Creating Selves

The concept of creativity, together with concerns over access to creativity and knowledge, are currently the subject of international debate and unprecedented public attention, particularly in the context of international developments in intellectual property laws. Not only are there significant developments at the legal level, with increasing moves towards stronger and harmonized protection for intellectual property, but also there is intense public interest in the concepts of creativity, authorship, personality, and knowledge. In Creating Selves, Johanna Gibson addresses strategic responses to intellectual property, and suggests alternative models for encouraging, rewarding, and disseminating creative and innovative output, which are built upon a critical analysis of and approach to the debate and to the concept of creativity itself. Drawing upon critical theories in authorship, literature, music, the sciences and the arts, Gibson suggests a radical re-consideration of the notion of creativity in the intellectual property debate and the means by which to encourage and sustain creativity in contemporary society.

Addresses the issues of self and self-esteem, demonstrating how to fully realize one's own power through a plan that explains how to overcome fear and fulfill personal potential.

"Exploring the theatre from the 1960s to the present, Robert J. Andreach shows the various ways in which the contemporary American theatre creates a personal, theatrical, and national self." "Andreach argues that the contemporary American theatre creates multiple selves that reflect and give voice to the many communities within our multicultural society. These selves are fragmented and enclaved, however, which makes necessary a counter movement that seeks, through interaction among the various parts, to heal the divisions within, between, and among them." --Book Jacket.

Guided by developmental cultural psychology, this volume focuses on understandings and responses to disability and stigmatization from the perspectives of educators practicing in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Synthesizing research that spanned over a decade, this volume seeks to understand disabilities in different developmental and cultural contexts. The research presented in this book found that educators from all four cultural groups expressed strikingly similar concerns about the impact of stigmatization on the emerging cultural self, both with children with disabilities and their typically developing peers, while also describing culturally nuanced socialization goals and practices pertaining to inclusive education. In providing a multicultural view of common challenges in classrooms from around the world, this book provides important lessons for the improvement of children's lives, as well as the development of theory, policy, and programs that are culturally sensitive and sustainable.

In Creating Community-Led and Self-Build Homes, Martin Field explores the ways in which people and communities across the UK have been striving to create the homes and neighbourhood communities they want. Giving context to contemporary practices in the UK, the book examines ‘self-build housing’ and ‘community-led housing’, discussing the commonalities and distinctions between these in practice, and what could be learned from other initiatives across Europe. Individual methods and models of local practice are explored - including cohousing, cooperatives, community land trusts, empty homes and other intentional communities - and an examination is made of what has constrained such initiatives to date and how future policies and practice might be shaped.

The Created Self takes readers to as-yet-unexplored regions in the modern psyche's preoccupation with self-invention.

The Self-Creating Universe is a wide-ranging attempt to bring science and spirituality together in a philosophical synthesis. It opens up to the reader exciting new developments in the natural sciences while also showing how these contribute to a worldview which addresses fundamental philosophical and social questions. The key concept is creativity, in both nature and human life. Making use of ideas from the history of philosophy and from recent speculations in sciences including cosmology and evolution, the book offers bold conjectures about the emergence of new forms of order and self-organisation in nature, in consciousness and in human life as a whole. The book is written in an accessible style which is designed to appeal to both the general reader and to specialists interested in the wider implications of their fields.

The editors bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, narrative identities become the stories we live by.

This unique scientific treatise merges science and philosophy, theorizing that the universe, life, and human societies have an innate purpose and are part of a universal reality.

A critical reason this is (well, maybe not THE best) a useful book is that YOU do the work! The more you apply what you learn and understand, the greater your growth. This is not a quick fix book, but one to assist you in a lifelong journey of self-discovery. It is difficult to understand what another person really thinks or feels, because it is dangerous to your career, your relationships, and even your existence. You can learn to know who you really are. As you travel you will find things about yourself you dislike and like. The more honest you are the more you will like yourself and amazingly enough, like and be liked more easily by others. By using the metaphors of Giant and diminished self, you have a means to constantly evaluate what you are experiencing. As you do this you are getting more in tune with what you're thinking and feeling. Most people are not congruent, that is, what they think and what they feel are not in synch. In psychology when this happens it is called inappropriate affect. The face you show does not reflect what you feel or think. Yet, in many situations you cannot (because the repercussions are too great) express or even show what you're thinking and feeling so what you say does not reflect your internal experience. As the years pass you move further away from congruency and often can no longer even recognize what you are feeling and thinking. You believe that what you're "supposed" to feel or think in that setting is what you're actually feeling and thinking. I will try to help you discover who you are or could have become or still could become. In metaphor it is creating your GIANT SELF, which is the realization of your inherent potentials plus hard work! This self is a marked contrast to your diminished self. This self is the brainwashed, depressed, frightened, rigid self that those with greater power have made you believe is who you are. Without even knowing you I can say that you can become a person who can look yourself in the mirror and honestly like who you see. It means opening up to ideas and concepts that may be confusing, unnerving, and may mean that your world as you know it now will never be the same. Many of the ideas seem to be so simple and logical that you will say, "I knew that!" You may know it, but have you had the courage to apply it? I think one reason Dr. Wilson believes in this book is that I send an honest searchlight into my mind, body, and soul. Some of the things I discovered I did not like - still do not like. However, I found that by challenging EVERYTHING I believed I was able to free myself from many of the errors of my past. Besides my dark sides, I found a rather decent, intelligent person who was worthy of being loved and appreciated. One thing I had to admit and face was the number and constancy of errors I made on a regular basis. Humans are error-making machines. There are so many things that cause us to make mistakes that each of us could talk for hours about the stupid things we've done. How many times have you pulled instead of pushed even though the sign on the door was very clear? I know I have. I shake my head and laugh - most of the time. Other times my inattention or stupidity creates errors of judgement that could have caused a serious accident. I misjudge how far away a car is before I shoot out into the intersection. Or, I'm in a rush and I take a chance knowing full well that I'm acting like a fool. Take our senses. Each information bit that stimulates one of our sensory nerves is affected by our attention toward it, its magnitude, its intensity, its uniqueness, and the number and sensitivity of the nerve endings that receive it. It then travels through that sensory system with countless chances for the message to be garbled or misinterpre