Conventions of Creativity: Everyday artistry in Africa. A conference celebrating the work of Karin Barber
- Location
- Arts Lecture Room 2
- Dates
- Thursday 12 June (09:00) - Friday 13 June 2025 (17:00)
The Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham is delighted to invite interested scholars to its 18th Cadbury conference. The conference focuses on the topic ‘Conventions of Creativity: Everyday artistry in Africa’ and celebrates the work of the department’s Professor emerita Dame Karin Barber FBA.
Confirmed participants include: Saheed Aderinto, Karin Barber, Alexander Bud, Carli Coetzee, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, Juliet Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, Rebecca Jones, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Moruff Mudasiru, Stephanie Newell, Innocent Akili Ngulube, Insa Nolte, Shirabe Ogata, Olukoya Ogen, Elizabeth Olayiwola, Derek Peterson, David Pratten, Katrien Pype, Lucie Ryzova, Nozomi Sawada, Kate Skinner, and Sikelelwa Anita Zimba.
If you are interested in attending, please contact e.j.richards@bham.ac.uk
Conference theme
Coming “from the ground up”, Karin Barber’s work demonstrates that much can be learned from analysing creative practices in their cultural and historical contexts and from recognising how artistic practices, as expressions of the common people, arise out of and re-shape quotidian life. As part of this ground-breaking research, Barber has argued that creativity, although always enterprising, innovative, and forever in process, cannot be unmoored from existing conventions and standards if it is to be successful. The generation of new ideas, meanings, and practices is dependent on what social life makes possible, and new artistic endeavours must be legible through broadly shared cultural viewpoints if they are to be recognised.
Following Barber’s suggestion that the conventions which inform the generation of new creative forms could be extended to encompass other forms of social or cultural life, the programme includes research on new practices or forms in fashion, music, religion, and other parts of social life. We will explore the following topics:
- Creativity in distinct social constellations. Barber argues that gender, class, education, and religion shape the engagement of groups and individuals with new social and artistic practices. Just as particular configurations of skills and talents underpin the generation of new forms, ideas, and social practices (1994), different cultural forms have their own historicity (1991; 2000; 2012; 2018). How can we account for the emergence of new forms of artistry and social practice at particular historical junctures? How do such forms of artistry resemble, or differ from, those produced in other historical periods or cultural contexts?
- Creative ecologies: How are creative practices linked to space, and how do they reflect the distinct possibilities and restrictions associated with particular locations? How is creativity linked to engagement with the world ‘beyond’, and to ‘outside’ practices and insights? How can we understand creativity as a social process linked not only to individuals but to specific groups of people?
- The emergence of new ideas, objects, or institutions from the apparent ordinariness of everyday life. Barber emphasises the human ability to detach chunks of speech or formal features from one context and to insert them into a new one, where it takes on new meaning (1990a; 1991, 2000; 2007). How is the creation of new texts or social, political, or religious practices informed by the distinct conventions governing the detachability, insertability, and recontextualization of social and textual elements?
- What distinguishes innovations from mistakes or ‘making do’ and helps them ‘stick’? Different conventions are associated with distinct “repertoire[s] of skills, dispositions and expectations” (2007: 37). What artistic, social, religious, political, and economic conventions inform whether new things are recognised as innovative or flawed? And how do the boundaries between creativity and ‘flawed’ forms reflect social understandings of genre or field, i.e. the historically contingent understandings of the conventions within which creativity is mobilised?
- What is the relationship of creativity to time? Creativity is often understood as the basis for innovation and progress, and thus central to moving with (or being ahead of) the times. How does creativity shape the understanding of the past through the selection of existing ideas or practices valuable enough to endure? How does creativity relate to aspects of material, social, or intellectual life understood to be unchanging? How does it project new visions of the future?
- What emic understandings of creativity exist in African languages, societies, or distinct groups? How do such understandings relate to everyday practices? How do such emic understandings illuminate ideas about the self and others, but also, for example, about material, social, or biological processes?
Conference Programme
Thursday, 12 June 2025
- Chair: Fuad Musallam (Univ. of Birmigham)
- Alexander Bud (Open University, UK), ‘Praise, Packaging and the Promotional System’
- Innocent Ngulube (Univ. of Malawi), Everyday Artistry of Joe Gwaladi’s Music’
- Katrien Pype (KU Leuven), ‘The Risk of Sex Tapes in Digital Kinshasa: Popular Culture, Repair, and Ritual Creativity’
- 13:30-14:30 - Lunch. Arts 224
Friday, 13 June 2025
- 14:00-16:00 - Panel 6: Everyday artistry. Arts LR2
- Chair: Stephanie Newell (Yale University)