To celebrate World Creativity Day, I interviewed Professor Vlad Glaveanu, one of the most prolific creativity scholars, for this episode of the book series. He is a Full Professor of Psychology at Dublin City University and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen.
With an outstanding career path, Professor Glaveanu’s breadth of work includes areas like psychology, social sciences, arts, anthropology, education, and future studies. He is one of the minds behind the creation of a whole new field of research, the study of the possible, where he and his colleagues at the Possibility Studies Network are dedicated to exploring in-depth.
With an eloquent writing style and contagious charisma, Professor Glaveanu is the author and editor of several books and academic papers, but has also ventured into writing fiction books.
Personally, Vlad’s work has inspired me in many ways. Having the opportunity to discuss ideas with such a brilliant scholar and thinker, not only for this interview but also for my PhD research, where he has contributed closely, proved to be instrumental in shaping both my work and my thinking.
To begin, I imagine that your first field of research was creativity. What was the first question about creativity that genuinely puzzled you enough to devote years of your life to studying it? How did it influence the way you began writing about the topic?
Where did it all start? Great question. You see, this hidden question didn’t necessarily start with my PhD. Obviously, I had a question there that I can talk about, but it evolved from way back. I was always fascinated by symbols and understanding how we think in symbolic terms, so the connection with creativity and culture actually came very early on. Although I wouldn’t have framed it that way at the time, I was curious about the roles of institutions, who becomes an artist, and why we call some people artists. These were big questions for me.
Then, my PhD went into folk art, which is in the vicinity of it. It has the name “art”, but it’s kind of on the periphery. Art is a whole universe of creativity. For example, you have Becker, who wrote Art Worlds, a very influential work in the art ecosystem. I did work on street art as well. All these are art-adjacent topics that, for me, represent a very interesting sociocultural challenge. Art is an easier example to explain the role of culture and creativity, but street and folk art are much more community-based.
Through my mom, who was an art teacher, through the exhibitions, and the artistic camps that I did, I think I was really interested from the start in how we create together, and how we create with these symbolic things that come to mean something for people. So, we can say that meaning and creativity were probably among my earliest questions.
Across your books and articles, your work seems to move from creativity research toward broader questions about imagination and possibility. When you look back, do you see a clear thread connecting these phases of your thinking?
Well, I do see that the clear track would be, in many ways, the sociocultural. If you notice, I started from distributed, sociocultural, and creativity, and then my first book on the Possible was The Possible: A sociocultural theory.
But interestingly — and you’re making me reflect on this here and now — when I started creativity, it was an established field. You need to find your footing, and you, Felipe, know that very well. You’ve also adopted some distributed ideas, and you need to kind of choose camps. At the time when I did my PhD, the sociocultural approach was even younger. Obviously, you have great researchers like Amabile, Simonton, and Csikszentmihalyi accredited with a lot of the social approach to creativity. Then you have Sawyer, and Montori & Purser, who did group creativity in the 90s. But when I came in in the early 2000s, it was still kind of a relatively newer thing, so it was easier for me to adopt an identity and build stuff.
When you start your PhD, you have this confidence in the early beginnings, and you think, “nobody has ever done this.” Because I did a master’s in culture and psychology, I thought nobody had ever put together a sociocultural psych and creativity. So, I wrote to some Vygotskyian guy I knew, and he was like, “Vygotsky’s work on children and imagination was about this,” and I was like, “Okay, so people have tried it before,” but it was that exercise of positioning.
Now, with Possibility studies, this is a completely new thing. It has a lot of roots, connections, and historical resonance with creativity research. But it’s easier for me to start wide and actually to widen my own interest, because with creativity, you must make a choice to position yourself to exist in that universe. With possibility, we’re all starting. I feel like I have become more open to literatures, methodologies, and things like that. When I did the creativity bit, I was much more constructivist, sociocultural, and qualitative at the beginning, and nowadays my name is even on papers that validate a test, which young Vlad would not have approved of (laugh).
You mentioned your book, The Possible, and I believe it was the first book that you wrote about the topic and this transition. When did you first realize that it might become a central concept in your work, and how did that idea evolve as you wrote the book?
Again, great question. First of all, as a little fun historical fact, it’s not the first thing I ever wrote on possibility. When I was the editor of an open-access journal, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, there was an editorial there called The Possible as a Field of Inquiry. That’s the very first, earliest thing. Before I started the distributed sociocultural stuff, I had another editorial in Egypt, and this is much older, named Distributed Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box of the Creative Individual. It was kind of an anti-individualistic critique.
There is a reason I’ve been doing these editorials, and this might be a little hack or a tip for readers: I feel like in the world of ideas of today, you have to put a flag on certain things, but before you get to do the whole book, which can take years, you have to start communicating and writing about it. I highly advise people to publish an editorial, a commentary, or even a presentation at a conference. Let other people know you’re working on something.
The Possible as Field of Inquiry was the first piece of writing, and it linked psychology and possibility. I reused that for the Encyclopedia of the Possible, where I wrote the psychology entry, so it was a nice revisiting. The book itself was a project that I worked on for years, and I was in creativity at that time, so I just transported it into possibility. I know colleagues who, when they have an idea and they shift it, they don’t recognize, “I’ve been kind of doing that before,” but I love these continuities. I think it’s perfectly normal to do that.
Obviously, I didn’t leave creativity, but I write much more on the possible now. It was post-5As framework, into the perspectival model, and I wrote a paper called Creativity as a Sociocultural Act. That was when I put in the perspective-taking, repositioning — all after my PhD — and the Possible book is exactly the anatomy of that sociocultural act. The building blocks are difference, positions, perspectives, dialogue, metaposition, all of that. It’s like unpacking what I saw as a creativity model, and I still think that it has relevance for creativity. The highest, sharpest formulation of that is in another paper called A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity. I called it the Perspective Affordance Theory (PAT). There was a lot of stuff that I learned from creativity, but then, suddenly, I realized that it applies to so much more than just creativity.
If you’re wondering, and many people might be: what is the difference between the possible and creativity? Aren’t they kind of the same? Well, the possible is wider than creativity. I think creativity holds you to a standard of novelty and originality. Which can be very wide, obviously. I mean, it can be mini-c, Big-C, and we know that. But possibility is not about originality. You can rehearse and revisit possibilities that you’ve thought about a million times, and it’s still very interesting from a possibility perspective. I feel that creativity is one of these drivers of possibilities. It’s one of the most forward-looking and active ways of engaging with the possible. But, you know, counterfactual thinking is also a way of engaging with the possible that doesn’t always result in creativity. People might argue that it might be a mini-c creative outcome, but anyway. It was a shift from a lot of thinking I had into a new, bigger framework.
I feel the same about the creativity field. It’s kind of becoming a little constrained for what I’m thinking, doing, and what I’m curious about. As you said, the possible is broader than creativity, so it is interesting to explore it. Also, you mentioned a lot of papers you wrote to get where you are now. In your writing process, when a new research idea emerges for you, how does it typically evolve into a paper or book? Do you start with conceptual sketches, empirical questions, or a broader narrative you want to develop?
I had a different process when I was a little bit younger and more at the beginning than what I do now. Obviously, it’s nice to grow in age and to be fortunate to have an academic job that is stable, because a lot of people have to write in a specific way, and about something, because of constraints to get a job. That was something I was spared. I also entered academia just at the transition point. I definitely could see how academia has changed and become much more competitive, ruthless, and unfunded.
However, when I was at the beginning, I would have a paper idea and then add a lot of references. I would be very focused on who said something relevant, and I would have these huge pages upon pages of references, and I would put them into a structure, so a lot of my sentences would have many references. Nowadays, I sometimes add references only after writing my piece. I mean, it’s the benefit of reading. You know when you refer to other people. It’s not like writing completely out of my own head. But I’m much more driven by what I want to say, and I think that’s the best way you can write. You know, it’s much clearer, because otherwise you need to connect to that reference, then read again, and sometimes you have to take detours into your own thinking because you have to acknowledge, and so forth.
The latest paper I wrote was Possibilities Literacy: Empowering Learners For An Uncertain World. It just came out, and it’s open access. I’m so happy because I’m doing so much with that idea. I mean, that’s kind of the sharp end or the formulation I want to get behind with the possible, so people will really get it and then do something with it. That was completely in dialogue with my colleagues Catrinel Tromp and Constance de Saint Laurent, doing some practical work.
By the way, some behind the scenes: We put together this framework for the paper, and then reviewers came in and were like, “But how did you make this framework?” You know, it’s a very typical reviewer question. Oftentimes, you do frameworks as a creative exercise in which you use all your life experience and thinking, and there is no step-by-step. It is an abductive jump in the way you think. If you read the paper, you’ll identify where, because of the reviewer, we had to say certain things. But I like writing like this, which is much more idea-driven.
Sometimes, I’m invited to write a chapter, which can be difficult, because you write it because you know the editor. You know, I say no to most things. There are so many things to do. To give you an idea of what I’m doing now, I have the literacy framework, and one of them is mindsets. I was invited to write a chapter in Romanian on winning mindsets for a sports psych. I tend to say yes to Romanian requests because I feel like I owe a debt, and, you know, connecting back to my roots. But now, I want to do on possibility mindset, so I’m very keen to see how I can… — you see, I’m already like, “I need to write about that,” so there’s energy there (laugh).
As you said, you have this idea, and you want to write about it. But how much of your theoretical development actually happens during the writing process itself?
What you want to write and what you get to write are two different things. I’m the kind of person who plans a lot ahead, and I’ve noticed some people really struggle with the let-me-see-what-I’m-going-to-write-next type of formula. There are people I’ve known who got into writer’s block because of that. You can’t really write paragraph by paragraph not knowing what’s next.
I focus on doing a good structuring. I make sections in my head and write them down. I even put word counts so that I don’t go on and on, because that’s another thing when you like a topic, so you need to sharpen your thinking there. For example, I mentioned the Sociocultural Act paper. I put a schema there, a visual thing, and it’s not great, it’s very convoluted, but anyway, it’s there. I put the 5A models in a dynamic process-like thing. It was something. I don’t often go back to these visuals, because people will not get it. But the act of putting that figure or table together, that’s when you have the possibility to really understand what you’re doing. When you write, you have to define, to be specific. But it’s the tables and figures that really push you to think about what the line is, what the link is between this and that in your paper.
I know that some of your work explores less traditional formats, such as interdisciplinary collaborations. Do you see your writing as a kind of intellectual experimentation? If so, how do you decide when an idea is ready to be shared publicly?
There is a playfulness to building ideas, and that’s the motivation, honestly. It’s like, “What is the sense of the possible? How is this going to shape up?” By the way, I find conference presentations very useful for that, because you have to put it into words. It’s a different modality, but it’s still language-based. I’m a very improvisational speaker and probably writer as well. Although I plan a lot — and that’s maybe a paradox — I like to think on the spot. When you present, you have to make links. I’m teaching in business school, for instance, and I’m giving talks about possibility and work, or whatever. This is not my usual, but I definitely see the links. I put some of the usual slides I have, but then I want to give examples for business, and that’s such a beautiful challenge. Sometimes I do it on the spot, so I love that experimentation.
How do I decide what I will publish? Well, in my experience, especially for books, I have a cycle. I put a lot of books out, and then there are about 5 years that I’m done with books. The last big book sprint was in early 2020, with Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience and Mobilities and Human Possibility, and I don’t know what else. Now I’m in a new book sprint, and it’s going to be a textbook for Possibility Studies and several other books with Palgrave. I have this Possibilities Literacy Workbook, so it’s a moment when I’m pushing again. It’s cyclical.
For articles, it’s driven by collaboration. I’m very lucky that people want to co-write, because they bring what they do and connect with what I do, so it becomes a really interesting process. I would add a little piece, then they would take the lead, and we would adapt it to a specific journal. For instance, the Possibilities Literacy paper, which I hope will become kind of big and important, is in the Thinking Skills and Creativity (TSC) journal, not in the Possibility Studies journal. I hope to write a piece for possibility studies, but there is also this kind of where’s-my-audience type of question when you decide what idea you want to publish. This paper has a lot of education in it, so I thought Thinking Skills would certainly be the best place.
I’m sometimes frustrated that we don’t have enough outlets. At the moment, I want to put some futures-connected stuff, and I know there are some futures journals, and I know some colleagues, but we don’t yet have a full dedicated journal. We know the creativity world very well and who the players are. For theoretical contributions, the Journal of Creative Behavior (JCB) is very good, maybe TSC. Creativity Research Journal (CRJ) is empirical, and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA) is hyper-empirical, so it’s a bit rarer for me, because I don’t get to do as much empirical work. And then there is my journal, Possibility Studies & Society, so I’m always yearning for new outlets to put ideas in.
Talking about new outlets, I know that besides your academic work, you also wrote a novel, The Wish Thief. After years of writing academic papers, how did that experience shape your approach to fiction? And conversely, did writing a novel change the way you think about writing academic work?
Yes! And, surprise, the second volume is coming up! It will be part of a trilogy called The Land of Mar. The Wish Thief is book 1, The Wish Tree is Book 2, and The Wishlist will be Book 3. I am insane, I guess; I don’t know how to name this. This is self-published. I did look for an agent, but forget about it. You need to really dedicate your life to that type of creative writing.
Fantasy is a very different ballgame than academic publishing. It’s a very crowded field, but I’m doing it for the joy of it. I love the story. I try to connect now, more and more, the two sides, because wishes and wish-making are so close to possibility. I worked with an Australian colleague who is also a writer on a presentation about wishes. I also wrote an encyclopedia entry on wishes and wish-making for the possible.
At the next conference in Brighton, we have a symposium for academics who kind of have an art practice, and the different ways in which you keep it separate, or integrate, or build, etc. I find it awesome, and I think it’s very in line with our community in possibility studies. A lot of people in our universe do that. Do you have any creative writing or art practice somewhere, Felipe?
I do have it, yes. My background is in Graphic Design, so I continue my art practice in photography and Illustration, and keep my online portfolio updated just for the joy, just like you. But when it comes to fiction writing, I like to write short stories. But I have this longer story in my head for, I don’t know, 10 years now. I’m not actively working on it right now, but I keep a separate notebook just for this story. One day, I will sit down and write it.
This is where — and this applies to my academic writing as well — I love thinking of titles. Even before I have the paper, the right title gives me an idea of what the paper is about. I’m not saying that I have the greatest titles, but I like playing with them. I always have to name the thing I’m working on. With the novel writing, I’m super big into plot. I know exactly what I want to happen, and sometimes the writing takes me, like, there is a kiss scene that was not planned, and it just happened because of the characters. But building the story, the narrative arc is what gets me into stories. More than just the immersion, the psychological, the description that puts you in, which I would love to do more of, but it’s not fully my style.
It’s also a preference for what I read. I love stories that move fast, and the action is driving the character’s development. I remember when I was reading Jules Verne as a kid, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. I scored 3 pages of describing the submarine. I know that in the history of science fiction, this is super important, but I could not read about mechanisms on a boat. I was like, “I need to know what the characters are doing.” So I write in a story-moving way.
Now I’m doing this big novel, but short stories are so powerful, and I love a good premise. For me, it’s similar to article writing. I need to know what the punchline is. In the Possibilities Literacy, it is bringing all that expertise on the possible but talking about the how. How do we do this? Can you learn it? How do you practice it?
For my novel, my premise is that, in this fantasy world, people are born with a wish they can make. And they have a luminous orb that they kind of grow up with as kids, and when they come of age, they break it, and they say what they want, and they get that wish. It’s one wish, that’s it. But you can’t wish for anything, like superpowers or to change the world with one orb. There is a limit somewhere. Then everything is built around the question, “What kind of a society would that be?” There would be a wish order, people would try to regulate wishes, or how do you even live with others in a world where you have this power? And the main character is this girl who doesn’t want to make any wish at all.
Looking back across your publications, do you see your writing as a kind of intellectual archive of your thinking over time? Have you ever rediscovered earlier ideas in your own work that later became more significant?
Absolutely, it’s an archive. Actually, that is the motivation I always had to publish, and it’s different than a lot of colleagues I’ve seen. A lot of them are shy to publish because they think, “I’m not ready, I’m still thinking about this, or what if I regret it? What if I change my mind?” I firmly believe that it is a history of your thinking, so I’m absolutely fine contradicting myself. Sometimes I just express it, or tease it out, or, you know, reflect on the changes and stuff like that.
Now, the second question. I will be honest with you, and this can sound like a humble brag. I have, like, 200 papers by now? Probably, I don’t know. I do not rewrite or re-read what I wrote. I know the essence of it, but I don’t think I’ve ever re-read my papers. At conferences, people are very kind, and sometimes they cite me. It’s kind of embarrassing, because I’m there in the room and I get to read back what I wrote, and I’m thinking, “Oh, that was great, I wrote that?” (laugh).
Maybe I should read myself a bit more. I don’t know what I wrote, necessarily. And it came also for a few reasons. One of them is that I’m always up for the next idea. I mean, that’s a bad feature of my life, generally. Look at this textbook of possibility studies, for example. Of course, it’s going to be a lot of work. I’m going to have a creative pedagogy approach to it; it’s a lot of exciting stuff. But crazily enough, it’s almost done for me, because I thought of it, we have the contract, and that’s it. It’s almost like, “What’s next?”, which is a very bad way to live your life. Anyway, it’s pathological (laugh).
The second reason is that I’m kind of embarrassed sometimes to read what I wrote. I don’t know if it happens to you, but you know when you have to re-read and proofread, there are always mistakes coming in, and I hate discovering a grammatical error or something. My book, Distributed Creativity, is a very short book. It was after my PhD research, where I never mentioned distribution, so it was really an upgrade of my own thinking. So, one day, I swear to God, I get the book, I’m so excited, I open it, and I read the following sentence: “Now that we know what Vygotsky has said, we are not better equipped to understand…” How is it not better? No! The right sentence is, “now that we read Vygotsky, we are better equipped,” but there is a “not” there, I swear to you. I closed the book. And I shall never read again (laugh).
Looking at your work today, what questions or ideas are currently occupying your attention? And looking ahead to the next year or so, what directions might we expect your research and writing to take?
What’s my next big idea? I can tell you. I can tell you because, you see, I live in the possible future (laugh).
I’m really invested in possibility studies. I find it to be almost like a legacy project, and the joy of my academic life is that so many people connect to it, and I’m not possessive around it. If I were really into it, it would have been called the Sociocultural Possibility Studies Network or something, but it’s called Possibility Studies, so everybody can come in and do their own version of it. I don’t care, as long as we talk about these beautiful, big topics, I’m excited that people do that.
I keep writing on creativity, of course. I mean, I will always be a creativity researcher. It was my entry point. Then wonder comes back, and care is a new topic of interest that a lot of people around me have. But for me, it’s the practice of possibility.
For the next few years, there are the possibilities literacy article that came out, there is a workbook with 450 exercises, quick sparks, and deep dives, and we’re making an online resource and kind of formatting beautifully, and it’s open access, so that people can download it freely. We’re also thinking of developing a course, training people in possibilities literacy. Potentially, there could be a pay element to that, just because we don’t change a membership fee. Everybody comes in, and all the resources are kind of free, but we need some money to run conferences and to do some things, so we do have a fee for the summer conference. We’ll have a merch shop, by the way. We have these beautiful designs for our conference bags, and sometimes people want a second bag. And then there’s going to be an education initiative that we’re working on for the Possibilities Literacy project.
I feel that all of us need to use all our knowledge to make a little bit of good in that messy, crazy world, and we who study creativity, imagination, possibility, or whatever, have a double responsibility, because these are the human attributes that will make a difference and need to make a difference now. So, I feel very energized by what we contribute to.
You can learn more about Professor Vlad Glaveanu’s work at the DCU website or at ResearchGate. You can also connect with him via LinkedIn or join the Possibility Studies Network.