Beyond creative Production: Shaping creative togetherness across differences in a European screenwriting program

This empirical article seeks to explore the relational dynamics and social phenomena underpinning collective creativity, focusing on the lived experiences of co-creators. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the Eureka Series programme, we examine how participants build and sustain social bonds while creating together. This programme, organized by the Series Mania Institute in Lille, France, brings together emerging European TV series writers, placing them in a ‘writers room' environment to collaborate and develop original TV series projects. Our analysis reveals how co-creators cultivate a creative togetherness (i.e., a way of being and feeling together while creating) and shed light on three underlying dynamics: (1) the assembling of human and material entities, (2) the movement between different modes of ‘crea-co-presence', and (3) the careful mobilization of affects and affectivity. By integrating relational and new materialist perspectives such as Judith Butler's social ontology of shared vulnerability, we highlight the significance of embodied and affective subtleties in collective creation. We challenge traditional views of creativity as a static process focused on production, instead emphasizing the generative potential of being and creating together. Our findings contribute to management and organization theory by shifting the focus from collaborative production to the organization of creative togetherness, underscoring the importance of non-productivist forms of collective creativity in contemporary work environments.