Why we should take a second look at the politics of creativity:the dangers of a celebratory mode

At the heart of this chapter is an ethical contention: By avoiding scrutiny of creativity sustaining processes, strategies and products serving authoritarian, violent or discriminatory practices, we fail to face the tricky question of what happens when we fetishize ‘creativity’ either in the abstract or in particular circumstances (such as in regard to digital culture, AI or education) without attending to the ethics and politics of its deployment. Leading up to this contention, the chapter draws on evidence from more than two decades of work with children and young people in regard to media use, political or civic participation and contributions to everyday social reproduction to describe a range of political and social creativity. The chapter theorises the way children and young people apply creative learning – and technologies old and new – to everyday survival, politics and activist struggle. Generated from a range of qualitative methodological fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2020, including in-depth face-to-face interviewing, ethnographic observation, textual analysis and contextual, historical analysis, three youth-centred vignettes at the heart of the chapter offer a necessary provocation around unreflexive normativity when theorising creativity and learning, problematising the non-recognition of forms of creativity that do not line up with normative imperatives and frameworks.