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Popular conceptions of creativity advance a neoliberal world view that reduces creativity to spontaneous ideation or so-called "right-brain thinking." Such formulations, now commonly upheld in popular and educational discourse, blinker the essential role of criticality and sensitivity to socio-cultural context in the creative process. To challenge the neoliberalization of creativity, we designed the Remaking Critical Theory (RCT) process, which synthesizes recent cognitive science and creative humanities research to reconstitute creativity as criticality and vice versa – what we label critical creativity. The process reframes humanistic interpretation as a critical-creative activity and adapts methods from art, design, and innovation management to facilitate the production of humanities insights. Drawing upon dual-process models of creative cognition, we theorize how the RCT process activates the right type of thinking at the right time in the creative process. We also evidence efficacy by delineating and reflecting upon a pilot application at Sheridan College, which culminated in the student researchers making critical theory zines. More than simply reaffirming the value of critical theory in neoliberal societies, we delineate a radically new approach to humanities research and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Marshall McLuhan's idea of Canada and his work on poetry, poetics, humanities, and related subjects. McLuhan's sense of poetry, poetics, technology, culture, and nature depends in part upon his view of Canada. He sees the connections between the United States and Canada while also admitting some distinctions. Britain, France, Canada, and the United States are interrelated in the forging of boundaries and identities. The article assumes that McLuhan's contribution to the long-time debate on Canadian identity is thoughtful, poetic, far-reaching, and deserving of detailed attention. The figure of the artist is important for McLuhan, who says that the electric age should be the opposite of surface and requires more thought and work. Discussing poetry, McLuhan examines Ezra Pound, who wrote notes to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. McLuhan provides notes or glosses to his own work in his poetic vision in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and his culture of poetics and poetics of culture were of Toronto, the University of Toronto, Canada, North America, and beyond. For McLuhan, the electric age gives Canada – a borderline case – advantages and provides new ways of thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creative humanities respond to the creative turn in art, culture, and higher education. In the decades bracketing the millennium, art and culture were instrumentalized to underwrite growth in the creative economy by attracting world-class talent and generating spin-off benefits for hospitality and tourism. Similarly, higher education was retooled to train labour for the creative economy and bring tangible innovations to Canadian communities. These broadscale shifts present pertinent challenges to humanists: we need new theories to critically examine the production, politics, aesthetics, and second-order consequences of culture vis-à-vis the creative economy, and we also need theories and practices that can strategically situate the humanities within neoliberal models for higher education that increasingly prioritize career preparedness, creativity, innovation, and commercialization. Three emergent theories of humanities creativity and innovation – critical creativity, critical making, and meta-creativity – are delineated to showcase how they can be broadly applied to leverage neoliberal discourse to gain access to resources and opportunities while nevertheless championing alternative models grounded in social justice and the social good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on psychological research that claims critical thinking is a key component of the creative process to argue that critical-creative literacy is a cognitive goal of creative writing education. The article also explores the types of assignments and prompts that might contribute to this goal and simultaneously build bridges between creative writing education and other humanities disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reacting to the symbolic features and historical artefacts that invite institutional self-reflection at the Royal Military College (RMC), I created a performance project leading to two storytelling events. Everyday campus life at RMC already offers opportunities for cultivating a meta-perspective – a higher-order awareness – of the institution, and the storytelling events called attention to such opportunities. I argue that, likewise, art-based projects in the humanities call attention to the creativity – the making – involved in the humanities more broadly. The first storytelling event, Tailor Made (2017), comprised stories focused on the uniform as a model and the body wearing it as an actual bearing out that model. Social and cultural life is made of the difference between models and actuals, and each story engaged the ways in which rules, systems, and practices meet with individuals in hurtful, inconvenient, funny, or messy ways. The second event, Skylarking (2018), included stories of the institutionally condoned pranks called "skylarks" and coincidentally occurred against the backdrop of a campus-wide punishment that elicited a skylark response. This event and its context showed that marking disruption with more disruption (marking failure with punishment and marking punishment with prank) is a recursion that invites higher-order thinking about existing orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical examination of creativity discourse at the intersection of two disciplinary fields: health and humanities. In contrast to creativity's long-standing associations with making, imitation, or invention, we examine the relatively recent emergence of what we call creativity's preparatory capacity, particularly within critical discussions of health-care and illness narratives. Working with fictional representations of the emergency room in physician-writer Jay Baruch's short-story collection Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (2007), we identify how particular narrative techniques are revealed in a range of emergency scenarios – both within and beyond the fictional setting – and what such deployments of creativity might signal for the future of literary studies more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering design and communication courses are typically dynamic, active learning spaces that bring together a complex array of knowledge and skills. Their ambiguous nature has allowed, often contentiously, subjects such as language and communication, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences to enter the discourse of engineering in a newly meaningful way. This article considers this development in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and, in particular, how the creativity and imagination required to succeed in engineering design might be cultivated in emergency distance learning. I consider a plethora of sources for guidance, with a special interest in how language and communication facilitates collaborative learning, creativity, and intersubjectivity and how that mediation is further mediated by educational technology in distance learning. I focus on the challenges faced and the resulting importance of training for both instructors and students. Finally, I argue that, despite our difficult circumstances, we should aim to encourage our students to exercise their imaginations, both independently and collaboratively, through our selection, framing, and facilitation of team design projects during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition of Harold Innis' work from staples research to communications studies commonly is understood to have been an extension of his earlier research rather than a dramatic break from it. While in agreement, we argue that a significant transformation in Innis's ontology (but not his epistemology) also took place. This can be understood by referencing his concerns about the fate of civilization and his views on the prospectively strategic role of what he called the Greek tradition. To explain this, herein we concentrate on Innis' largely forgotten book Political Economy in the Modern State, initiated in 1943 and published in 1946, as a window into his intellectual processes. By the latter year, Innis had come to believe that a second Greek-inspired renaissance was needed. Vestiges of the Greek tradition, Innis thought, had to be recalled through the university and the humanities in order to provide society with the reflective universal perspective needed for survival. This transitional and transformational period involving his embrace of the Greek tradition as a kind of ideal type constitutes an important but under assessed aspect of Innis's intellectual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas conference held at the University of Toronto in May 2017, Rinaldo Walcott described Canadian literature as being as white then as it was when Insomniac Press published his Black like Who? twenty years prior. This essay responds to Walcott’s critique with a personal ethnography that describes Canadian literature as a field of study, that pays particular attention to the internal fractures that belie the field’s whiteness, and that considers students’s self-governance within neo-liberal universities. Beyond Canadian post-secondary education’s anti-Black structural barriers, graduate-level studies in the humanities depend on students’ access to financial and social credit. In turn, credit limits who can afford to study Canadian literature. Academic labour’s growing precarity further redlines non-professional fields of study, intensifying racial divisions within Canadian post-secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our world is post-auratic in Walter Benjamin’s sense, but that does not mean that the humanities are left without a task. The world that Benjamin described as a world of play also affords opportunities. Humanities competes in this space with new dramaturgy of ideas (see: TED talks), and with design as a master trope for creativity. But the enduring appeal of embodied experience, typified by festivals, indicates that there is still room for the complex and unpredictable diffusion of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Adelaide Festival of Ideas (AFOI), is a biennial festival of public debate on issues ranging from cosmology to art to public policy. It is one of the earliest of its kind, and the author has been involved on programming committees and as chair since its inception in 1999. This paper is an analysis of the sorts of public engagement the AFOI elicits from those who come to listen and engage. The sessions are largely free and well-attended, and the passive model of audience entertainment seems a very poor explanation of the civically active mode of engagement that actually occurs. This paper briefly maps the historical trajectory of the festival, and then uses Michael Warner’s framework of publics and counterpublics to explain how the AFOI is both more and other than a simple addition to the entertainment industry. Understanding different qualities of engagement is a crucial issue for a broad appreciation of the public humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on scholar-practitioner precedents within museums, and collaborative research principles in museum anthropology, the Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections research initiative is offered as an example of public humanities research. Focus is placed on the dynamics between, and identities of, research participants from both the university and the public in order to interrogate how public humanities research engagements are conceptualized. Homi Bhabha’s third space is used to analyse Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections, and the third space’s capacity for disruptive enunciation encouraged as valuable – even necessary – within public humanities research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory is a distillation that makes the inevitable trial and error of teaching and learning count for lessons to be passed on. We learned this from working on engaged humanities projects, and also from reading Frederich Schiller, John Dewey, and others who share a fascination with doing as a trigger for feeling and thinking. The sometimes humble practice of service learning generates lessons that add up to the broad intellectual ambition of public humanities: to explore and expand the civic dimensions of art and interpretation, and to demonstrate through practise the centrality of the humanities to democratic processes and social justice. Theory not only informs engaged humanities practices: theory is transformed by these practices, as are those who participate in them. At a time when the value of the humanities is continually in question, it is all the more essential to engage the humanities in the dialogical process of refashioning education, community, theory, and the humanities themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What sort of contribution to the public weal constitutes a natural extension of the goals and values of humanities scholarship, and what sort a betrayal? This essay aims to shed light on this question by restating one historically influential conception of humanities scholarship and speculating about how humanities scholarship thus understood might play a positive role in society without betraying its own distinctive mission. The view of humanities scholarship adopted here is inspired by a broad humanistic tradition developed by thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Henry Newman, and Karl Jaspers. This tradition views humanistic scholarship not only as the soul of the university, but also as a promoter of high culture and truth in society at large. In the context of the increasingly fashionable notion of ‘‘public humanities,’’ this essay offers a restatement of the traditional view of humanities scholarship and a brief discussion of the challenges of ‘‘doing public humanities’’ while honouring a broadly Humboldtian ideal of humanistic research and teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many academics continue to assume or actively advocate for the idea of the university as radically autonomous from both state and civil society. This view was articulated by nineteenth-century German idealists, and has remained influential, but the university it imagines has never existed, even in Germany. My argument is that we need to reconceive the humanities’ relation to the public. While we will want to continue to insist on a degree of autonomy greater than that enjoyed by most other American workers, we need to reconceive that autonomy as granted in the service of the public good, and we need to make the knowledge we produce available and accessible to those outside of academe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through this paper, I will consider the roles that the humanities can play in interpreting and interacting with the arts. To investigate this topic, I will use several international examples. These are situated in Cannes, Edinburgh, and London, though they directly connect with countries such as South Africa and Mozambique. The world’s best known film festival (Cannes), and the world’s largest theatre and arts festival (Edinburgh), alongside the world’s first national public museum (the British Museum in London), provide the contexts in which my argument develops. In each of these spaces, one can be confronted by a myriad of human faces, presented publically in innumerable ways. Film posters, stand-up comedy adverts, and exhibition fliers commonly employ the human face to attract, to intrigue, and to entice audiences toward their spectacle. The humanities can both interact with and critically analyse these uses of faces. The human faces in these diverse and dynamic settings provoke questions which the public humanities can address, as they interrogate celebrity, analyse portrayals of suffering, and in the shadows of dangerous memories, even help to create materials to inspire peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtually all scholars in the humanities agree that the public humanities are important, but consensus frays when it comes to discussing the degree of institutional investment in the public humanities, methods of public humanities engagement, and even the definition of what counts as the public humanities. To that end, Jeremy Browne (of BYU’s Office of Digital Humanities) and I created a survey whose data we compiled from dozens of institutions in the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. What emerges are a series of perspectives, at once diverse and overlapping, about such issues as the definition and perceived impact of the public humanities, both within and outside universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the relation of the humanities to the arts, reflections of the humanities in relation to the history of universities, and what museum-based humanists can learn from Indigenous publics.

Rudy Wiebe's book, 'The Scorched-Wood People' deals with francophone Manitoba Metis and their struggles to protect their lifestyle and territory from the national-consolidation projects of English-speaking Ontario and its Confederation partners. Wiebe eschews objective or fact-based accuracy for a method called dialogical appropriation, an ethically necessary method of engaging history and the collective individual identities that are its raw material.

C.B. Macpherson stands as one of the most significant historical-materialist, critical theorists writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century. His work provides a profound and challenging critique of the formation of the subject, the modern individual, a critique concerned most centrally with the subject's connections to property relations and the commodity form within developing capitalist economies from the 17th century to the later 20th century.

The relevance of Toni Morrison's works in teaching literary and psychoanalytic theory and how the discussions of her works like Recitatif, Sula, Beloved can enhance classroom discussions is discussed. Examples of literary theory's concept of defamiliarization are used to show that Morrison's work correlates the threat of formlessness with trauma and a psychoanalytic account of belatedness in her works.

The complex relationship between the thoughts of Northrop Frye and Matthew Arnold is highlighted along with a religious divergence between them, at a time when the literal and cultural studies were prominent with religion and spirituality. While Frye's visionary Protestantism differs significantly from Arnold's Anglican Modernism, they shared the goal of educating people to read the Bible as a literary text.

Waiting must be seen as a temporal aberration by the standards of time's exactitude, and by the economics of its consumption, since the person who waits is out of sync with time, that is, outside of the moral and economic community of those whose time is synchronized and act predictably in unison. The qualitative and moral difference between mathematical time and the mere duration associated with waiting may begin to explain why waiting is considered to be a waste of time.