Creative Participants Research Articles

«The time of money»: property and sovereignty as alternative narratives of land and value near the Ramu NiCo mining project (Madang, PNG)

Two narrative themes are apparent around the relation to land in the Rai Coast hinterland of Madang Province, PNG at present. Senses of loss on the one hand, and of opportunity on the other, reveal deeper concerns over sovereignty over land and lifestyle. Under pressure from large-scale extractive industry, customary tenure is changing from the condition for constitutive and generative relations with land to a relation of property and control over land. This paper reports on narratives in which places figure as animate, creative participants in relationships between people, and those associated with the mine in which it is seen as the property of individuals, regulated by the state.

The eyes of creativity: Impact of social comparison and individual creativity on performance and attention to others’ ideas during electronic brainstorming

The present research aimed to examine how social comparison and individual differences in creativity might influence creative performance and attention paid to ideas generated by a partner during an electronic brainstorming session. After completing a creativity scale, forty-one psychology undergraduates generated ideas by computer with a remote partner/confederate presented as a student in either Arts (upward comparison) or Sciences (downward comparison) and who was instructed to give a list of pretested ideas. During the idea-generation task, the eye movements of each participant were tracked to measure the attention they paid to the ideas of their partner. As predicted, results showed that the quality (but not the quantity) of ideas was greater in upward than downward comparison, but only for high creative participants. Similar patterns were found for attention allocated to the partner’s ideas. We discuss the role of motivational and attentional processes for electronic brainstorming research.

Inspiring Artifacts: Examining Utilization of Archival References in the Textile Design Process

ABSTRACTStudies regarding the design process tend to come from outside of textile and fashion design. Existing literature suggests a need for further investigation of design processes in these disciplines to advance understanding. Designers collect inspirational images and information to inform design development, often utilizing historical and archive resources; however, minimal insight is provided regarding application within the creative process. The Awaken Project investigated the conceptual possibilities of reinterpreting archive material for contemporary textile design and related work. Resulting from the project, this paper describes case studies with fourteen creative practitioners, to enhance understanding of the textile design process, specifically related to archive utilization. Each of the creative practitioner participants produced a creative process journal (CPJ). The CPJ comprises text, visuals and other media forms to provide insight into the creative journey. Archive inductions, subsequent archive visits and focus groups were central to the study and encouraged critical reflection on the work in progress. The case studies highlight varying approaches to working with archival resources in the textile design creative process. Discussion of the research project findings highlight factors for future consideration when working with archives. The research methods adopted are reflected upon and opportunities for further research are identified.

Financial Engineering or Legal Engineering? Legal Work, Legal Integrity and the Banking Crisis

A much repeated strand of analysis in the banking crisis has been the issue of financial engineering gone wrong. Problems are attributed to innovative financial products so complex that risk and even ownership became untrackable. Characterising the financial products and transactions that led to the crisis primarily as financial engineering, however, tends to gloss over the other innovative skills and creative participants involved in their construction. This paper demonstrates that the significant practices behind the banking crisis involved not just financial engineering but legal engineering, legal engineering designed to systematically thwart regulation and bypass regulatory control. The paper, first, analyses the role of legal engineering in the banking crisis, showing it to have been a conscious strategy in which regulatory circumvention, complexity and opacity were integral parts. It then sets out some specific implications for future practice in business, government, regulation and the professions, and argues the need not just for new law and regulation, but more fundamentally for a new respect for the rule of law, for a new legal integrity, in both business and the professions.

Marginalization and the Multiplicity of Rationalities: A Discourse Theory of Poverty

The roots of global poverty are often explored from a purely economic perspective. Its main causes have been attributed to the exploitative practices of the dominant economies of the first world and the continued imposition of unfair and unjust trade relations with the global south. From the dire and unabashed exploitation of natural resources and manpower during the colonial era to today's almost manic imposition of free trade policies on the world market, Western nations work hard to keep the world order subjugated under policies which keep exploited former colonies from developing their own higher income-producing industries or from realizing models of development and progress that are more advantageous to non-western peoples. These same practices confine the so-called developing world to the role of low-cost labor and raw material supplier whose produce not even traded fairly. The current regime of intellectual property protection and the imposition of WTO policies that allow the unregulated dumping of manufactured goods from the west illustrate effectively how poverty maintained in the so-called developing world.Aside from the exploitative policies that the economically dominant nations impose on the world that keep developing nations from actually developing, we can also look at exploitative structures within nations where the elite effectively control all the resources and means by which incomes can be generated and wealth created. Exploitative structures exist in poor nations that allow the elite to capture all forms of political and economic power thus depriving the vast majority of the opportunity to earn better incomes or create new forms of wealth.Often, the prescribed remedy for poverty to reform existing market systems and economic structures in order for facilitate the entry to the poor into mainstream systems of production and income generation. Global market systems are also being reformed in order to create what economists view as genuinely free markets that will allow poor nations to engage fairly in trade with other nations based on each one's comparative advantage. Whatever prescription of reform for poverty given, reformers always look for ways to equalize the existing economic system in order to allow the economically marginalized to fruitfully participate in it. However, these prescriptions do not genuinely respond to the roots of poverty. This because they fail to see how the way out of poverty demands more than just the inclusion of the poor in the existing economic systems. A deeper, more radical reform than this needed and genuine liberation from poverty can only be achieved if it understood from its root cause. In this paper, I will argue that the poor are impoverished because their rationalities are rendered inutile by existing socio-political and economic systems. Certainly they are poor because of oppressive policies of the dominant countries of wealth and because of the unfair practices of those who dominate the markets, however, more fundamentally than that, the poor are poor because they are unable to participate in the dominant systems as creative participants. And the root of this the marginalization of their rationalities by the existing systems. The just and effective reform of the existing system would be to address this marginalization so that the marginalized other of the world global economic order will be given a chance to reshape this world order to be more responsive to their conception of development, progress, and a good, human life.THE MARGINALIZED RENDERED INUTILEIn the dominant world order where modern, market driven, Western economic systems prevail, traditional peoples and their wisdom are alienated from productive activity. This because modernization, which the foundation of economic development, is authored on an implicit belief in the value of western rational scientific thought and 'objective' truths, that discredit and erase individual people's interests1 and not to mention their unique conceptions of the good human life. …

Effects of Creative Dispositions on the Design of Lessons

Since Skinner's distinction between the science of learning and the art of teaching, it is an unanswered question whether the ability to teach and to plan lessons is based on learning by advice or on special dispositions of the teachers. We therefore addressed the question whether a creative disposition of instructional design students has effects on their designs of lessons. We conducted a study with 44 students. Every student had to design two different lessons which were analyzed in regard to their creativity. Creative lesson designs were defined as innovative being practicable at the same time, and as structurally varied. The results do not provide clear evidence that more creative persons are able to design more innovative lessons that are practicable at the same time. Nevertheless an in-depth analysis shows that more creative participants design more varied lessons.

The Pedigree of Fishery Economics

This paper was written as thanks for compliments offered at award proceedings at the 2010 IIFET. It deals with the past and future of fishery economics. A short historical account (or “pedigree”) shows that while fisheries have been mentioned by historians of old economies, their writings chiefly covered only the fish trade. This was also true of early economists, such as Petty and Adam Smith. It was marine biologists who were to show the way. Around the time of the Great War, the first bits of genuine fishery economic analysis appeared. These, however, were generally disregarded until Scott Gordon’s 1954 article caused what Thomas Kuhn calls a “revolution.” My own paper appeared a year later. There followed what looked like decades of comparative calmness in ocean economics. The advent of individual catch quotas has now widened and deepened the interest in fishery problems and those “paradigms” related to them, such as those appropriate to fishery self-government. The new problems and possibilities have drawn in lively and creative participants. They work in the front ranks of applied economics, and the author is proud to have been honoured by them.

Can Unscrewed be unskewed? Television coverage of the Internet

This paper documents one way the Internet is presented to the public by analyzing a late–night TV talk show about the Internet called Unscrewed on the TechTV cable network. I gained the opportunity to study Unscrewed, and attempt to influence its focus, when I was invited to appear as a guest on their show after having e–mailed them a criticism of their sexist coverage of the Internet — specifically their positioning of women as pretty objects to be ogled online rather than as creative participants in online culture and as authors of a diversity of Web sites. Though I liked the program’s potential to challenge some aspects of an increasingly market–driven Internet, I was unable to unskew the sexist focus of Unscrewed precisely because market forces demanded the show remain male–centered.

An Enrichment Philosophy and Strategy for Empowering Young Gifted Children to Become Autonomous Learners in Science

A goal of gifted education is to enable gifted children to become autonomous learners and, as adults, creative participants in society. In this study, we have implemented a program in which young children are provided with opportunities to become autonomous. The approach is based on a “pull-out” enrichment program in science. Children attend a 10-week series of workshop sessions in which the teacher scaffolds the development of science-related reasoning skills and knowledge construction in a social context that encourages discourse and argument. The children develop the appropriate skills to undertake individual or group project work in a collaborative and creative fashion. Analysis of qualitative data reveals that during the program the participants develop skills, independence, and motivation to learn. The findings have significance for programming for the gifted and for teacher education.

Creativity, Synesthesia, and Physiognomic Perception

Evidence suggests that creative individuals have access to primary process modes of thought. Because such thinking is associative, it is believed to enhance the likelihood of a creative insight. Synesthesia and physiognomic perception are aspects of primary process thinking. Synesthesia involves a unity between or among different sensory modalities. Physiognomic perception involves a fusion of affect and perception. We investigated the relation between creativity and synesthetic tendencies and physiognomic perception. The Remote Associates Test (S. A. Mednick & M. P. Mednick, 1967) was used to measure creative potential. Similarity judgments were made between auditory stimuli (pure tones and pure vowel sounds) and colors to measure synesthetic-like phenomena. Colors were rated using adjectives with emotional or evaluative connotations to measure physiognomic perception. More creative participants differed significantly from less creative participants on their ratings, with more creative participants exhibiting stronger associations between colors and pure tones, vowels, and emotional terms.

Attracting Students to Science Through Field Exercises in Introductory Geology Courses

Field exercises in introductory geology courses allow students to be active and creative participants in their education. We bring small groups of students into the field and introduce them to the problem we will work on. Students work in groups of three or four, make observations, draw sketches, and take preliminary measurements. Then we regroup and discuss their observations, create a list of questions they would like to answer, and devise methods for answering their questions. They return to work. Then the students present their results in short papers that require them to synthesize what they discovered and to recognize the weaknesses in their data. Although this method is not efficient for transmitting information, it helps students: 1) understand the importance of separating observations from interpretations, 2) appreciate how difficult it is to ask good questions and gather data to answer them, and 3) to be creative. The instructor provides context for the problem to be investigated, asks questions...

Creativity and Individual Differences in Asymmetric Cerebral Hemispheric Functioning

In an attempt to see whether one can differentiate the highly creative from those of lesser creativity on the basis of hemispheric processing, 100 people were presented with a battery of creativity tests, control cognitive tests, and tasks known differentially to engage the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Compared to those of lesser creativity, the highly creative participants exhibited a greater tendency habitually to employ the right hemisphere in task solution and a pattern of cerebral lateralization marked by a greater segregation of verbal functions to the left hemisphere and bilateral representation of a nonverbal, melodic function. The success at predicting creativity level on the basis of hemispheric task performance was impressive, and was observed even when general intellectual abilities were equated in the high and low creative groups.