Dr. Saara Liinamaa receives Harrison McCain Foundation Emerging Scholar Award to support her research:

The New Spirit of Creativity: Cultural Work, Compromise and the Educated Imagination

Dr. Saara Liinamaa

Sociology/Women’s and Gender Studies

This emerging scholar award will facilitate the completion of a book currently under contract with the University of Toronto Press. This book traces the rising star of creativity within public policy and institutions, especially higher education. It develops an original perspective on how the growth of the creative economy under informational capitalism has transformed concepts of work and education. Creativity, in this guise, becomes an inequitably distributed resource that carries myriad implications for work and research at universities. Drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted at three art and design universities, this book demonstrates the role creativity plays as a key contemporary compromise discourse of choice within institutions.