CCPN Dialogues #5: Dr Simon Moreton on Assembling the creative economy

Assembling the creative economy: how economic rationales are performed through university-creative sector R&D programmes Dr Simon Moreton, UWE Bristol Chair: Dr Alexandra Reynolds, Univ. of Southampton This talk reflects on thirteen years involved in the delivery of large-scale university-led collaborations with the creative sector. It focuses on attempts to mobilise universities as agents for regional creative economic development, such as the AHRC's Creative Industries Clusters Programme. The talk argues that such schemes emerge from a complex assemblage of ideology, imagination, policy and practice, whose nature facilitates a form of ‘policy transfer’ to extend a governmentality of economic creativity into the higher education sphere. Projects funded by these schemes must then negotiate the tensions generated by efforts to service an imperative to instrumentalise creativity in service of economic growth, whilst also seeking to generate socially and culturally progressive impacts. The talk unpacks the mechanics of two such projects funded by AHRC, REACT (2012-2016) and Bristol+Bath Creative R+D (2018-2024) across which I worked variously as a researcher, co-investigator, and director. I suggest that these projects can be seen as part of a multivalent, ad hoc and sometimes contradictory assemblage which is never entirely complete nor stable. In this sense, I argue, such initiatives can still function to imagine and generate alternative approaches to creativity that are not wholly reducible to a neoliberal or capitalist logic, but will always remain implicated therein. The talk is based on two papers, one sole authored (Moreton 2021) and one written with my colleagues at UWE Bristol, Liz Roberts and Jack Lowe (Roberts et al 2025). Here are links to the two papers Simon referred to most directly in his talk: https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/r4a/a... https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retri...