Creative interventions

Course goals

After completing this course, students have:

• knowledge of different creative practices that can be used to produce a creative intervention focused on a public issue within an organisation or in public space;
• acquired the skills needed for collaboratively designing, organising, and implementing a creative intervention;
• the ability to anticipate and respond to the sensitivities that emerge through creative interventions in an ethically sound manner;
• the ability to facilitate meaningful exchanges between the audience and/or participants following an intervention;
• insight into their own functioning in the role of interventionist through individual and collective reflections.

Content

Creating impact has become more and more important for scholars and practitioners alike. Yet conventional academic training often focuses largely on rational approaches to address social and organisational issues. In this course you will become acquainted with the way impact can be created through creative interventions. Creative practices are particularly suited to this end because they offer ways to address complex social issues through the sensory, embodied and emotional realms. Thus, creative interventions can provide new and innovative ways of thinking and feeling around issues that people are ‘stuck’ on.

You will learn about different creative practices that can be used to create an intervention. Through tutorials, field trips and hands-on workshops by artists or interventionists, you will become familiar with the ways in which photography, storytelling, dance, performance art and poetry can be mobilized within an intervention to create impact. You will learn about interventions aimed at organisational processes (e.g. to improve collaborations within an organisation) and those aimed at specific themes (e.g. to create awareness around climate change or burnout).
In small subgroups you will design and organise your own creative intervention. You will be asked to try out this intervention on your fellow students and facilitate a meaningful exchange, suited to the focus of the intervention. The course will be wrapped up with both collective reflections on the presented interventions and individual reflections on your own development and functioning as creative interventionist.

Teaching methods to be used in this course are training tutorials, hands-on workshops, presentations, field trips, vlogs, discussion, reflection.

This course is part of the elective Academic and Professional Skills programme offered by the Master’s degree programme and will be scheduled in the second half of the week, from Wednesday afternoons onwards.