The Centre for Culture and Creativity builds interdisciplinary approaches to vital and complex critical, historical and creative questions. Our Centre brings together researchers and practitioners from across the Arts and Humanities to enrich cultural understanding, enhance public debate, further creative and applied practice, and drive positive social change.

The Centre positions itself within the national and international research landscape as a unique body, investigating and intersecting key areas including:

• Care: foregrounding issues of ethics, responsibility and intersectionality in relation to questions of self, identity and wellbeing; situating arts and cultural activism, practices and theory to do with structural inequality in wider contexts.
• Disruption: concerning the vital role of the arts and culture in giving expression to minority, dissenting or radical voices and visions, challenging orthodoxy and transforming our understanding of past and present societies.
• Ecology: addressing space, place and belonging in relation to the built and natural environment, foregrounding artistic and cultural responses to climate crisis and our relation to non-human life.
• Participation: encompassing critical reflection and innovative practice in relation to the philosophies, methodologies and strategies around concepts of engagement and inclusion in both arts practice and cultural policy.

The Centre works across a range of literary, cultural, historical, artistic and creative fields drawing on a number of special collections and archives, including the collections of the MIMA School of Art and Design and Teesside University Library. We work in partnership with a range of regional, national and international organisations and charities in arts, education, industry, heritage, museums, public health and policy sectors to enrich societal resilience and well-being.

This Research Centre hosts Teesside University’s input into the AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training, The Heritage Consortium, and the Northern Bridge Consortium. The Centre also partners with Tate Plus, National Gallery Research Network, Middlesbrough Cultural Partnership, Creative Fuse North East and Creative People and Places project: Borderlands.