Creative entrepreneurship in rural and peripheral regions is often evaluated primarily through economic indicators such as employment, growth and sectoral performance. Yet creative practice also generates relational and spatial forms of value through collaboration, cultural knowledge, participation, place attachment and the ongoing making of place. This seminar examines how these different logics of value coexist and are negotiated in practice, and what becomes obscured when economic value becomes the dominant framework through which creative activity is understood.

The seminar presents a conceptual and methodological approach to examining how economic, relational and spatial forms of value are negotiated through creative practice in rural and peripheral regions. It invites discussion on the implications of this approach for cultural policy, cultural ecosystems and place-based development.


Programme

Presentation (45 min)
Creative entrepreneurship as infrastructural practice; the negotiation of economic, relational and spatial logics of value; comparative research in Ireland and Iceland; and methodological approaches for tracing these processes over time.

Discussion (45 min)
Discussion of how multiple forms of value can be conceptualised and made visible in research, policy and place-based development.

Bio note

Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdóttir is Assistant Professor and Programme Director in Creative Industries at Bifröst University, Iceland, and a PhD researcher in Geography at the University of Galway. Her research focuses on cultural and creative industries, rural and peripheral development, cultural infrastructure, placemaking, and the negotiation of multiple forms of value through creative practice. She co-led the Icelandic lab of the Horizon Europe IN SITU project, and her recent collaborative research has examined emergent placemaking, local stewardship, and cultural and creative activity in non-urban areas.