Poiesis Means Making

Abstract

Poiesis means making.It means making our world, but it also means making ourselves.The idea that the world is created by people in history, both consciously and through cumulative unintended effects, represents the bulwark of the modern secular social sciences.From this foundation, scholars have argued that fundamental features of our world that we often take to be natural, from race and gender to politics and the economy, are actually products of human making.This is the basis for the twined concepts of social construction and human agency.Rarely, however, do we focus on construction not as a metaphor but as a concrete human activity.While the terms social construction and human agency both point toward the study of creative activity, they tend to operate at a level of abstraction that seldom contains analysis of how things are actually created, including the conditions of creation as well as the products that come out of it.This special issue of Public Culture is based on a collective research project, the Poiesis Fellowship, which aims to shed light on human creativity. 1 In the pages that follow, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars -from a physicist based in Munich to a journalist based in Bombay to a filmmaker based in New York -examine creativity not just as an idea but as a concrete practice, as something we do, and as something we do not simply in special circumstances but in our everyday lives.Our focus is on the city, as both a context for creative action and a product of that creative action.Our decision to focus on cities is a strategic one.As the centers of contemporary economic power and influence, cities are now home to more than half of humanity.They are sites of global connections and interactions across basic

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