Knowledge exchange in the arts and humanities as creative economy policy assemblage

Simon Moreton

doi:10.14324/rfa.05.2.06

Abstract

The creative economy is a complex assemblage of policy, practice and industrial activity, underpinned by apparently novel configurations of cultural and creative work. In recent years, it has become the focus of a number of schemes which have seen major shifts in how UK research councils fund universities. This paper reflects on the work of Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology (REACT), a major knowledge exchange programme aimed at stimulating growth in the creative sector through collaborations with universities in South West England and South Wales. In the first section, I unpack some of the underpinning logics of the ‘creative turn’ by which creativity has become a key currency in modern economies. I then consider how this shift has affected universities. I next ask how the various rationalities of an economy driven by creativity have moved into the knowledge exchange sphere. I approach this by formulating creative economy policy as a form of governmentality performed through assemblages that facilitate policy transfer. The paper turns to the empirical example of REACT, considering it as an assemblage through which reconfigurations of discourses, spatialities, temporalities, subjects and calculative practices have unfolded. The analysis shows how the multivalent, ad hoc and sometimes contradictory experience of producing an assemblage such as REACT means that policy transfer is never entirely complete nor stable, and that in this sense it is still possible for knowledge exchange programmes to imagine and generate alternative approaches to creativity that are not wholly reducible to a neoliberal or capitalist logic, although they remain implicated therein.

Highlights

The emergence of ‘creativity’ as a central driver in Western societies over the last thirty years has been a complicated and multivalent process
While power was largely devolved to the Operations Group and delivery teams, this framework was dominated by university staff, processes and procedures, and often threatened to occlude other forms of institutional knowledge and practice. This was visible in the manner that Watershed – a lead partner who were central to the delivery of REACT – were required to be engaged as ‘subcontractors’, as AHRC rules at that time precluded them from being represented as co-investigators, even though Watershed brought with them the central network of organizations and actors working within and adjacent to the creative economy upon which the project was based
It is inescapable that REACT was part of a broader movement that has positioned higher education institutions (HEIs) as ‘stewards’ of the creative sector, operating at an imagined interface of care, support and expertise to a nascent, small, agile, but vulnerable creative economy (Munro, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

The emergence of ‘creativity’ as a central driver in Western societies over the last thirty years has been a complicated and multivalent process. While power was largely devolved to the Operations Group and delivery teams, this framework was dominated by university staff, processes and procedures, and often threatened to occlude other forms of institutional knowledge and practice This was visible in the manner that Watershed – a lead partner who were central to the delivery of REACT – were required to be engaged as ‘subcontractors’, as AHRC rules at that time precluded them from being represented as co-investigators, even though Watershed brought with them the central network of organizations and actors working within and adjacent to the creative economy upon which the project was based. The REACT team became implicated in informing the architecture of future knowledge exchange policies, inside and outside the university, but retained little agency in how that architecture would be established

Concluding remarks

Notes on the contributor