Creative Transformations


Book Description

In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.




Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma


Book Description

Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between trauma and creativity. It is about art in the service of healing, mourning, and memorialization. This book addresses the questions of how artistic expression facilitates the healing process; what the therapeutic action of art is, and if there is a relationship between mental instability and creativity. It also asks how self-analysis through art-making can be integrated with psychoanalytic work in order to enrich and facilitate emotional growth. Drawing on four decades of clinical practice and a critical reading of creativity literature, Sophia Richman presents a new theory of the creative process whose core components are relational conceptualizations of dissociation and witnessing. This is an interdisciplinary book which draws inspiration from life histories, clinical case material, neuroscience, and interviews with creators, as well as from various art forms such as film, literature, paintings, and music. Some areas of discussion include: art born of genocide, confrontation with mortality in illness and aging, and the clinical implications of memoirs written by psychoanalysts. Visual images are interspersed throughout the text that illustrate the reverberations of trauma and its creative transformation in the work of featured artists. Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma powerfully articulates how creative action is one of the most effective ways of coping with trauma and its aftershocks - it is in art, in all its forms, that sorrow is given shape and meaning. Here, Sophia Richman shows how art helps to master the chaos that follows in the wake of tragedy, how it restores continuity, connection and the will for a more fully lived life. This book is written for psychoanalysts as well as for other mental health professionals who practice and teach in academic settings. It will also be of interest to graduate and post-graduate students and will be relevant for artists who seek a better understanding of the creative process.







Beyond Benefit Cost Analysis


Book Description

Illustrated by case studies from Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines how non-market values can be identified, measured and incorporated into planning evaluation methodologies. The traditional means of assessing planning options, benefit-cost analysis, requires that all effects be expressed in monetary terms and this volume offers alternative approaches. It presents strategies for accomplishing the major purposes of planning evaluation - including the provision of an explicit, replicable basis for public assessment - in alternative ways. Growing demand for public involvement and for accountability in decision making requires better means for accommodating a broad range of concerns in planning evaluation. Methodologies examined include effectiveness-cost and multicriteria analysis, and the book explores how these have been applied in practice in developing special-issue plans, complex regional development strategies, and efforts to analyze the environmental justice implications of major infrastructure projects. Use of scenarios and problem structuring methods by stakeholder groups are also explored.




Creative Transformation


Book Description




Reading Bion’s Transformations


Book Description

Reading Bion's Transformations is an in-depth reading of Bion’s 1965 work, Transformations, and investigates the epistemological concept of "O" introduced by Bion. Throughout the book, Bion’s conceptual and unconventional text is discussed step-by-step, with a focus on the first three and last three chapters. The epistemological references are highlighted and analysed, allowing the reader insight into how to do a deconstructive psychoanalytic reading, acknowledging that Bion raised psychoanalytical thought and practice to new levels. The authors’ reading both de-focuses and re-focuses several theoretical statutes of O discussed by Bion in 1965. Reading Bion’s Transformations is an essential read for those approaching Bion’s work for the first time, as well as those seeking to better understand his theories and the metapsychological and epistemological impact of the concept of transformation within psychoanalysis.




Setting Agendas in Cultural Markets


Book Description

This book draws on agenda setting theory to examine how cultural organizations relate to media in order to increase their visibility, valence, and eventually build their public image. Most organizations have a keen interest in their symbolic presence, as their media visibility influences public knowledge, perceptions and even behaviors. Diminished public funding, in combination with the global proliferation of cultural entities, creates a competitive environment, leading to a transformation of cultural industries. In the book, several questions are under scrutiny: How do cultural organizations acquire symbolic significance? How do they become prominent in media content? Which mechanisms and processes should be examined by cultural managers as they set out to achieve salience? Is there a relationship between media and public salience? In other words, if an organization becomes symbolically prominent, in what ways is the public influenced, both in terms of perceptions as well as behaviors?




Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape


Book Description

Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods. Since the 1980s, art and artists’ role​s in gentrification ha​ve been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban space​s illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance​. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.




Political Innovations


Book Description

Political Innovations: Creative Transformations in Polity, Politics and Policy provides a theoretical framework for studies of political innovation as well as a number of empirical studies of innovations in the way policy strategies take form, in the exercise of political leadership, in community self-organizing, in political parties, and what implications informal governance has on political innovation. Public innovation has risen to the top of the agenda among governments all over the Western world. The message is clear: the public sector needs to become more innovative in order to meet the demands of modern society. There is also a growing interest in public innovation amongst students of public policy and governance, who are currently working to define and conceptualize public innovation, analyze drivers of, and barriers to, innovation in the public sector, and prescribe ways to make the public sector more innovative. However, researchers have so far mainly theorized, studied and analyzed issues related to innovations in public services and public delivery. Few have payed attention to the fact that public service innovation takes place in a political context, and that innovations in polity, politics and policy are fundamental aspects of public innovation. A comprehensive research agenda on public innovation should therefore include studies of political innovation. This book will be of great value to scholars and researchers interested in Public Administration, Policy Making and Innovation, Public Governance and Political Leadership. It was originally published as a special issue of the Public Management Review.




Creativity in Transition


Book Description

In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with ‘innovation’ in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.