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Tracey Nicholls

A good person and a good academic: A conversation with Tracey Nicholls

Dr. Tracey Nicholls is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lewis University. She completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship with ICASP in the 2009-2010 year based out of the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal. Dr. Nicholls has recently published a book entitled: An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future.

Dr. Elizabeth Jackson has recently taken up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at McMaster University with the Centre for Leadership in Learning . Previously, Dr. Jackson worked with the ICASP project as the Website Content Coordinator.

The video documents a conversational interview conducted by Dr. Jackson over Skype with Dr. Nicholls. Dr. Nicholls discusses her newly published book, identifies some core values of improvised music and art-making in regard to politics conceived at a broader level, improvisation in the classroom, social privilege, Cartesian dualism, notions of justice versus charity, and the positive possibilities of an audience’s role in regards to improvised performance.

A full transcript of the interview is available here.

We’ll all be more innovative if we participate in collaborative webs and share more openly. Creativity is always a collaboration and it’s always a form of improvisation, written large in the social world.

– Keith Sawyer