What is EMA-PS?

EMA-PS is a European Union Socrates Curriculum Development programme set up jointly, in 2002, by representatives of a number of European Universities including the University of Malta (Professor Richard Muscat and Professor John J Schranz), Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy, (Professor Clelia Falletti), Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, Poland (Professor Juliusz Tyszka) and De Montfort University, Leicester (Professor Nicholas Arnold).
  

The founders of the EMA-PS Programme had one specific aim: to design a unique, highly innovative and dynamic Joint European Master’s degree programme in the science of performative creativity, which programme was launched in October 2007, awarding the degree of Master in the Science of Performative Creativity, with the above mentioned founders constituting the MSPC Board of Studies. The programme is now run by a partnership made up of the University of Malta (which is the co-ordinating university) and the Adam Mickiewicz University.

Apart from the five founder-representatives, the academic body is composed of academics and researchers from the founding institutions and from other institutions now involved in the programme; these include Dr. Noellie Brockdorff (University of Malta), Dr. Clive Zammit (University of Malta), Professor Tsutomu Fujinami (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Dr. Maciej Kijko (Adam Mickiewicz University), Professor Joanna Ostrowska (Adam Mickiewicz University), Mr. Victor Jacono, M.A. (University of Malta), Mr. Jacques Sciberras, M.A., Mr David Wright, M.Sc. (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Ms Michela Loporto, M.Sc. (Manchester Metropolitan University).

Bringing together a number of disciplines that bridge the arts and the sciences, the two-year, interdisciplinary, taught course follows a groundbreaking path to inquire into Creativity by focusing upon Memory Systems and Learning Processes, studying contexts which potentiate them and contexts which, on the other hand, inhibit them.

The research proposed by this programme faces long standing questions such as:

• What enables creativity and innovation?
• Why are some people more creative than others?
• What contexts enable individuals to develop their creative powers, entrepreneurial skills... and what contexts inhibit the growth processes and potentials of so many?
• How does the human being take decisions, even those as what to have for dinner or what car to buy?