5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Micro sociological accounts from ethnomethodology, interactionism, STS and cultural cognitive sociology, as well as inductive ethnographic and participatory/artivist proposals will shed an empirical light on the fuzzy concept of creativity. Contemporary cognitive science such as embodied cognition (Gibbs, 2006), distributed cognition (Kirsh, 2024), enactive (Nöe, 2023) and extended cognition (Clark, 2008) acknowledges the artists’ embeddedness in the studio. Together with multimodal communicative encounters such as artistic gossip (Muntanyola-Saura, 2018) we can explain what truly happens within the black box of the creative process in the phases of conceptualization, execution, and evaluation.

The digital turn makes explicit the centrality of software that produce models, diagrams and prototypes. Digital resources are objects of epistemic judgment (Knorr-Cetina, 1999). Without falling into technological determinism, they constitute background practices (in Husserlian terms) first analog and now mostly digital. Schools and universities foster the creativity of those who study within their walls. The institutional framework of digitalization is linked to learning conditions, such as the development of specialized literature within a discipline, the available tools for novices, and the legitimacy of the established curriculum (Crenshaw, 2010, (Bourdieu, 1994; Heinich, 2010, Lewandowska & Smolarska, 2019).