Hello and welcome!

I like to explore what it means for people to live full and flourishing lives, and how these can be enabled and supported at organisational, industry, and policy levels. I seek to make a meaningful contribution to progressive change at a time of multiple crises through acknowledging our 'humanity' - i.e., what it is like to be (human). I am interested in the interconnections and interdependencies between human creativity, art and culture, the arts and cultural and creative industries, practices of care, authenticity, knowledge and truth. This is a big topic, and takes me down many paths(!)

My current research is working towards a series of publications dedicated to profiling and overcoming the dominance of what I term the 'culture of knowing' - a culture that seeks to control and is born of fear and anxiety concerning 'the unknown'. I seek to do this through exploring and re-valuing different approaches to wisdom and ways of knowing - notably not-knowing, unknowing and transrational knowing.

I have previously researched and written extensively on early music and authenticity, creativity and care, cultural capability, a realist theory of art, and what I term Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR). At the heart of ACR is a commitment to our learning to become more experienced in experiencing the world. I have defined experience in terms of our thought and un-thought knowledge of being-in-relation with the world. This is a definiton I keep coming back to, and I'm in the process of refining it in my ongoing research. It seems to me that 'experiencing' is too often marginalised or overlooked - with the result that we are in danger of 'falling out of being'.

Other definitions - all 'work in progress':

Creativity - the discovery of the possibilities and potentials of the world and bringing these into being; creativity involves recognising and pursuing meaningful and valuable projects; such projects may or may not get recognised as valuable by others.

Art - the creative practice of giving sharable form to people's experiences of being-in-relation with the world; this includes people's connections with all that is 'real' - how the world is (and is not); such experiences constitute a particular form of knowing - which we might label as aesthetic knowing. Human beings make art in all sorts of contexts, and not just in 'the arts'. You don't have to be an 'artist' to do art. However, the arts are vital because this is where society gives permission to value aesthetic knowing - which helps people recognise what they have reason to value, and come to know what it is like to be human; it is in the arts that society recognises the production, consumption and all-round enjoyment of 'art-works' (see Culture - below); it is also through the arts that the skills and competences to make art (whether as artists or not) are learned and passed on to others.

Culture - our systems of value recognition (i.e. how we determine what matters). Understanding and critically interrogating our systems of value recognition (the market, politics, education, science, healthcare, and the arts) is one of the emost important tasks we can embark on.

Cultural capability - people's substantive freedoms to recognise what they have reason to value (I link this to the freedom to acknowledge our humanity).

Cultural development - the expansion of people's substantive freedoms (i.e. their opportunities) to recognise what they have reason to value (and to acknowledge our humanity).

Cultural needs - people's needs to recognise what they have reason to value (comprising their needs to connect, to create and to count).

Care - seeing and hearing others' needs and taking responsibility to fulfil these needs. Creativity and art are practices of care.

Cultures of care - the cultures  we reproduce and transform everyday that enable us to care and be cared for. (See www.culturesofcare.com).

In 2022 I completed my involvement on a three-year research project focused on Developing Inclusive and Sustainable Creative Economies (DISCE). I led the development of a Cultural Development Index (CDI) and a Needs-based Approach to Governance.

I regularly upload writings and links to publications, as well as information about my current research interests and projects. More details of my work at the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King's College London is available on the CMCI website.

Please do get in touch if you would like to collaborate!