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Things

Glăveanu, Vlad Petre orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-6029-6718 (2023) Things. In: Glăveanu, Vlad Petre, Tanggaard, Lene and Wegener, Charlotte, (eds.) Creativity — A New Vocabulary. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ((PASCC)) . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 251-260. ISBN 978-3-031-41907-2

Abstract
We are born into a world of things: Something that is undeniable. Things surround us, they give our life stability, accumulate over time but also change and diversify. Arguably, the most simple definition of creativity would be the process leading to the creation of new things, material and symbolic (including, nowadays, virtual; see Chap. 7). In most cases, creative processes leave a ‘visible’ mark in the world, they generate or change things around us, but they can also take the shape of utterances or processes (see also Chap. 9). A dance performance can be a creative outcome despite the fact we would not commonly call it a ‘thing’ (although its recording might be considered one); same for a piece of writing (see also Chap. 26). Nonetheless, by and large, creativity involves a kind of externalisation or materialisation (Moran & John-Steiner, 2003). Individuals and their culture are connected to each other through things, in the constant dynamic between internalisation and externalisation, appropriation and transformation of the material world. But, of course, other people stand ‘between’ person and things (Vygotsky, 1997), those who make the things we use, who introduce them to us, who teach us or guide our action. It is virtually impossible—or, in any case, reductionist—to consider the relation between individuals and their material surroundings without taking into account the crucial part played by other people and by society at large (Harris, 2023; Pickering, 2023). In other words, without understanding how things become, through (inter)action, objects and, ultimately, artefacts.
Metadata
Item Type:Book Section
Refereed:Yes
Subjects:Social Sciences > Education
Social Sciences > Sociology
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > DCU Business School
Research Institutes and Centres > Centre for Possibility Studies
Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
Official URL:https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-03...
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:33115
Deposited On:18 Aug 2026 13:17 by Tam Nguyen . Last Modified 18 Aug 2026 13:22
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