Critical Foundations of Creative Practice Leadership

Northeastern University

Semesters taught: Fall 2022; Fall 2020; Fall 2019

Course description

Creative industries and creative economies are wide-ranging, requiring a diverse array of skills and practices for individuals and organizations to make an impact. Some constraints on your ability to lead and succeed on your own terms are internal: do you have the requisite know-how, networks, resources, and training to bring your ideas to fruition? Others are external, shaping the opportunities available to you based on factors over which you have little control. While you may not be able to control factors like audience tastes, business trends, entrenched power hierarchies, and the social logic of groups and collectives, you can control your preparedness for these factors and enhance your ability to analyze and respond to historical, contemporary, and upcoming trajectories and changes.

In this class we will explore, analyze, and criticize a wide variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks that have been deployed to explain the structures, trends, and disruptions in creative industries. The critical and conceptual foundations you develop in this course will provide a substantial basis for your future practical work and leadership in creative practice and the creative industries. What have been some of the biggest challenges that have faced the creative industries in the past? How have scholars, participants, and observers characterized both these challenges and the opportunities that emerge from them? What positions might you make and take as you plan to (re)enter the creative industries as a professional? In what ways can you establish yourself as both a thought leader and an innovator in your chosen field and sector? By the end of the semester, you will have a substantial toolkit of theoretical and empirical research that has shaped how we think and work as creative practitioners.