Understanding dialogue is important to both the practice of creativity and the research which interrogates it (Chappell, Craft, Rolfe and Jobbins, 2012). The presentation will introduce Chappell and Craft’s (2011) Living Dialogic Space methodology as a means to understand creativity within education. This methodology is co-participatory and integrates Lefebvre’s (1991) lived space and Bakhtin’s (1984) work on dialogue to flatten hierarchies, re-position researchers, listen to multiple perspectives and take relevant action. These Living Dialogic Spaces are appropriate for developing an understanding of creativity itself that is dialogically based. This understanding is offered next in the form of Chappell’s (Chappell et al, 2012; Chappell et al, 2016; Walsh et al, in press) conceptualisation of humanising creativity. Here embodied dialogue is seen to be the creative process’ driver, via conversations between the inside and the outside (inside-out and outside-in). Through the generative, embodied nature of this activity, Chappell et al argue that students are ‘making and being made’; they are on a ‘journey of becoming: developing their identities as they develop creative ideas. Chappell et al connect this inside-out outside-in dialogue between creativity and identity to Merleau Ponty’s argument for nurturing the ‘space in between ’ or the Chiasm (1964) as part of dialogic creativity. The humanising part of the process derives from students’ embodied becoming, acknowledging that creative ideas always have humanly-values-driven impacts on individuals and communities. The presentation will go on to consider how Chappell et al (2012), question their use of the term ‘humanising’ recognizing that it brings with it rhetorics from humanism (e.g. Rogers 1951) which scholars, including Gray (2002), have critiqued as human-centric, over-emphatic of a rational world-view and too strongly prioritizing human agency and power over the non-human. The presentation will therefore suggest that although an ethical imperative remains important, a less-human centric role for ethics in creativity may be appropriate. Braidotti’s stress on the complex materiality of bodies of all kinds (human and non-human) and their social, power relations will be used to develop Chappell’s embodied dialogic theory of creativity. This involves critiquing the tendency to interpret humanising as ‘good’ rather than also encompassing the failings of the human condition, and its relationship to the non-human. The presentation will conclude by looking forward to an embodied dialogic creativity which maintains an emphasis on the role of humane action/ethics but which acknowledges and is assisted by Braidotti’s (2013) vision of ‘posthuman humanity’.

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