Decolonizing Creativity: A Crowdsourcing Project About Creativity as Survival

Abstract

Understanding creativity from a decolonial perspective means removing the focus from the individual as innovator (as well as its profit-oriented goal), and instead highlighting the ongoing networked relationships among people, technologies, and spaces that often occur with creative practices. This creative process is not concerned with the creation of new things. Rather, it is about the mobility and networking of resources that can improve lives and facilitate survival strategies. In order to understand how creative practices occur in non-traditional contexts outside the colonial Global North perspective, we have developed a PubPub repository to crowdsource examples of creativity. PubPub is an open-source, web publishing platform that prioritizes community-generated and knowledge sharing. It is a low-barrier entry method to share information and knowledge within one's community of learners—in our case, individuals interested in creative practices that occur outside traditional corporate and profit-oriented domains. In this presentation, we will describe the conceptualization and development of our online repository, focusing on how open science knowledge and crowdsourced information can help decolonize creative processes. Our project will accomplish four main goals: (1) explain this concept of creativity for a broad and non-academic audience, (2) share previous research and materials about this topic, (3) ask the audience to contribute to the collection, and (4) display the crowdsourced examples from the audience. In building our PubPub housing, we were especially interested in collecting publicly-identified instances of creativity to support the development and accessibility of a broad collection of examples found across the world.