This dissertation, consisting of five independent studies, explores contemporary educational regimes of creativity. In line with Foucault’s theory of governmentality and Rancière’s theory of equality, they analyze educational discourses of creativity to demonstrate their inscriptions of possible subjectivities. Chapter 1 critiques the neoliberal regime of creativity as it is made present through a cross-section of artifacts published in English since 1990s that exhibit a concern for creativity in education and frame their debate in relation to state policies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China. It describes three rival dispositifs of neoliberal creativity and argues that the neoliberal regime of creativity performs consensus, aligning different worlds and shutting down alternatives. Chapter 2 tells a story of how educational psychology has invented instrumental creativity. It focuses on how the psychometrics and the cognitive psychology of creativity have made creativity an educational problem. Chapter 3 follows the curriculum of extended TRIZ in Việt Nam, a case in which a scientific post-psychological theory of creativity in engineering is adapted into a general theory of creative problem solving and taught to the general public. The chapter portrays curriculum development as a process in which the person in love forms himself as a teacher, integrating into as well as generating the sensible of creativity and education. Chapter 4 inquires into theoretical possibilities of arts education. It critiques the instrumentalism of discipline-based arts education (DBAE) and suggests a non-instrumental way of theorizing art in which what is specific about art is surprisingly not the artist’s act of creation and their well-recognized achievements. Finally, Chapter 5, examining the field of educational philosophy, attends to education as an act of creation. This chapter engages with Levinas, Foucault, and Rancière’s theories of subjectivity and the ways in which forms of subjectification bring something new into the world or grapple with the possibility of the new.
Read
