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

Brian Aycock

Dr Brian Aycock is an Associate Professor of Law at Chuo University, Japan) He is also a Senior Research Associate in the Refugee Law Initiative’s Internal Displacement Research Programme and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the RLI Working Paper Series.

His research focuses on state responsibility for climate-induced displacement and the development of international protection frameworks in response to environmental harm. His work examines the intersection of refugee law, subsidiary protection, and international legal obligation, with particular attention to comparative approaches in Japan and Europe.

He has conducted field research on planned relocation in Fiji and has presented his research internationally in Japan, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has also consulted with the Japanese Ministry of the Environment on legal responses to disaster displacement.

Dr Aycock earned a PhD in International Law from International Christian University, Japan, in 2023 and an MA (Distinction) in Refugee Protection from the University of London, United Kingdom, in 2019.

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.

Anne Boddington

Professor Anne Boddington is Executive Vice-President and Provost of IAFOR, and oversees the academic programs, research and policies of the forum.

Anne Boddington is Professor Emerita of Design Innovation and has held executive and senior leadership roles in Higher Education including as Dean of Arts & Humanities at the University of Brighton, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, Business & Innovation at Kingston and Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange at Middlesex University.

In 2022, she concluded chairing the Sub Panel (32) for Art & Design: History, Practice & Theory as part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) and has extensive experience in the governance and conduct of peer review, research evaluation and assessment in REF2014 (Sub Panel Deputy Chair and Equality Diversity Advisory Panel [EDAP]) and RAE2008. A former member of AHRC’s Advisory Board, she is the current Chair of the Advisory Board for the UKRI’s National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research (NICER) programme (£30M), Deputy Chair and a Trustee of the Design Council, the government’s strategic advisor for design, and a member of both the InnoHK Scientific Committee (Hong Kong) and the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications (HKCAAVQ).

Since the 1990’s Anne has worked across the UK and internationally with a wide range of quality assurance, professional, statutory, and regulatory bodies in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Hong Kong, and India.

As an independent consultant she now works as a strategic advisor and mentor and is committed to promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in practice, developing effective governance, supporting career development, reducing bureaucracy, and improving organisational design, integrity, and productivity in the changing workplace.

Joseph Haldane

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s global business and academic operations.

Dr Haldane has a PhD from the University of London in 19th century French Studies (ULIP/RHUL), and has research interests in world history, politics, and education, as well as governance and decision-making.

In 2022, Dr Haldane was named Professor in the United Nations Peace University's European Center for Peace and Development (ECPD). From 2019 he has been also a Visiting Professor at Doshisha University, where he teaches Ethics and Governance in the Global MBA, and a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance since 2017.

Since 2015, he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at The University of Osaka, having taught on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and has been Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary research centre situated within the university, since 2017. He is also a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa, United States.

From 2020 to 2025, Dr Haldane was an Honorary Professor of University College London (UCL), through the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. Earlier in his career, he held full-time faculty positions at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, Sciences Po Paris, and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas and the Schools of Journalism of Sciences Po Paris and Moscow State University.

Professor Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations at universities and conferences globally, including at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs, and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office, and oversaw the 2021 Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned study on Infectious Diseases on Cruise Ships.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane was Treasurer of the Chubu chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce Japan, and since 2015 has been a Trustee of HOPE International Development Agency Japan. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2015. He lives in Japan and holds a black belt in Judo.

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Brian Aycock is an Associate Professor of Law at Chuo University, Japan.
Professor Alex Seago received his PhD in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, United Kingdom and 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.
Professor Anne Boddington is Executive Vice-President and Provost of IAFOR, and oversees the academic programs, research and policies of the forum.
Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of IAFOR.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

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