Presentation Schedule
Creative Education in Times of Crisis
Friday, 6 November 2026 10:50
Session: Conference Plenary Session
Room: Aula Magna (7F)
Presentation Type: Panel Presentation
This hour-long panel discussion explores the role creative education can play in generating moments of cultural intensity and social transformation. Taking Barcelona as a resonant setting, it brings Spanish and British examples into dialogue to ask how education, experimentation and collective creativity have helped turn periods of political change, urban reinvention, and social resistance into enduring cultural movements.
In Spain, the discussion will consider La Movida in Madrid in the late 1970s and 1980s, following Franco’s death in 1975, as a moment when punk rock, the films of Pedro Almodóvar, sartorial experimentation and new forms of everyday life expressed a wider democratic and cultural transformation. It will also reflect on Barcelona’s 1992 Olympic and Cultural Olympiad moment, when culture, design, and urban planning became inseparable from the city’s international reimagining.
In the United Kingdom, post-war educational reforms made art colleges more accessible to working- and lower-middle-class students. These institutions became spaces of experiment in music, sound, art and design, helping to generate Swinging London in the 1960s and 1970s and paving the way for later movements including Glam, Punk, and Cool Britannia. Across these examples, the panel asks whether creative education merely responds to social and political change, or whether it actively produces the languages, images, and practices through which such change becomes visible.
At a time when artificial intelligence, technological determinism, and renewed investment in national defence are reshaping the value placed on human creativity, this conversation invites reflection on the contemporary purpose of creative education. What forms of communication, imagination, and resistance can it still enable? How might it help us reframe everyday experience, social exchange and cultural expression in ways that remain distinctly human?
Biographies
Alex Saego
Professor Alex Seago received his BA in American Studies from the University of Birmingham, United States, his MA in American Studies from the University of Kansas, United States, and his PhD in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, United Kingdom. During an academic career spanning almost 50 years, he has taught a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in sociology, cultural studies, popular culture, criminology, development studies, art, and design history for several British and American universities and colleges of art, including the Royal College of Art, where he was responsible for supervising MPhil and PhD students. During the mid 1990s, Professor Seago developed the Research Methods lecture series for MPhil and PhD students at the Royal College of Art. His publications include Burning the Box of Beautiful Things (Oxford University Press, 1995), a cultural historical study of changes in graphic design at the RCA in the 1950s and early 1960s and Pop Art and Design (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) with Dr Anne Massey.
See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule
