Qualitative Inquiry

Harris, Daniel X.; Rousell, David

doi: 10.1177/10778004221080219pmid: N/A

This editorial lays the groundwork and context for this special issue addressing a range of posthuman ecological approaches to the study and theorization of creativity, and its potential to transform understandings of 21st-century learning events and environments, including cities, schools, museums, parklands, digital environments, wild places, and more. Importantly, this collection establishes an ethics and politics of posthumanism as it intersects with creativity, including attention to the necessity and ethics of the ways in which Indigenous knowing and knowledge creation are changing and expanding traditional academic framings of arts-based research, creativity, and posthuman scholarship.

Country, Bawaka; Burarrwanga, Laklak; Ganambarr, Ritjilili; Ganambarr-Stubbs, Merrkiyawuy; Ganambarr, Banbapuy; Maymuru, Djawundil; Lloyd, Kate; Wright, Sarah; Suchet-Pearson, Sandie; Daley, Lara

doi: 10.1177/10778004211068192pmid: N/A

Songspirals bring Country into existence. Co-authored by a more-than-human, Yolŋu-led collaboration, this article centers Yolŋu understandings of time and place and elaborates on our work together through a spiral-based framework. Our Indigenous and Country-led Collective nourishes and shares some Yolŋu understandings of songspirals to enable, enrich, and awaken Country; to challenge and expand Western academic frameworks; and to contribute toward more responsive relationships between people and places. To sing or keen the spirals now means the ongoing creation of place and people—an emergent, more-than-human creativity that literally creates and re-creates existence. Songspirals are more-than-human processes that need active engagement to nourish positive relationships and to heal damaged ones. Songspirals are a keening/singing, of, with, by, for, and as Country.

Somerville, Margaret J.

doi: 10.1177/10778004211064940pmid: N/A

This article presents my personal story, as a non-Indigenous settler woman, of walking along a ridge close to my home at the foot of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, after the fires of 2019 to 2020. In this article, I want to invite the reader into my love of this country through sharing my record of this walking over a 12-month seasonal cycle. Every walk presented me with new understandings of this Country where I live, which I already knew as Darug Country, having explored the nature of this country in collaboration with my Darug friends Jacinta and Leanne Tobin.

Henriksen, Danah; Creely, Edwin; Mehta, Rohit

doi: 10.1177/10778004211065813pmid: N/A

With the emergence of Western posthuman understandings, new materialism, artificial intelligence (AI), and the growing acknowledgment of Indigenous epistemologies, an ongoing rethinking of existing assumptions and meanings about creativity is needed. The intersection of new technologies and philosophical stances that upend human-centered views of reality suggests that creativity is not an exclusively “human” activity. This opens new possibilities and assemblages for conceiving of creativity, but not without tensions. In this article, we connect multiple threads, to reimagine creativity in light of posthuman understandings and the possibilities for creative emergence beyond the Anthropocene. Creativity is implicated as emerging beyond non-human spaces, such as through digitality and AI or sources in the natural world. This unseats many understandings of creativity as positioned in Euro-Western literature. We offer four areas of concern for interrogating tensions in this area, aiming to open new possibilities for practice, research, and (re)conceptualization beyond Western understandings.

Glăveanu, Vlad P.; de Miranda, Luis

doi: 10.1177/10778004211063617pmid: N/A

This article is the fruit of a written dialogue between a sociocultural psychologist and a philosopher invested in the study of the Creative Real, in a context that resonates with process philosophy and posthumanism. Each of the two authors come from a different tradition (or, rather, different traditions) to the topic of posthuman creativity and their approaches overlap considerably but include as well important points of difference, ranging from writing style to key concepts and areas of application.

Williams, Nina

doi: 10.1177/10778004211065803pmid: N/A

Biodesign disrupts the traditional temporalities of expectation and demand in wider design economies because designers are not selecting from a range of prefabricated samples from which they manufacture a product. Instead, they are plunged into the durations of other organisms for the simple reason that they must wait for something to grow. Situated in this context, this article considers how we might conceptualize these events of “waiting” such that we intensify their importance for ecological thought. In the philosophy of Henri Bergson, events of waiting are important as a mode of intuiting a register of movement beyond human habits of perception, what he refers to as duration. In this article, I suggest that thinking events of waiting in biodesign via Bergson intervenes in debates surrounding posthuman creativity, not because it multiplies creative agents but because it cultivates a sympathy for temporal ecologies from which human perception is alienated.

Chappell, Kerry

doi: 10.1177/10778004211065802pmid: N/A

This article explores the affordances, challenges, and imperfections of researching “post”humanizing creativity, by offering two exemplars, sharing how we walk the talk, so to speak, as well as how we have been rewarded and challenged. This is all within the larger umbrella of exploring how a posthumanizing creative approach can expand pedagogical and methodological possibilities for educators, facilitators, environments, and other actants, and ultimately to see how this can disrupt established cultural and educational practice and research to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Harris, Daniel; Holman Jones, Stacy

doi: 10.1177/10778004211066632pmid: N/A

This article advances a manifesto for a posthuman creativity studies that highlights the emergent, collective, and ecological aspects of creativity, offering propositions that problematize any individualist or human-exceptionalist approach to the field. We attend to a range of extra/ordinary affects, encounters, and modalities for expanding creative possibilities in the 21st century. Beginning with a recognition that creativity must be rewilded from its current capture in economic and educational discourses, we argue for more sustainable re-engagements. In the specificity of these encounters, we manifest 10 commitments to posthuman creativity as the foundations for a more dynamic and more-than-human creative agency.

Cole, David R.; Baghi, Yeganeh

doi: 10.1177/10778004211065800pmid: N/A

This article reassesses the concept of a house from a non-human perspective. The two worlds that collide in this article are philosophical analyses that are “beyond the human” and sustainable engineering house design. By analyzing the houses of ten animal species for shelter/skin properties, life pedagogy (how to live), materials and resources, thermal dynamics, and structural elements, we speculate on the future of housing. The premise of this article is that “beyond the human” philosophy opens a new visage to comprehend and conceptualize what a house could be. Beyond the human theorizing is defined by philosophy that has gone beyond framing an exploration internally to the benefit of themselves, as human subject(s). This article speculates that considering animal house construction is a way forward for thought in a changing climate.

Vagg, Julia

doi: 10.1177/10778004211069696pmid: N/A

Posthuman theorizations of creativity direct attention to the material, affective, relational happenings as they emerge between networks of more-than-human bodies in interaction. This necessitates a rethinking of how creativity research is conducted, including the kinds of data collected and how they are analyzed. Drawing on two case studies exploring the relationship between empathy and creativity in theater devising workshops, this article outlines how a multimodal research design combined with an empathic approach to diffractive analysis provides the opportunity to look beyond the linguistic and textual to explore multi-sensory worlds and draw out the complexities of emerging affects. Adapting Karen Barad’s diffractive analysis, this empathic approach is embodied and involves experiencing-with data to generate new understandings and questions about posthuman creativity. Rather than speaking for others via observation, recognition, and evaluation, this follows Gilles Deleuze’ proposition that thinking should involve embodied encounter, which can disrupt thinking through relational becoming.