Summer school – ‘Creative Work(s): Cultural Production Studies Across the Disciplines’ (2024)

Dates: 1-4 July 2024
Location: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Instructors: Sara Strandvad (RUG), Kathryn Roberts (RUG)
Contact: s.m.strandvad@rug.nl & k.s.roberts@rug.nl
Credits: 5 ECTS

The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired new forms of artistic practice through technology (Zoom ballet! Streaming concerts!) and a renewed appreciation for the role the arts play in our collective life. Yet with the closing of performance spaces and the hospitality industry (where many artists have day jobs), creative workers, already precarious, find themselves in dire circumstances. Although creative work is almost universally celebrated, it is financially sustainable for very few creators. Meanwhile, platform-based home entertainment generates massive profits for multinational corporations. This Summer School explores the way artists and scholars have dealt with these contradictions: through protest and critique and explanation; through innovative creative and scholarly practice; through building new kinds of institutions and collectives.

“Creative work(s)”—art objects, artistic practices, and an expanding employment category–is the multifaceted topic around which we bring together scholars from both the Humanities and the Social Sciences. (If you are an art-maker in addition to being a scholar, so much the better.) The keynote speakers, workshops, and student presentations will dive into contemporary scholarly debates from a number of angles. While critical theory (whether in the Humanities or in the sociology of cultural production) situates the arts in their economic and political context, Marxian modes are often accused of ignoring, flattening, or instrumentalizing the art work itself. In response, scholars from a variety of disciplines have embraced Actor-Network Theory as a method for exploring the agency art works exert in their own making and meaning. Diving into both traditions, the course looks for ways of bringing them into dialogue. Above all, we ask how scholars can explain creative works, and creative lives, in terms both recognizable and compelling to the people most concerned: artists, audiences, and the institutions responsible for sustaining both.

Readings may include Born, Bourdieu, Brouillette, DeNora, Duffy, Felski, Gerber, Hennion, Latour, McGurl, McRobbie, Mol, Siciliano, and Stengers, among others.

Our speakers are specialists in cultural sociology, literary studies, critical theory, art and media. A full list of speakers in 2024 is forthcoming.