Geography’s creative (re)turn: Toward a critical framework

I The creative turn?

The latest ‘turn’ to appear on geography’s horizons is, it seems, a creative turn (Crang, 2010; Hawkins, 2011; Last, 2014; Madge, 2014; Marston and De Leeuw, 2013). This disciplinary pirouette marks out a rise in geographical scholarship that extends disciplinary relations with creative and cultural practices beyond the cultural analysis foregrounded during the cultural turn (e.g. Daniels, 1993; Cresswell and Dixon, 2002; Hawkins, 2014). The ‘expanded field’ of geographic knowledge-making now takes in creative practitioners, seeing their creative practices as part of the ‘doing’ of geography (Hawkins, 2014). While geographers are becoming makers and collaborators, creative practitioners are undertaking geography PhDs, and geography is developing an increasingly diverse methodological tool-kit of creative research practices. Even a cursory cataloguing brings to light geographical practices of cabaret, drawing, film-making, photography, theatre, dance, art, poetry and exhibition curation, to list but a few (Alfrey et al., 2002; Cresswell, 2013; Crouch, 2010; De Leeuw, 2012, 2015; Driver et al., 2005; Eshun and Madge, 2016; Gallagher and Prior, 2014; Garrett et al., 2014, 2016; Hawkins, 2015; Krupar, 2013; Magrane and Cockinos, 2015; McLean, 2016; Pratt and Johnston, 2013, 2017; Price, 2004; Raynor, 2017a, 2017b; Veal, 2016; Yusoff, 2008). But this is not, of course, to say the publishing of papers or monographs has been abandoned. Indeed, hybrid forms – such as photo or video essays or critical-creative writing pieces that explore the essay rather than paper format – are appearing, encouraged by special sections such as Cultural Geographies in Practice in Cultural Geographies, the ‘Creative|Alternative’ section in ACME, Geography Compass’s video submissions, Gender, Place and Culture’s multi-media submissions policy, and GeoHumanities’ practices and curations section (Sachs-Olsen and Hawkins, 2016; MacDonald, 2013; Gerlach, 2017). These experimentations are not limited to papers but are also present in monographs and have been for a while, from Gunnar Olsson’s experimental work in the 1980s to Allen Pred’s in the mid-1990s and, more recently, work by David Matless (2015) and James Riding (2017), amongst others.

Geography is not alone in undergoing a creative turn – orientations towards creative practices as research methods can be witnessed in archaeology, anthropology and sociology (Cochran and Russell, 2014; Morgan, 2009). Within geography the creative turn pairs what have also been termed experimental and art-full geographies with a wider spatial turn within arts and humanities scholarship and practice (Crang, 2010; Last, 2012). Such a ‘turning together’ situates bodies of thought, such as those on place, space and landscape, and practices such as mapping and exploration as points of intersection and engagement (Rendell, 2013; Rogoff, 2000; Schlogel, 2016 [2003]). The resulting artefacts and experiences constitute not only a making of knowledge, but also the reshaping of disciplinary landscapes and the remaking of worlds.

One of the clearly emerging contexts for creative practices within geography is that of the GeoHumanities. GeoHumanities has come to denote the intensification of work at the intersections of geographical scholarship and practice with arts and humanities scholarship and practice (Dixon et al., 2015; Hawkins et al., 2015). As such, it offers a wider scaffold and support for the work done by and with creative practitioners within geography that has a number of valuable dimensions. Firstly, it situates this relation between creative practice and geography as an exchange, so whilst this paper might focus on creative practices within geography, there is a clear sense in which creative practitioners without the discipline of geography are finding much value in the geographical as an intellectual framework and set of practices with which to align themselves. Secondly, the recent development of the GeoHumanities is very much about an intensification of existing work rather than the evolution of something entirely new. This offers helpful context for the arguments elaborated later in this paper about the histories of the creative turn. Thirdly, this relationship between arts and humanities reminds us that these practices often evolve alongside related bodies of quite sophisticated critique, which are useful to remember as geographers turn to practice – something which has, often surprisingly, been divorced from what might be quite useful critical frameworks that already exist within the humanities.

Rather than attempt to review the extensive and expanding field of creative geographies through its substantive concerns, this paper seeks a critical framework for the ‘doings’ that sit at the heart of the creative turn. Existing scholarship has tended toward the case study account, often accompanied by critical reflection on creative methods and the issue at hand (memory, place, urban intervention, etc.). Other accounts have noted the field’s emergence and intensification, mapping substantive foci or, recently, reflections on political imperatives (Crang, 2010; De Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017; Last, 2012; Rogers, 2017; Tolia-Kelly, 2012). Common across the literature are calls for the advancement of critical frameworks for the creative turn (Marston and De Leeuw, 2015; De Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017; Hawkins, 2014). Indeed, De Leeuw et al. (2017) believe we need to guard against a worrying normativity of creative methods and ‘remain sufficiently vigilant and critically aware to ensure they do not become a parody of themselves, something wholly corruptible and able to be put to use in exactly the opposite ways as those for which they were intended’ (p. 6). This paper responds to such concerns with the proposition of some foundational elements of a critical framework for creative geographies. It does so, in part, through the lens offered by recent interdisciplinary turn talk.

To talk of turns is often to talk of fleeting academic fashions, of free-floating paradigms, of governing gazes, of shared generational events (Bachmann-Medick, 2016). What is put at stake with such heady namings, clarifyings and sortings of intellectual fashions? On the one hand to talk of turns is to summon up a sense of innovation, to evoke the vigour of new ideas. On the other, it is to give spoken form to an intellectual congealing, to articulate the grounds for constructing academic conformities (Barnett, 1998a, 1998b; Cloke, 1997). To name something a turn is often to create an intellectual event, to give it a certain solidity in disciplinary discussions, to employ a rhetorical usage which, articulated often enough, comes to take on the appearance of fact. To talk of turns is therefore to magic forth symbolic capital in an intellectual commodity regime in which jostling for name recognition becomes bound up with identifying the latest flight of academic fancy (Barnett, 1998a, 1998b).

Turn-talk often pivots on tensions between innovation and intellectual conformism. It negotiates the sense both that something is afoot, an opening, an expansion, but also navigates signs of fatigue and the domestication of ideas and methods (Bachmann-Mink, 2016). At its worst, turn talk enunciates a governing gaze, corralling diverse intellectual projects under a singular banner and congealing sets of methods into certain regulations of practice (Denning, 2004; Bachmann-Mink, 2016). At their best, turns articulate powerful tools for inter-disciplinarity, and create spaces through which to reconfigure intellectual landscapes through experimental modes of understanding and a tolerance of incompleteness and uncertainty (Bachmann-Mink, 2016). To talk of turns is a tension-filled enterprise indeed. Moreover, it is one that demands a certain scepticism and concern to negotiate ‘the small space that separates the all-too-easy dismissal of new intellectual trends from the equally easy uncritical embrace of them’ (Barnett, 1998a: 382).

Geography’s own critical reflections on intellectual turnings, especially the cultural turn, offer useful ballast for these discussions (e.g. Barnett, 1998a, 1998b; Cook et al., 2000). Yet the imaginary of turns that is at work in this paper is perhaps best divorced from such significant turns, and the common imaginaries of turn talk reviewed above. Thus what I am not arguing is that the creative turn has the scale and longevity of the cultural or material turns within geography; rather, I am attracted by ideas of turns that hail from one famous turn talker, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. For Geertz (1983), intellectual turns are less a matter of the creation of new academic schools than of denoting emerging research processes that, over time, come to cultivate potent investigative attitudes and directions. This seems entirely akin to the current form of the creative turn. For Geertz the research process meanders, constantly undergoing an active shift from old to new patterns of theorisation and methods. Turning, Geertz suggests, may begin as a detour, an experimental dalliance down a side-street, but can eventually come to transform a research field. Thus to speak of a creative turn is less to summon up a wholesale disciplinary re-orientation – although examples will be used that work across different sub-fields of human and physical geography and are linked into wider shifts in the social sciences – than it is to enable an exploration of an ongoing process of disciplinary attunement and orientation toward ‘doing’ creative geographies. Indeed, the critical framework proposed here might offer a step in enabling the creative turn to gather pace and accrue wider force and relevance across geography and beyond. What is at stake, it seems to me, is a sense that while the relationship between geography and creative practice has intensified, in part driven by various aspects of the neoliberal academy (especially in the UK and the USA), the critical discussions surrounding these practices, their politics and possibilities has not kept pace. If these practices are to fulfil their potential and retain their criticality in this context, a framework is needed through which to reflect on where we have come from and to ensure we move forward in critical and positive ways. To ensure, in short, that geography’s current interest in creativity does not become just another example of disciplinary colonialism or a fad driven by less than intellectual or creative ambitions.

What follows, therefore, takes forward five reoccurring debates in wider turn talk – histories, geographies, imaginaries, expertise and politics – to elaborate on a critical framework for the creative turn. Together, these constitute possible foundations for a more critical account of geography’s creative turn, celebrating innovation without seeking conformism or tempering the energy of the current moment. The intent is to query the creative turn, to offer moments to reflect and regroup and the chance to pause amidst what has of late been heady progress.

II Critical framework I: Histories

The temporality of turns is a common point of contention. If to talk of turns is often to think of fads and fashions, what might it mean to counteract such apparent speed, ephemerality and progress with a slower, more considered register, to create moments for pause and reflection as a critical practice? Further, what if taking the time to pause reveals turns as returns? Such that turns are less a headlong forward momentum and are rather entangled with and rooted through history. Conservative German historian Karl Schlogel experiments with watery metaphors to describe turns less as singular movements than as ongoing and repetitive; they are, he suggested, ‘like running waters that seep away and continue to flow unnoticed underground only to return to the surface at some later point in time if at all’ (2016 [2003]: 62–3). This is a language less of Kuhnian paradigm shifts or Copernican revolutions and rather a more cautious and gradual unfolding in which critical turns foster intellectual comportments wherein new ideas are built on the awareness and valorisation of older ones (Bachmann-Medick, 2016).

Dominant historiographies of geography have tended to narrate disciplinary struggles to be taken seriously as a science (Livingstone, 1992) – a trend that the demarcating of creative geographies as experimental perhaps veers toward. It is equally possible, however, to piece together a history of creative geographies that incorporates the arts and humanities within geography in a more fulsome manner. This history would multiply the histories of the creative turn beyond 20th-century humanistic geography and the recent rise in visual methods. This is clearly not the place for an extensive historical retelling, nor, interestingly, does the literature under discussion explicitly develop such retellings. What it does do, however, is direct us toward what such historical perspectives might offer to contemporary creative geographies.

There are any number of creative geographers of the past who could have been selected for discussion here – whether those like John Fraser Hart and Donald Meinig (1983), who issue clarion calls for the recognition of geography’s artfulness, or those like John Wreford-Watson (1983) or Bill Bunge, whose research and writing explicitly use creative practices (Barnes, 2017; see also Hawkins, 2014). The jigsaw of the histories of creative geographies is most complete, however, around the arts of exploration and linked discussions of the 18th-century polymath Alexander Von Humboldt. Humboldt’s aesthetics, together with his insistence on placing art at the heart of scientific development, has been crucial to human and physical geography (Bunske, 1981; Buttimer, 2001; Dixon et al., 2012). As Buttimer argues, Humboldt’s is a geo-poetics that involves a ‘more than scientific mastery of various geophysical and biological processes’, combining ‘poetics, aesthetics, emotion and reason in the quest for wiser ways of dwelling’ ¹ (see also Dettelbach, 2001, 2005). Scholarship on Humboldt, together with that on arts and exploration, articulates the persistence of intersections of science and aesthetics in the history of geography and creativity (Smith, 1985, 1992; Stafford, 1983). Such work is framed by a broad spectrum sense of creativity, from the professional to the amateur, from the large oil painting to the lantern slide or the hand-drawn sketch, from the carefully compiled album to the personal diary entry (e.g. Driver and Martins, 2005; special issue of Journal of Historical Geography, 2014, 43/2). It is further shaped by concerns with the relationships between creative practices, geographical science and imperial desires. It is also cut through with debates around ‘truth’, ‘veracity’ and aesthetics – art as ‘packets of information’ set against an aesthetics forged through a hybrid composition of tropical landscapes and Western landscape art traditions. Others have focused on the consumption of these works, identifying the geographical imagination they forge and tracking its circulation through European publics Driver and Martins, 2005; Quilley, 2014; Smith, 1985). In sum, as well as important in their own right, to appreciate past iterations of creative geographies is to cultivate an attentiveness to currents of thought common across time – whether the sites and practices of creative production and consumption, or the geographical imaginaries of the works themselves.

We might take inspiration, for example, from concerns with the ‘public engagement’ potential of creative practices. Artistic practices have long been of value to geographers as a device to engage both specialists and the general public with their work, whether this be in the esteemed institutional spaces of the European Enlightenment, elegant private soirees across the continent, or in diverse galleries, lantern shows, and even newspapers (Smith, 1985, 1992). As well as the interest in the consumption of images produced during the age of exploration, we see such concerns persisting throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Sir Francis Younghusband, for example, concluded his 1920 presidential address to the Royal Geographical Society with an explicit call for the place of creative geographies in practices of communication: ‘we expect of him [sic] that he should have in him something of the poet and the painter’ (1920: 10). Geographers, he believes, should cultivate a ‘seeing eye’ not only to discern the natural beauty of a region, but should have ‘acquired the capacity for expressing either in words or painting what the eye has seen, that than he [sic] can communicate it to us’ (p. 10). We will, he asserts, ‘no longer tolerate a geographer who will learn everything about the utility of a region…but who will take no trouble to see the beauty it contains’. He acknowledged the ‘desperately revolutionary’ nature of his words for an RGS inclined to seek recognition for geography as a science, but, he assured his audience, his conclusions were based in ‘extensive field-work and travel’. Crucially, for Younghusband, the artistically literate geographer was not just a better geographical scientist – she was also a better communicator, better able to enrol followers within the geographical cause.

This is, of course, just one example, but directing our attention to such histories, and how scholars have critiqued the past political, economic and institutional loci of geography’s mobilisation of creative practices, is a useful foundation from which to reflect on the place of ‘creative public geographies’ (Crang, 2010) ² within the rise of public intellectuals and the ‘impact agenda’ in the neoliberal academy (Rogers et al., 2014; Pain, 2014). As Tolia-Kelly observes, it is important that ‘geography not just see “art” as an easy component of the “impact agenda”’ (2008: 136). Indeed, she sketches out a ‘new orthodoxy’ evidenced by how ‘university funders are bounding towards a culture of impact and public engagement’, often enrolling visual culture and arts along the way as they do so (2008: 137). The challenges and tensions of such enrolments of creative practices within the dynamics of the neoliberal academy have not been overlooked by creative geographers, especially those concerned with participatory practices, wherein the politics of knowledge production are always central (Askins and Pain, 2011; McLean, 2016).

Geography’s creative turn should be thought of, then, as a return. Across the centuries, from 18th-century ships to 20th-century conference rooms, we find a range of sites wherein the place and practice of creativity within the production of geographic knowledge is celebrated. Attending to such histories is valuable not only for its own sake, but also for the direction it offers current thinking about creative practices, their function, the intersections of information, aesthetics and representation and the complex politics and institutional locations of their production and consumption.

III Critical framework II: Geographies

Writing of revolutions – intellectual or otherwise – Withers and Livingston (2005) direct us to the importance of querying their geographies – their sites of production, the mobilities of thoughts and things, and the sites that shape the evolution and uptake of ideas. Indeed, what is clear is how these geographies are thoroughly implicated in shifts in the spaces and practices of the production, consumption and circulation of geographic knowledge. Relatedly, in his writings on geography’s cultural turn, Barnett (1998a: 382) exemplifies the importance of attending to the geographies of knowledge production. He demonstrates how the institutionalised contexts of production, especially the publishing industry and the intellectual norms of judgement that regulate academic production, were both productive of, but also produced by, the cultural turn.

Taking forward these arguments, this section explores how any critical framework for the creative turn must take seriously both how it shapes and is shaped by disciplinary geographies of knowledge, but also by the wider political economies of the academy within which we all work. It is, after all, very easy to get caught up in new things, and especially with something like creativity which, as the next section explores, comes with a very positive set of attachments. Going forward, however, we need to remain aware of both the existing intellectual contexts from which creative geographies emerge, especially those outwith geography, and also how the wider conditions of academic working lives and knowledge-making practices shape what counts as knowledge, geographical or otherwise. What is at stake here are informed creative geographies that take account of their own politics, not least how these intersect with the political economies of the academy in ways that shape who gets to make knowledge, how and in what ways.

As such, then, these geographies of knowledge are disciplinary (albeit highly varied across universities and countries) but are also those political economies of the neoliberal academy within which many of us, and especially those in the UK and the US, operate. This is well known to be an academy undergoing a crisis of identity and mission, caught in the midst of the ‘encroachment of an economic ethos into higher education’ (Berg et al., 2016; Gill, 2009). It is an academy in which the temporalities of metrics, audits around research, teaching and the impact of our scholarship beyond the academy, come worryingly close to directing what and how we research. This section offers two cuts through geographical knowledge production: the evolution of practice-based PhDs within geography, and creative outputs and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. In doing so, it draws out challenges around the co-constitutive relationships that evolve between knowledge and the geographies of its making, not least the political economies of the academy.

In recent years geography has joined the growing number of disciplines supporting creative practice-based PhD students, with some 30 registered in geography departments globally. Their numbers are swelled by those using creative practices within their research but whose doctorates would not be considered practice-based, and those who are working on geographic topics while based in a range of creative practice departments and often co-supervised by geographers. ³ Geography’s own evolution of practice-based PhDs must not be seen outwith the wider cross-disciplinary explosion of these forms of doctorate in the early 21st century. Focused in Australia and the UK, and concentrated on studio-art practice-based PhDs, although now encompassing most forms of creative practice including design and music, the growth in these PhDs was matched by an explosion in associated critical literatures (Barrett and Bolt, 2010). Indeed, in 2005 James Elkins, a major scholar in this field, observed that their expansion was less in question than ‘how rigorously they would be conceptualised’. Geography could do a lot worse than participate in these evolving conceptualisations, not least where they discuss the nature of research and ‘new knowledge’, forms of supervision (generally teams of one practitioner and one scholar), thesis format and terms of judgement. Also key is the much debated difference between ‘practice-based’ and ‘practice-led’ research. ⁴ While definitions vary across disciplines, practices, institutions and funding organisations, most edge toward some iteration of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council statement: ‘research in which the professional and/or creative practices of art, design or architecture play an instrumental part in an inquiry’. ⁵

As well as remaining aware of the wider critical context for the growth of these doctorates, geographers would do well to reflect on how they require shifts in the norms of intellectual judgement and have formed new disciplinary codes within geography, placing demands on staff and students. At Royal Holloway, University of London, for example, new PhD regulations state that practice-based PhDs write between 30,000 and 60,000 words and submit a body of practice for examination. ⁶ If students create artefacts – paintings, photographs and so on – then an exhibition is common. If performance or live art is the focus, then examiners (usually one geographer and one practitioner) will witness a performance. In both cases, appropriate documentation will be created and included alongside the written thesis to ensure longevity. Whatever its form, this body of work must be considered of PhD quality, hence making an original contribution to knowledge and practice, but what exactly that might be is harder to pin down. Whilst in its shorter form the written component mainly affords a critical account of the development and originality of the creative practice, in its longer form the text must, like more ‘standard’ geography PhDs, make an original contribution to geographic knowledge. There is an ever-present risk that we ask too much of practice-based PhD students. The assessment of practice as a PhD component means we are training geographers who, from the beginning of their academic careers, produce outputs whose forms extend beyond the journal article and the monograph, and who have been trained to expect that these will be taken seriously. Masters and undergraduate courses too are developing new generations of creatively-literate geographers for whom creative practices are a regular and assessed part of their geographic knowledge-making. Yet, such outputs are a far from a straightforward site of creative geographies.

Despite widespread support for the creative turn within geography, acceptance, or even understanding, especially of alternative outputs, is very varied and by no means universal. Nor is it always forthcoming at key moments in the academic life-cycle, such as hiring and promotion, where it seems creative outputs are more generally understood in relation to impact, and as less important than the ‘serious business’ of paper or monograph writing. Such tensions are most clearly lensed through one of the most institutionalised of the UK Higher Education’s forms of judgement: the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), that controversial process by which a university’s research standing is judged. Heaped onto the pressures REF places on ‘traditional’ scholarly practices (see, for example, Pain et al., 2011) are the less-documented negative effects on academic creativity, where energies are oriented ‘in very specific ways…narrowing our capacities and potential contributions’ (2011: 183). We might think of how pressures to publish reduce the time and space for the evolution of the skill sets and relations that creative practices and collaborations require, and how adventurous venues and academic forms might appear less attractive to many, or even simply not an option at all for those more precarious scholars whose need to impress internal or external judgement panels is more urgent.

Yet, perhaps ironically, REF’s very practices of standardisation might also offer a glimmer of possibility for such ‘alternative’ outputs. REF 2014 identified 21 different categories into which academic outputs could fall, from books and papers to artefacts and performances. ⁷ Within geography 81.8 per cent of outputs were articles, whilst in music, drama, dance and performing arts articles accounted for only 29.5 per cent of outputs. ⁸ Reviewing some 6021 submissions to the Geography, Environmental Studies and Archaeology panel, only one ostensibly creative output was submitted, Hidden Histories of Exploration, an exhibition developed by Felix Driver (2013) alongside the Royal Geographical Society in London. This was despite the shared panel with archaeology where exhibitions are common, but yet seem to be more often part of impact submissions than considered as a research output. While it would be misguided to read too much into this single inclusion – no doubt others were included as the subject of papers or books – this entry and its double weighting (like many monographs) might evidence a growing confidence in and place for creative geographical practices within the discipline. Thus the rubrics of REF might offer creative geographers a valuable means to state the case for their work in languages that heads of department and university management who are not experts in the subject area can understand. ⁹ Moreover, the reports from creative practice-based subject panels offer invaluable resources, enabling reflection on evidencing and judging these forms of practice more generally. For example, experts on the Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts panel (part of Main Panel D) observed in their overview report a real need to distinguish ‘excellent professional practice from practice with a clear research dimension’ (p. 100), noting that the strongest submissions provided evidence of a strong research imperative, clear methods, as well as documentation of processes of development and outcomes. ¹⁰

This is not, of course, to overlook the many challenges of REF and other practices of assessment (including Australia’s ERA- Excellence in Research Australia , the US’s tenure process, as well as more general promotion practices). It is, however, to suggest that as geography looks to navigate the evolution of practice-based working across teaching and research, whether at postgraduate level or not, we would do well to draw on existing resources to help guide us, resources that are already present within the arts sector, whether associated with the problematic arenas of REF or not. Also worthy of further reflection are the creative contexts out of which were born many of the creative forms to which geographers are drawn. Interestingly zines, artists’ books, chap books, or live art and performance works, common forms for creative geographies, were originally conceived of as challenges to the marketised and institutionalised structures of the art market and the creation of an ‘enduring art object’ that was so often the target of 20th-century artists’ critiques (Bagelman and Bagelman, 2016; Bond et al., 2013; Cutler, 2013; Garrett et al., 2014, 2016; Hoskins and Whitehead, 2013; Lovejoy and Hawkins, 2009; Neate and Craggs 2016). There are some interesting tensions around what it means for such formats to become enrolled in institutionalised academic contexts that would bear further study.

Any critical framework proposed for creative geographies might gain much then by taking account of the analytic force of geographies, not only in terms of the spaces and practices of the production and consumption of knowledge but also the situated intellectual and institutional contexts from which creative practices emerge and which they may contest. As the exploration of practice-based PhDs and outputs suggests, there are rich contexts from within the art world that might enable the engagement of geographers’ critical questions. Further, we are also directed to the importance of taking account of the political economies of the academy within which we work, and within which we are all differentially located. As the origins of a number of the creative forms to which geographers have turned make clear, we should not overlook possibilities that such forms offer as valuable sites for the reworking and reshaping of disciplinary norms and practices.

IV Critical framework III: Imaginaries

Turn talk tends minds toward the imaginations that inhere in our disciplines (Bachmann-Medick, 2016), by which I mean how it is we think of and understand our disciplines. Unsurprisingly, much of the literature on creative geographies channels engaging imaginaries of interdisciplinarity, forward thinking, relentlessly positive scholarship: after all, who does not want to be considered creative (Wylie, 2010)? While much could be said about the imaginaries of geography at work in creative geographies, I am more concerned here with the ideas of creativity mobilised within many of these discussions. ‘Creative’ has not been universally accepted as a denomination for these practices. But, whilst others prefer art-full or experimental (see Last, 2013; Crang, 2010), creativity has come to take on a certain solidity in discussions, becoming an essential if often uncritically reconstructed reference point for these practices. Yet, we need to take more care in how we think about the very idea of creativity that underpins creative geographies. Indeed, to label some methods or ways of making geographical knowledge as creative brings a dual danger: that of both falsely denoting other methods as uncreative and that of marking out the research produced through creative methods as somehow different and therefore, depending on your perspective, more or less worthy/political/rigorous.

Comprehending ‘culture’ remains a stumbling block in understandings of the ‘cultural turn’ within geography and beyond (Mitchell, 1995; Denning, 2004). It might be wise to try to head off, as far as possible, similar issues with creativity. This is not, of course, to suggest a singular and easy understanding of creativity in contrast to culture’s well-noted complexity. For creativity is quickly joining the ranks of ‘keywords’ that are central to an intellectual zeitgeist but whose complexity and tensions remain significantly under-theorised. The proliferation of meanings are far too many and varied to do justice to here, so what follows takes up two sets of critical reflections by way of an illustration of what retaining rather than overlooking definitional tensions might enable. The first finds in the creative economies literatures lessons for thinking through the politics of creative geographies, while the second concerns expanding our understandings of creativity beyond the professional creative practices of artists, writers and so on to consider more vernacular practice. What is at stake here is the need to challenge the evolution of an overly narrow and even policed set of ideas around what constitutes creative geographies and what is lost when we operate with too narrow a definition of creativity in our thinkings and doings.

Perhaps the largest collection of work on creativity within geography concerns the creative economy. Here I want to trace one thread of this work – the dark side of creativity – that enables us to challenge the fetish of creativity as inherently good, and also that enables close attention to the politics of creative geographies, both their doings and their outputs, to reflect, for example, on the complicity of creative arts in colonial visions, whether those of past empires or of the neo-liberal scripts of creative economies and creative cities (Daniels, 1993; McLean, 2016; Hawkins, 2016; Loftus, 2011). These ‘scripts’ encourage a blanket global application of creativity as an economic solution and planning strategy that overlooks local context as well as creativity’s darker sides. This includes effects on city spaces (e.g. gentrification, hipsterification), bad labour practices (casualisation; rife self-exploitation) and the political economies of creative production that privilege certain forms of practice and certain ‘types’ of practitioner.

Even a glance at geographic scholarship on the arts suggests a need to temper our enthusiasm for the potential of creative practices. We might cite, for example, 18th-century landscape painting’s conservative values or public art’s complicity in gentrification as indicators of creativity’s implication within the production and reproduction of elite narratives and practices and the concomitant sanitisation of their critical and interventionary possibilities (Deutsche, 1991; Daniels, 1993; Pinder, 2005). Interestingly, such critical perspectives are often overlooked when it comes to reflecting on geographers’ own creative practices. De Leeuw et al. (2017) tackle this issue directly in a sensitive discussion of their work with indigenous and settler peoples in northern British Columbia via reflections on its location within creative turns within both medical humanities and geography. Exploring what story-telling might do, who might tell stories, of what and in what form, they build on creative and artful forms of therapeutic doing to urge storytelling practices that are ‘vigilant against the uncritical use of tools, languages, or practices to make or understand knowledge’. The combination of medical humanities and indigenous knowledge evolves a concern-full approach to the power relations of knowledge production. Pointed questions arise around how to cultivate creative research stances that remain within the realm of their creators and users rather than becoming mobilised by those driven by profit and corporate interests (2017: 6).

Interestingly, a closer attention to both the undercurrents and, less often, the explicit statements of creative geographical work may indicate concerns with issues around the political economies of artistic labour practices, including their enrolment within institutionalised academic contexts (e.g. Foster and Lorimer, 2007). Creative labour theory brings to the fore differential social access to the creative economy, not only in terms of who can purchase goods and use services, but also who can produce and what they can produce. Relevant too is the proliferation of casualisation and self-exploitation across the creative sector, whilst theorisations of terms such as passion labour or ‘playbour’ signify the importance of affect and emotion as both the driving force and also part of the detrimental effects of these forms of ‘work’ (Conor et al., 2015). Clearly aligned with characterisations of academia’s own labour practices (Gibson and Klocker, 2004), it is worth being sensitive to these issues when freelance practitioners, often with highly mixed portfolios, intersect with academic institutions. Along with the danger of ‘deskilling’ creative labours out of ignorance of difference, artists also risk joining the list of those from whom universities and often well-meaning academics extract labour (McLean, 2016). Looking beyond the creativity ‘hype’ and getting acquainted with some of the more uncomfortable and critical dimensions of this scholarship seems to be imperative if creative geographies are to develop any kind of meaningful vocabulary for talking and thinking about the politics of doing these practices, let alone if they are to be able to make claims with any truth as to the political impact of their work.

I now turn to a second, briefer, example of the value of holding in tension multiple understandings of creativity. Critiques of the cultural turn as being too high-brow, as doing violence to the experiences of everyday life (Philo, 2000), triangulate with discussions of creativity that assert subcultural, vernacular and amateur creativities in the face of floods of work on the professional creative economy (Hawkins, 2016; Edensor et al., 2010). In the context of the doing of creative geographies foregrounded here, we should take account of the growing geographical work on craft and in particular that which sees geographers studying their existing, or learning new, creative practices as part of their research. Such practices take in weaving, taxidermy, knitting and restoration (Mann, 2017; Delyser and Greenstein, 2017; Straughan, 2015), foregrounding how ‘such embodied interventions extend academic understandings of the everyday embodied accumulation of skill and tacit knowledge’ (Gibson and Carr, 2017). Geographical doings of these forms of creativity offer a focus on process, on a grasping of what happens in the making. These are studies that foreground ecologies of skill and ‘unravel’ relations between skill and the cultural, social and political contexts, historical and contemporary, within which these practices should be situated. The evolution of material, embodied and social accounts of such creative doings are of value if we are to appreciate the forms of labour of these practices, their political challenges but also their possibilities as well as their wider promise. Of course other wider versions of creativity can be asserted that focus more on instinctive or improvisational forms of creative practices that evolve in the moment (Hallam and Ingold, 2008). Thinking across these variegated forms of creative practices raises concerns with the doing of creative geographies, addressed further in the following sections.

In short, creative geographers interested in evolving a critical framework for their practice might do well to embrace the breadth of understandings of creativity at work within geography currently, from those of the creative economy, to those of the improvisational and everyday – not least for how it is that such breadth and the tensions inherent within it draw to the fore concerns with what happens in the doing of creative practices rather than judgement focused on the created outputs, and how it opens out some of those geographies of production and consumption attended to in the previous section as well as attuning us to some of the more problematic politics of these practices. It is, of course, not just creativity that needs to be rethought: we might also usefully revisit thinking on the imaginaries of geography and of interdisciplinarity that sit at the heart of creative geographies.

V Critical framework IV: Skill and expertise

I am, as I have explored elsewhere, very bad at drawing, if to be ‘good’ might mean being able to create a half-way accurate representation. My frustrated methods of mark-making are poor communicative tools indeed (Hawkins, 2015) yet, optimistically, rather than reflect on the failure of my drawings as ‘packets of information’ – a classic historical valorisation of geographic drawings (Balm, 2000) – I am rather more interested in the process of ‘doing’, with how my frustrated, angry and uncomfortable attempts to render the environment caused me to slow down, to sense my environment differently. My lack of creative skill finds me in good geographic company – my discomfort and awkwardness are shared by numerous others, including Wylie (2010), McCormack (2015), Revil (2004) and Straughan (2015), all of whom have expressed the vexations and discombobulations of creative geographic doings.

There is productivity in those moments that require us to sit with our disciplinary anxieties, that demand that we negotiate what was diagnosed in the cultural turn as a geographical clinginess, an over-attachment to the ‘geographical’, the ‘spatial’, the ‘environmental’, as a form of anxiety management in the face of essentially un-masterable fields of cultural theory or practice (Barnett, 1998a, 1998b). Such concepts become our ‘tickets to entry, they are what we offer and how we recognise possible interlocutors’, but they also enable us to retain a ‘vestige of continued control over the potentially vast areas offered up by interdisciplinary adventures’ (Barnett, 1998a: 390). What does it mean when geographers are asked to practise a suite of what are for many new creative techniques? Importantly, what it should not mean – which it too often does – is a bifurcation between fetishisation of either the amateur or of professional skill. Instead, we might be best served to pursue a space in which we sit with the process rather than the output, and in doing so we neither fetishise the amateur nor forget the value of skill. For while we should celebrate the skills and creative professionalism (itself far from structured) of some geographers, such as those published poets (Cresswell, 2013; De Leeuw, 2012, 2015) or exhibiting artists (Crouch, 2010; Boyd, 2017), or those who have sought second degrees or even PhDs, we might also look to value those with more amateur skills. Developing theories of the amateur within creativity, we might reflect on skill and its acquisition less in terms of identifying a ‘lack’ and rather more through a celebration of the possibilities of learning and doing. A range of participatory creative geography projects, for example, see relatively unskilled participants and geographers working alongside professional creative practitioners (Askins and Pain, 2011; Tolia-Kelly, 2008; Hawkins and Catlow, 2017). All the accounts centralise what happens in the ‘doing’ over and against the ‘work’ done by the finished objects (if there are any). Whether this be the collective production of paintings, drawings or video games, it is a concern with the meaningful encounters, or the identification of shared identities, problems and (re)imagination of community futures that have made up the core of those discussions. Common too across these accounts is a resistance to drawing distinctions between skilled and unskilled, professional and amateur, and the ease with which these categories become mapped onto one another. Tolia-Kelly (2008), for example, outlines how professional artists can contribute a rigour to participatory art that helps code the visual materials as ‘art’, in the eyes of participants and audiences. This enables those involved to avoid thinking about the research process as ‘as naive, “experimental”, unethical or patronising’ (Tolia Kelly, 2008: 133–4). Askins and Pain (2011: 812) observe how professional and amateur artistic practices enable different parts of a research process, whilst acknowledging tensions between the ‘perceived need for a professional product (art for consumption) and our goals in knowledge coproduction (participatory art as process)’. In a different vein, Parr (2006, 2007) notes how research power structures are challenged by researchers and participants learning creative skills, in this case video-editing, together.

If much can be learned in the doing, this is not to dismiss the need for close and at times uncomfortable attention to these doings and their outputs. Without such critical attentions we risk geography’s creative (re)turn becoming yet another example of the discipline’s trend towards ‘research tourism’. The under-appreciation of creative skill has a range of impacts. Such absentmindedness tends to smear creative practices and genres together, desensitising creator and audience alike to the nuanced critical work that different practices might do. Following Lauren Berlant’s (1998) observation of how non-rigorous studies are often the result of popular culture being ‘all too easily available for reading’, we might guard against creative practices, especially in an era where it is easy to take and make high quality photographs and videos, becoming ‘all too available for the doing’. We might urge creative geographers to recognise that their own practices are not transparent, and whilst not to encourage obfuscation for the sake of it, we might request an engagement with the historical and theoretical contexts of and for creative geographic practices. Madge’s (2014) entwining of geographic thinking and literary theory offers an excellent example of the productivity of such engagements. Her analysis demonstrates how reflecting on the genres and histories that you create within, even if they are not a direct influence, might help to gain an analytic purchase on the geographic work poetry (in this case) is doing, in her case fostering a sense of affective and embodied poetic encounters. This is never an easy balance to strike – as Elkins observes of visual arts, sometimes ‘too much art historical knowledge might hamper or even ruin ongoing art projects’ (2005: 9).

Reflecting on the complex skill sets and knowledge required to practise creative geographies brings us face-to-face with tricky academic temporalities. Common to discussions of the pursuit of creative geographies is an emphasis on patient and accretive approaches that demand space not only for learning but also for practice and refinement (Foster and Lorimer, 2007; Hawkins, 2015). Further, many accounts of collaboration emphasise the need for time and space to build relations and cultivate patient respect for differences in knowledge-making practices. The ‘fast’ academy, the speeding up and intensification of practices – from publication to audits – is placing pressure (unevenly) on staff who scramble to meet ‘high productivity’ targets in ‘compressed timeframes’. These are temporalities which need to be reconfigured through sets of imaginative and inventive practices that don’t just seek to do more in less time, but which seek to remake the temporalities of the academy itself (Meyerhoff et al., 2011).

Creative geographers appear therefore to hold within them an implicit or explicit site of resistance to some of these more speedy processes of the neoliberalised academy. Indeed, to practise creative geographies might be to activate the principals of the slow scholarship movement – ‘good scholarship requires time to think, write, read, research, analyse, edit, organise’ – and we might add to do, make and create (Mountz et al., 2015: 1236). Such a slowing down, however might not be possible for all. While PhDs often offer the time and space for learning new skills, early career scholars, as well as others in precarious positions, may face difficult choices regarding outputs and the investment of time. If early career scholars, PhDs or otherwise, are left concerned and frustrated by the valorisation of exhibitions or performances as against rafts of publications, mid-career academics might be left wondering at the investment of time in developing new skills, to use in research and teaching, versus that spent reading and writing.

Of course, it is not just in the context of individual scholars and practitioners that these debates about skill play out, but also across the discipline as a whole. To support creative geographers an expanded disciplinary infrastructure is needed, consisting of reviewers, editors, supervisors, examiners and teachers to cultivate this work, as well as people in places of power on tenure, promotion and hiring committees to recognise its value. Without such gate-keepers, creative geographers – especially those battling it out in an already fraught job market – face forms of metrics and standardisation whose measurement not only makes little space for their forms of work, but which could eventually come to shape what it is that a discipline comes to be and do.

VI Critical framework V: Politics: Embracing ‘fizz’

It was geography’s ‘untrammelled imbibing of cultural fizz’ (as described by Paul Cloke, 1997) that caused many geographers to express significant worries regarding the cultural turn’s relationship to politics, morals and ethics (Swyngedouw, 1995; Mitchell, 1995). The cultural turn was, for its naysayers, at best a rather wearisome parade of identity politics and at worst an apolitical turn away from a substantial material in favour of imaginative, whimsical and elite texts – the fizz (McDowell, 2000; Sayer, 1994; Philo, 2000; Gregson, 1995, Smith, 2000). Recent evolutions in creative geographies offer a chance to combat some of these critiques by, ironically, embracing aspects of this fizziness rather than its denouncement as an aerated, immaterial spectacle or apolitical analytic trick.

The current iteration of the creative turn has appeared on geography’s horizons at a point when the relationship between art and geography and politics is up for debate. Just as when Valentine (in 2001) asked us to reconsider how the cultural turn had reshaped ideas of social, so we might ask how the creative turn can contribute to the recent reshaping of politics. On the one hand, art is increasingly aligned with political theory (art, for example, being seen as politics in action), whether by political theorists or by other scholars keen to valorise art (Demos, 2016; Toscano, 2009). On the other hand, geography, like other disciplines, is coming to rethink politics through ideas such as enchanted and vital materialisms of Jane Bennett (2001) that require rethinking of the boundaries between human and non-human. Also important here is the force of the non-living, such as that found in feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of geo-onto power (2016) that demands we consider what it might mean to rethink biopower with respect to the geo. While these are very different concepts, between them they direct us to a generosity in the comprehension of what politics is and in the enrolment of new kinds of practices as political. For these individuals like many others, world-making happens through the speculative, imaginative and engaging forms of politics propagated by creative practices (Kanngieser, 2013). These kinds of politics are not going to be to everyone’s taste, nor are they necessarily going to accomplish the kinds of work that some people would wish to delineate as the territory and practice ‘proper’ to politics. But, for many, politics they are.

Geography’s creative politics has often been understood through registers of the politics of representation (Daniels, 1993), or critical spatial practices and forms of intervention that owe much to the critical creative urbanisms of the Situationists (Pinder, 2008; Loftus, 2009), as well as the participatory forms outlined above (Pinder, 2005; Mackenzie, 2006; Pain and Askins, 2011). There are clearly myriad political registers available for understanding the politics of creative practices. We might think here too of the growth of interest from geopolitical scholars in the possibilities of closer working with (rather than on) creative practices. Ingram’s (2011, 2012) collaborative and curatorial work has been important here, as well as Williams’ and Woodwards’ artistic collaborations with artists in residence on visualising airspace and (see account in Flintham, 2016, as well as websites mentioned in Note 11). ¹¹ In amongst all these options, I want, however, to sit, in a sense, with the ‘fizz’. As such, I offer examples where geographers have held fast to the kinds of creative experiments that embrace speculative futures, that mobilise humour and satire or that find force in tentative attunings that celebrate ephemeral entanglements as a means to think about creative politics.

Two very different projects offer the chance to explore the generative political possibilities of creative geographies. The first, Krupar’s (2013) experimental monograph ‘Hot Spotter’s Report’, delights its reader with a style that both explicates and performs the experimental arts of connection between bodies (whether of environmentalists, artists, activists or publics) and environments that concern her. Creatively inhabiting and retelling ‘military fables of toxic waste’ through her practices as a ‘radioactive drag queen’ and ‘nuclear sculptor’ sees her creating new and uncanny intimacies between humans, non-humans and inorganic materials. In the second project McLean (2016) collaborates with queer and radical feminist cabaret artists in ways that ‘co-opt and rework the staging of neoliberal creativity’ (p. 52), critiquing creative city planning practices such as urban gardens. In both performance and paper difficult questions are posed about intersectional inequalities and about the complicity of the creative sector within neoliberal urban policy and its enrolment of ‘boosterish efforts to market and consume queer diversity’ (p. 53).

Both texts are refreshingly frank regarding the challenges and tensions of this work. Both authors articulate the discomfort of being forced to negotiate the enrolment of creative practices by many of very forces (institutions, politicians, corporations, etc.) that they are designed to critique. Neither accounts lets us, as creative geographers, off easily. Indeed, with an inspiring honesty McLean turns her attention to the academy, observing ‘even as our performances satirised exclusionary community work and labour practices, we were fulfilling the university’s ‘knowledge mobilisation’ regimes that pressures scholars to extract the work of activists, residents and precarious community workers’ (2006: 51). Both projects, like that of De Leeuw et al. (2017), force creative geographers to reflect hard on the complicacy of their practice within a corporatized higher education sector. It is profoundly disquieting to confront how easily our intellectual and creative labours become packaged up and mobilised within the reproduction of neoliberal practices and policies. It is important then to temper our excitement over the political possibilities of creative geographies with a careful reflection on the politics of our own practices. One place to turn is to critical geography where, as scholarship by De Leeuw and others suggests, rich resources enable both a reflection on the politics our creative practices might perform but also an interrogation of our complicity within the political structures within which we work and which we seek to critique. We might also turn to the art world and creative sector, where critical voices do speak up for the challenges and possibilities of creativity (Kanngieser, 2013; Demos, 2016) but where practice often performs these for us. We might think, within geography for example, of how the making and circulation of zines, with their low-cost easily reproducible forms beloved of the feminist movement, critique our standard publication registers and publications practices (Bagelman, 2016; see also Bagelman et al., 2017), or of the myriad ways that the essence of 20th-century arts practices sought to critique the institutions and markets within which they were produced and consumed, through their forms and materialities (e.g. feminist installation or live art) as much as their content.

VII To conclude: To talk of turns - Beyond fashion?

If to talk of turns is often to be accused of promoting a singularity of disciplinary direction, of demanding conformity from myriad intellectual projects, then we may think of the creative turn as a project of conformity at our peril. For this is a turn that combines work in a diverse range of mediums practised with various degrees of expertise. It addresses a diffuse selection of substantive geographic issues and it produces a range of geographic outputs, from ephemeral performances to the beautiful artefacts of poetry and photobooks as well as ambiguous, frustrating and utterly unremarkable outputs. Such recognition of diversity and the complexity of the projects united under a turn need not, as Barnett observed with respect to the cultural turn, disable attempts to subject ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is, to critical scrutiny, scrutiny that is increasingly salient as the attraction to and mobilisation of these practices by geographers intensifies. Indeed, following Geertz, the key turn talker in this paper, we might think of turns less as singular enterprises that see monolithic direction shifts and rather appreciate turns as productive meanders that can generate potent investigative force.

The potency of this investigative force is being increasingly realised across geography, as we see everyone from geomorphologists to climate scientists and economic geographers turn to the possibilities of working alongside creative practitioners. While for many this began as an exercise in public impact, it seems increasingly the wider possibilities of creative practices as geographic research processes are being recognised. There is much, as has been made clear, to be celebrated about this. But there is also, unless we evolve a critical framework for these practices, much that is concerning, issues that both formulate and cut across the five dimensions of the critical framework outlined here. As this paper has argued, there is a real need to open discussions about skill and expertise amongst creative geographies, to make live issues around the time, space and resources required for learning and practice, the challenging politics of collaboration and the humble and concern-full approach needed as we evolve new skills and relations. This must not be, especially amidst all the discussions about privilege and decolonialisation, another example of geographers rushing unthinkingly ahead on voyages of intellectual colonialism. Linked to this there are of course, as has been indicated across the five elements of the critical framework proposed here, significant sets of politics – labour politics, institutional politics, and the political economies of the academy that intersect with these sets of creative practices. These need to be appreciated if we are to navigate ethically the evolution of creative geographies, and to be in a position to develop projects and collaborations that are able to fulfil the promise of these arenas of work. There are also issues at stake here around the forgetting of histories, around our inability to appreciate that turns are often returns.

To make sense of some of these key themes and their importance for the future of creative geographies, I want to close by noting some of Lauren Berlant’s reflections on turns, fads and fashions. Observing the processing, mining, claiming and trashing that regularly occurs around emerging forms of knowledge production, she decries the devaluation of work as ‘tinny’, ‘sexy’ and ‘fashionable’, whilst also locating such critiques as a function of the pressures and anxieties of academic life. In doing so she offers a set of powerful reflections that might guide our creative geographies going forward. Core to Berlant’s discussion is her recovery of the fashionable. Just as I am urging here an appreciation of geography’s creative turn as a return, Berlant urges us to reject the fashionable as a fixation on the new and superficial. She argues that instead it should be seen as an accretion of repetition and difference, wherein rehabilitation is always an option, and we are inspired to revisit and rethink often accepted styles of thinking and modes of practice. To view creative geographies in these ways is to be reminded of the deep and enduring history of these practices, to be called to probe those moments of difference and repetition as a site from which to come to know those historical practices but also open out contemporary practices anew. It is not just the temporalities of knowledge production that Berlant reflects on but also the modes of authority and judgement that propagate these new forms of knowledge. Celebrating fashion means embracing a lifecycle that ensures that it is not just select individuals who control the shaping of trends, but instead we value the myriad ways that forms and practices are adopted and adapted by individuals and groups to their own ends. To adopt such an understanding requires taking account of both how disciplinary norms and norms of creative practice might shape creative geographies and also how, in turn, such practices might be themselves shaped and come to shape geography’s norms too. It is also to appreciate a diversity of creative practices within the creative turn, where highly skilled work can sit alongside more amateur practice, not as the same thing but as differently valuable. This would also require that we celebrate both doings and outputs, as well as resist the routinisation and foreclosure of other possibilities around doing and making that might evolve from less experienced, knowledgeable or skilled avenues.

Running throughout Berlant’s discussion, as there has been throughout this paper, is a powerful set of reflections on the yoking of intellectual development and the political economy of the academy. To attempt to situate the creative turn outside of this framework would be deeply problematic, especially at a time when geography risks performing token interdisciplinarites, is enforcing impact, and policing the reshaping the time, space and practices of being an academic to our creative detriment. We can and should understand the possibilities of the creative (re)turn as an inspiration not just for how it opens up possibilities to do research differently, but also for the resources it offers us to remake worlds, our own academic worlds included.