Research

In this solo-authored paper, I investigate how women creatives in male-dominated occupations achieve self-expression when the self is marginalized. Drawing on over 100 hours of participant observation at a women-only comedy festival, 25 hours of shadowing female comedians, and 60 semi-structured interviews with women working in stand-up comedy, I find that women experience forms of marginalization that target the self-expressive dimensions of their creative work. Contrary to expectations that they would conform to masculine norms, I find that these experiences prompt what I term generative reclamation: a process through which women embrace and amplify experiences of marginalization, as well as marginalized aspects of the self, through creative expression.

In this paper, we examine how creative workers experience and respond to divergent feedback. Based on 70 semi-structured interviews and 18 member checks with stand-up comedians, as well as over 120 hours of shadowing at comedy venues in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, we identify a phenomenon we term feedback whirlwind: a disorienting state triggered by divergent feedback from multiple sources. While feedback is typically seen as beneficial for creativity, we show that divergent feedback can overwhelm and destabilize creative workers.

In this theoretical paper, we argue that creative work is inherently gendered and that existing gender theories do not fully account for women’s marginalization in this context. We develop a theory of gendered creative work that reveals a gendered paradox: the forms of novelty most often legitimized are coded as masculine, making women’s deviations from the status quo less likely to be recognized as “true” novelty. At the same time, the relational labor central to creativity is coded as feminine and therefore less likely to be seen as creative when enacted by women. We label this dynamic the gendered creativity loop, which channels women into forms of novelty that are more legible as feminine yet less legitimate and more vulnerable to backlash.

In this paper, we examine how women’s identities shift following migration to unfamiliar work contexts. Based on 62 semi-structured interviews with migrant women of color in white-collar roles, we find that these women develop a growing awareness of the shifting meanings attached to their intersecting identities. We conceptualize this phenomenon as an identity dawn: the realization that one’s identity acquires novel and often unexpected meanings in unfamiliar environments.

The growing volume of creative work has increased the importance of curators who select, organize, present, and preserve creative outputs. Although often viewed as gatekeepers, curators can play an active role in shaping creative processes through what we call creative curation - the integration of curators’ own creativity in assembling and developing collections of work. This chapter examines how curation intersects with creativity, highlighting that creative work is evaluated not in isolation but in relation to broader collections, goals, and contexts. We explore the relationships between creators and curators, including potential tensions and opportunities for collaboration, and propose future directions for research on the role of curation in creative work.

Novelty and usefulness are widely recognized as the two core dimensions of creativity. Research often describes creative work as a process in which people first generate novel ideas and then evaluate them for usefulness during selection, thereby treating usefulness primarily as a filtering criterion. This chapter argues for a broader view in which usefulness also shapes idea generation itself. We propose that usefulness should not be viewed only as a post hoc evaluation criterion. Rather, attending to usefulness can actively shape idea generation and, in doing so, it can itself be a source of novelty. We suggest that this perspective is particularly helpful for understanding creativity in contexts shaped by practical constraints, shared needs, and problem-solving demands. We illustrate this with examples from communally derived creativity, technical or craft-based work, and efforts to address grand challenges.