ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to open up creativity teaching and research to the deeper challenges of the humanities and social sciences. It is in part a response to a personal concern, reflecting on my on–off involvement with the field of creativity over a period of twenty-five years, that traditional creativity research and teaching, through the unthinking repetition of an accepted body of knowledge, is in danger of destroying the very object (‘creativity’) it pretends to grasp and encourages students to learn. This realization first struck home about ten years ago when after a prolonged period away from the creativity field I attended the fifteenth anniversary conference of the journal Creativity & Innovation Management in Oxford and found myself in a strange time warp: the same people were talking about the same issues using the same conceptual frameworks and techniques. They all just looked a bit older. But the curious stasis that seems to haunt the academic field of creativity research is perhaps best exemplified by a different kind of personal time warp. In 1994 I co-authored a chapter surveying the field of creativity, which although delivered on time to the editor, somehow disappeared between the cracks of academic life. To my utter incredulity it appeared in a handbook of cutting-edge creativity research some eighteen years later, complete with references to ‘recent’ research from the early 1990s (Rickards and De Cock 2012).
