London School of Economics

Graduate Student, Social Psychology

Other Affiliations: Paris Descartes, Laboratoire Adaptations Travail Individu

PhD candidate / Teaching Fellow

Thesis Title: Creativity and culture: Towards a cultural psychology of creativity in folk art

About

I am a social and cultural psychologist with an interest in creativity and especially the relationship between creativity and culture.

My doctoral research at the Institute of Social Psychology, LSE, develops a cultural psychological approach to folk art and explores creativity evaluations, practices and the development of creative craftwork in both urban and rural communities. The thesis offers a critique of individualistic and cognitive accounts of the phenomenon, specific for mainstream creativity research, and aims to unpack the intrinsically cultural dynamic of creative activity and its relation to tradition and a social and material environment. In doing so several methodological innovations are introduced, among them the use of subjective cameras for capturing microgenetic aspects of novelty emergence in craft.

Other related research interests include: group and collaborative creativity, children's creative expression, and cultural differences in the representation and manifestation of creativity.

Among my general interests: pragmatism, the theory of social representations, qualitative methodologies, and the relation between psychology and history.

I am also Editor of Europe's Journal of Psychology (EJOP), a peer-reviewed open-access journal, published quarterly, featuring original studies in all fields of psychology and open to scholars, practitioners and graduate students. All articles are available from www.ejop.org