Abstract
Two decades of educational reform in New Zealand have resulted in one of the most market-oriented regimes of higher education in the OECD. In this environment, enrolments in design and other creative degree courses that seem to provide an opportunity for individual expression and self-development have greatly increased. However, representatives of traditional industry sectors complain that there are hardly any jobs for these graduates, and little in the way of career paths. The situation thus seems to confound human capital approaches to education policy, in which tactics such as high fees and student loans are meant to exert a conservative pressure on course selection. How then should we view these new ‘creatives’? Are design students simply dupes of the current education/industrial complex, doomed to disappointing work in the service economy? Or are they romantic resistors of instrumentalist educational policies? This paper employs a neo-Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ framework to undermine this opposition between power and domination on the one hand, and individual freedom and subjectivity on the other. Drawing on research into the recent constitution of Designer Fashion as a creative industry sector in New Zealand and interviews with fashion design students, it explores the ways in which ‘becoming creative’ relates to the current tertiary education regime and state programmes and technologies for economic development. Creativity thus comes into view as a ‘game of freedom’, performed at the intersection of policy and ethos. In order to successfully produce themselves as ‘creatives’ within the neo-liberal university, students become highly flexible, self-regulated, entrepreneurial subjects for the globalised knowledge economy.
Citation
Bill, A. (2004) Disciplining Creativity: Neoliberalism and Design Education in New Zealand., in Redmond, J., Durling, D. and de Bono, A (eds.), Futureground - DRS International Conference 2004, 17-21 November, Melbourne, Australia. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2004/researchpapers/74
Disciplining Creativity: Neoliberalism and Design Education in New Zealand.
Two decades of educational reform in New Zealand have resulted in one of the most market-oriented regimes of higher education in the OECD. In this environment, enrolments in design and other creative degree courses that seem to provide an opportunity for individual expression and self-development have greatly increased. However, representatives of traditional industry sectors complain that there are hardly any jobs for these graduates, and little in the way of career paths. The situation thus seems to confound human capital approaches to education policy, in which tactics such as high fees and student loans are meant to exert a conservative pressure on course selection. How then should we view these new ‘creatives’? Are design students simply dupes of the current education/industrial complex, doomed to disappointing work in the service economy? Or are they romantic resistors of instrumentalist educational policies? This paper employs a neo-Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ framework to undermine this opposition between power and domination on the one hand, and individual freedom and subjectivity on the other. Drawing on research into the recent constitution of Designer Fashion as a creative industry sector in New Zealand and interviews with fashion design students, it explores the ways in which ‘becoming creative’ relates to the current tertiary education regime and state programmes and technologies for economic development. Creativity thus comes into view as a ‘game of freedom’, performed at the intersection of policy and ethos. In order to successfully produce themselves as ‘creatives’ within the neo-liberal university, students become highly flexible, self-regulated, entrepreneurial subjects for the globalised knowledge economy.