Welcome

This is the blog for the group of research-active staff and PhD students in the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the West of Scotland who have an interest in practice/research relationships, with a particular focus on contemporary, applied and participatory arts practices, digital/screen media, creative writing, and creative pedagogy. In this blog we will gather together resources, links and materials which support our work.

We are based across the four campuses of the University of the West of Scotland, with a 'hub' in Glasgow which we're calling a "Creative Enterprise Cluster." Here, we have offices at CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts) and Film City Glasgow, both of which we use as a base for teaching, meetings, projects, workshops, events, and collaborations in research and knowledge exchange. We also work with SCET - the Scottish Centre for Enabling Technologies, based at Glasgow Science Centre, which is managed by UWS' School of Computing. UWS is working towards achieving full recognition as a Skillset Media Academy, which will draw together all of our provision in digital media, film, games, audio, music, journalism and broadcast across three Schools (Business, Creative and Cultural Industries, and Computing).

The Creative Enterprise Cluster is a 'portal' to wider cultural and artistic networks in Glasgow and beyond. We use it for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, it's a resource for partnership and collaboration, and it's strongly interdisciplinary, bringing together researchers, students and practitioners. Staff work across the domains of film, television, journalism, radio, music, performance, visual art and new media art, and we want to encourage collaboration and cross-fertilization wherever it's appropriate.

Across the Faculty as a whole we are concerned with developing and analysing the links between creativity, culture, enterprise, economy and communities. We do this through creative practice, reflection, evaluation, and sociological and theoretical enquiry. Some of the wider themes and issues we are interested in include making and analysing collaborative and creative work(s), exploring ideas about cultural labour, and exploring discourses of creativity, identity and community in the context of a network society in which power and resources are very unevenly distributed. Some colleagues are focused on creative and cultural business, work and commercialization of intellectual property; others have a strong interest in sustainability, participation, cultural identity and transition to a low-carbon economy; so the notions of ethics, entrepreneurship and ecologies of all kinds - mediated, social and 'natural' - are never far from the surface of our work.