Agency: Creation, Creativity, and Community

Human creativity and the capacity for communication find distinctive expression in the production of artefacts and texts. They demonstrate the human ability to materialize ideas, to identify challenges, and to develop innovative solutions. Such creative processes are deeply embedded in a complex web of social, material, and cognitive interactions. Accordingly, work must be examined as a multidimensional phenomenon that casts the individual, their performance, and the very process of making in a new light.

The research focus investigates, among other aspects, how perspectives shift when, instead of privileging the notion of a single “creative genius,” emphasis is placed on the significance of networks and communities in processes of creation. To what extent can collaborative developmental processes within social collectives—such as philosophical schools, monasteries, or workshops—be understood as central sites of the production, innovation, and preservation of knowledge? What role do such networks play in the transmission and transformation of knowledge over extended periods of time? In examining these communities, increased attention is also given to the scope of individual agency in relation to its social and material environment.

Texts, images, and artefacts themselves may likewise possess a form of agency within this web, insofar as they can shape relationships independently of the intentions of their creators. Emphasizing the agency of non-human entities within social networks thus reconfigures traditional questions concerning the interrelations between human actors and the material world.

The IAKA Fellowship 2026 has been awarded to Sydnie Chavez, who will be working from September to December 2026 within our research focus “Agency: Creation, Creativity, and Community."

Sydnie’s research focuses on textiles and textile language in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Using evidence from material culture, iconography, and experimental archaeology, she reexamines textiles in text from the perspective of the actual experience of production and all the technology, materials, hands, time, and knowledge that it entails.

At the beginning of the autumn semester, the conference “Making Matters. Processes and Meaning of Crafting in Graeco-Roman Antiquity”, organised by Prof. Dr Corinna Reinhardt and Sophie Preiswerk, took place.  The programme andinformation on participation can be found on the conference website. 

On 18–19 November 2026, the workshop “Narration and Metaphors of Making”(working title), organised by Sydnie Chavez and Dr Benedetta Foletti, will take place. Further information will follow shortly.