Remaking Critical Theory: A Creative Humanities Process and Intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Popular conceptions of creativity advance a neoliberal world view that reduces creativity to spontaneous ideation or so-called “right-brain thinking.” Such formulations, now commonly upheld in popular and educational discourse, blinker the essential role of criticality and sensitivity to socio-cultural context in the creative process. To challenge the neoliberalization of creativity, we designed the Remaking Critical Theory (RCT) process, which synthesizes recent cognitive science and creative humanities research to reconstitute creativity as criticality and vice versa – what we label critical creativity. The process reframes humanistic interpretation as a critical-creative activity and adapts methods from art, design, and innovation management to facilitate the production of humanities insights. Drawing upon dual-process models of creative cognition, we theorize how the RCT process activates the right type of thinking at the right time in the creative process. We also evidence efficacy by delineating and reflecting upon a pilot application at Sheridan College, which culminated in the student researchers making critical theory zines. More than simply reaffirming the value of critical theory in neoliberal societies, we delineate a radically new approach to humanities research and pedagogy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.070 | 0.082 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".