intellectual arguments.