David Gauntlett, Creativity: Seven Keys to Unlock your Creative Self, Polity, 2023
This is a lively and thought-provoking book about how to do creativity, unlock your potential, and make a difference.
The artists, musicians, and writers we think of as ’very creative’ are just like us, except that they have spent time developing and realizing ideas, and have found the confidence to share them with the world. None of this comes naturally. This wide-ranging book offers research, advice, and philosophy to fuel your understanding and passion for creativity.
David Gauntlett draws on his own experiences of making music and experimenting with digital media alongside 25 years of researching creativity. Including insights from a diverse array of creators, the book highlights the vitality of the individual creative voice in a world where social media offers a weird mix of inspiration and suffocation, and our struggles for social justice are equally hopeful and upsetting.
Creativity shows how vulnerability, experimentation, and courage can enable us to become bold and engaging creators.
Also available as an audiobook narrated by the author.
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Because Foucault’s ideas evolved and developed over time, small-minded critics would seek to humiliate him by pointing out that in an earlier work he had argued one thing and now, in more recent writing, seemed to be saying something different.
[…]
But as Foucault recalled in a 1982 interview, ‘When people say, “Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,” my answer is… [laughs] “Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?” This is the perfect response. We have to be allowed to grow and change, without this being judged as shamefully contradictory. […] It’s highly desirable. It is, really, the whole point.
(pp.180-1)
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