About the Network

What does it mean to engage in arts practice as a group of amateurs? 

What do people get out of informal and unpaid creative practice? 

These are common questions in various academic fields and journalistic investigations. Yet each field faces its own problems and challenges in answering these questions. Some problems are specific to the history of the discipline in which creative practices are studied, while others reoccur in many fields: researchers tend to focus on either the dynamics of the group, the operations of creativity, or the final artistic product. Instead, this research network, led by Dr Jennifer Coates and Dr Iza Kavedžija (University of Exeter) proposes taking an interdisciplinary approach to the question of group-based informal creative practice to address these questions more holistically by developing a toolbox of methods for studying the meaning and impact of informal creative practices, specifically those conducted in groups.