Creativity and Regulation in the 21st Century

The applicant plans to organise two interrelated workshops to explore intellectual arguments surrounding the conditions of creativity and how they are regulated in a radically changing digital media environment. The workshops plan to bring together academics and practitioners to share ideas and experiences on creativity. The first workshop, planned for May 2007, will concentrate on creativity policy, the second workshop, planned for September 2007, will focus on creativity practice. The two workshops have the purpose of connecting academic thinking on creativity with the needs of policy makers and practitioners. Participants from academia will be drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, including law, media and cultural studies, political science, philosophy, economics and sociology. Practitioners and policy makers will primarily be drawn from the film, television and music industries, as well as associated fields such as telecommunications, the games industry and the internet.

The first workshop, 'Creativity Policy', will be academically led with a focus on conceptualising the conditions of creativity and how they connect with issues of policy and regulation. The workshop will explore the nature of creativity in the era of rapid transformations in digital media technologies before moving on to more specific questions of how creative talent can flourish, what relationship it has to established media production practices and what questions this might raise for policy makers. Ultimately it is expected that the workshop will critically examine the existing framework of regulation with a view to presenting some alternative answers to issues concerning how creativity is enabled, valued and rewarded.
The second workshop, 'Creativity Practice', will be led by practitioners with a focus on building knowledge from their experiences of creative practice. The idea will be to explore the ways in which new media technologies and their regulation, through laws such as copyright or market-oriented technological controls such as digital rights management, can either enhance or constrain creativity. In particular, we are eager to discuss the practices of those working at the margins of conventional media industries to find out how they manage the creative process and what regulatory pressure they face in trying to make a living from this activity.