Groups, Clubs, and Scenes: Informal Creative Practices in Japan

作为一群业余爱好者从事艺术实践意味着什么？人们从非正式的、无偿的创造性实践中得到了什么？这些都是各种学术领域和新闻调查中常见的问题。然而，在回答这些问题时，每个领域都面临着自己的问题和挑战。有些问题是研究创造性实践的学科历史所特有的，而另一些问题则在许多领域反复出现：研究人员倾向于关注群体的动态、创造力的运作或最终的艺术产品。相反，我们建议采用跨学科的方法来解决基于群体的非正式创造性实践问题，以更全面地解决这些问题。这个网络汇集了来自不同学科和国家的研究人员，以建立一个方法工具箱，用于研究非正式创造性实践的意义和影响，特别是那些以群体为单位进行的创造性实践。非正式聚会和集体活动有助于增进个人和共同的幸福感。因此，该网络的协作工作与当代社会问题相关，包括孤立，定期和高薪工作的消失，以及创造性活动如何改善我们的环境和生活体验。网络活动将与社会实践、健康和老龄化的研究有关，并对日本的非专业艺术团体进行第一次广泛的研究。日本的日常生活以大量有组织的团体活动而闻名。许多社会团体都致力于艺术，然而关于俱乐部（kurabu）和圈子（saakuru）的学术研究往往集中在那些对个人有明显发展影响的团体，如体育俱乐部或语言学习团体。与此同时，俱乐部和圈子是一个相对平等或“水平”社会参与的空间，在一个通常被描述为主要是“垂直”社会的社会背景下。虽然网络活动中包含的群体在其组织性质和等级程度上各不相同，但它们为社会参与提供了另一种空间，对娱乐和幸福产生了显著的影响。我们常常认为，以群体为基础的实践是由建立社区或提高自我的愿望所驱动的，因此我们对公民发现的以群体为基础的创造性实践的许多用途缺乏细致入微的理解。我们如何解释那些不打算提高技能的人的经历？或者那些参与小组活动却没有与其他小组成员建立重要关系的人？这些案例不容易被简单地理解为非正式的以群体为基础的创造性实践，探索这些案例将提高对创造力和关系在日常生活中的作用的理解。日本的创意产业是世界领先的，但日本也面临着严峻的社会挑战，包括老龄化、不稳定和过度拥挤。为了克服这些社会挑战，在正式和非正式的实践结构中都需要创造力和创新。该网络将侧重于以小组为单位进行的非正式创造力，以开发模型，以了解如何利用关系创造力来解决或减轻大多数国家在不久的将来将面临的挑战。我们将借鉴网络成员对日本各地进行的各种非正式创造性实践的研究，以开发研究其他地方类似实践的模型，并更好地理解这些实践与过上美好和满意的生活有关的价值。我们特别感兴趣的是群体结构的作用（和局限性），以及我们如何在整个生命过程中构建生活世界、社会化和弹性的含义。

What does it mean to engage in arts practice as a group of amateurs? What do people get out of informal and unpaid creative practice? These are common questions in various academic fields and journalistic investigations. Yet each field faces its own problems and challenges in answering these questions. Some problems are specific to the history of the discipline in which creative practices are studied, while others reoccur in many fields: researchers tend to focus on either the dynamics of the group, the operations of creativity, or the final artistic product. Instead, we propose taking an interdisciplinary approach to the question of group-based informal creative practice to address these questions more holistically. This network brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and countries to build a toolbox of methods for studying the meaning and impact of informal creative practices, specifically those conducted in groups.Informal gatherings and group practices contribute to personal and shared senses of well-being. Therefore, this network's collaborative work has relevance for contemporary social issues including isolation, the disappearance of regular and well-compensated work, and how creative activities can improve our environments and lived experiences. Network activities will have relevance to the study of social practices, health, and ageing, as well as developing the first wide-ranging study of non-professional arts groups in Japan.Daily life in Japan is notable for its high number of activities conducted in organized groups. Many social groups are dedicated to the arts, yet scholarship on clubs (kurabu) and circles (saakuru) tends to focus on those with an obvious developmental effect on the individual, such as sports clubs or language learning groups. At the same time, clubs and circles are a space of relatively egalitarian or 'horizontal' social engagement, in a social context that has often been described as predominantly a 'vertical' society. While the groups included in the network activities vary in the nature of their organization and the degree of hierarchy, they offer alternative spaces for social engagement with notable consequences for conviviality and wellbeing. Too often we assume that group-based practice is motivated by the desire to build community or improve the self, and so we lack a nuanced understanding of the many uses that citizens have found for group-based creative practice. How do we account for the experiences of people who practice an art with no intention of improving their skill? Or those who engage in group activity without developing significant relationships with other group members? Exploring such cases, which do not fit easily into a simple understanding of informal group-based creative practice, will improve understanding of the roles of creativity and relationality in everyday life.Japan's creative industries are world-leading, and yet Japan also faces severe social challenges, including ageing, precarity, and overcrowding. To overcome these societal challenges, creativity and innovation is needed both in formal and informal structures of practice. This network will focus on informal creativity conducted in groups to develop models for understanding how relational creativity can be deployed to solve or alleviate the challenges that will face most countries in the near future. We will draw from network members' research on a variety of informal creative practices conducted in groups around Japan to develop models for studying similar practices elsewhere, and to better understand the value of these practices in relation to living a good and satisfying life. We are particularly interested in the role (and limitations) of the group structure and the implications for how we think about building life-worlds, socialization, and resilience across the life course.