Creativity and the biopolitical commons in secondary and higher education

Abstract

This article draws on autonomist theory in order to examine the role of creativity in educational policy and governance. Drawing examples primarily from the North American context, it suggests that extant efforts to manage creativity in secondary and higher education are ultimately unstable, revealing what the Edu-factory collective has referred to as the 'double crisis' in education. This refers to the erosion of the social democratic purposes of education conjoined with emergent conflicts over knowledge and immaterial labor. Ultimately, the article suggests that creativity rests at a key axis of contestation between state-corporate power and the possibility of imagining alternative democratic andsustainable futures rooted in the common.