Puhlkari by Kira Bhumber. Photographer: Andrew Howell. Used with permission

Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.

Latest Collection

Creating Knowledge in Common

Editors: Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire

Universities and communities are partnering together to more fully support needs across society. Art and design practices engaged within these partnerships substantively deepen the impact of this collective work through expression, visualization, representation, and exhibition, converging multiple viewpoints into broader re-imaginings and tangible new creations with both rational and emotional force. This special collection shares stories of such partnerships and their extraordinary outcomes in areas including community health, community arts, placekeeping, climate adaptation design, food production and distribution, abolition, student learning and engagement and more.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.2.0002 · CC-BY-NC-ND

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Call for Proposals

General Call for Submissions

Rolling Submissions

Cripping Creativity & Play: Artist-Led Explorations of Disabled Art-Making

Submit by January 30, 2026

Special Issue: Cripping Creativity & Play: Artist-Led Explorations of Disabled Art-Making

Guest editor: Dr. Elizabeth McLain

Ground Works launches its Reco(r)ding CripTech online archive...

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Announcements

Ground Works Pilots CRediT-FAIR Framework for Non-Authorial Contributions
December 2, 2024

Ground Works staff has adapted the NISO (National Information Standards Organization) Contributor Roles Taxonomy, known as CRediT.

CRediT has gained traction in sc...

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Featured Articles

Virtual Forests as a Creative Medium for Community Co-Creation and Collaboration

Aidan Ackerman, Daphna Gadoth-Goodman, Emily Esch, Robert Malmscheimer, Timothy Volk, Sara Constantineau, and Lauren Cooper

Our team of forest scientists, landscape architecture faculty and students, and communications staff collectively develops virtual, embodied forest experiences. These experiences enable us to invite those who care about forest landscapes to think together with us about positive futures for our working landscape. Conventional decision making processes often aim to communicate static scientific information to constituents through data and written form, limiting the agency of individual recipients who are not offered avenues for meaningful contribution to the ideas they receive. Our work is a direct challenge to this dynamic, developing an alternative way of working that uses three-dimensional, visually immersive, artistic virtual reality models to create a shared space for iterative idea generation. In this shared space we welcome community members, landowners, policymakers, and many others to experience the virtual forest and share ideas about ways of sustainably managing the land towards a more sustainable climate future. Each of these groups has different and often competing goals that are not easily resolved through discussion and feedback processes such as community meetings or stakeholder focus groups. In contrast, the virtual forest has allowed participants to identify shared values about the working landscape which result in buy-in and connection to the land, its management, and others who care about the working forest. This has resulted in advocacy for sustainable forest management, adoption of sustainable forest management practices, and critical feedback which has helped the academic team to hone and refine our virtual forest models.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0148 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Engagement, Education and Implementation: Supporting Community-Driven Adaptations to Rising Waters in Princeville, North Carolina

Andy Fox and Carla Delcambre

This article describes a collaboration between a STEM-focused land grant university in Raleigh, North Carolina and the Town of Princeville, North Carolina. Princeville experienced severe flood damage in 2016 due to Hurricane Matthew. As an important community hub, Princeville Elementary School, a Title 1 school, was heavily impacted by the floodwaters. After renovations, the school was set to re-open in January 2020 but had to pivot to online learning in March 2020 due to the pandemic. The North Carolina State University (NCSU) Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, who had been working with the Town of Princeville on disaster recovery planning, conducted a survey with the school that revealed that the teachers at Princeville Elementary School needed outdoor learning opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers wanted to challenge traditional indoor learning settings and promote access to fresh air and tactile outdoor learning opportunities for their students. The Design + Build Studio at NCSU, in the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning, was invited to collaborate but the studio was not originally structured to operate as an off-campus model. The pandemic provided an opportunity for graduate students to continue the Design + Build program during the pandemic; yet the challenge was to adapt the traditional, hands-on studio to online instruction. Students faced design constraints but adapted to fabricating modular structures off-site and installing site furnishings for the outdoor learning environment during the summer of 2021 and 2022. The collaboration between the university and the Town of Princeville demonstrates the potential for such partnerships to make a positive impact in the community, even in the face of pandemic-era conditions and shifted modalities of shared creativity.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0153 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Decolonizing Representations to Evoke the Complexity of Black Lives in Florida

Amanda D. Concha-Holmes, Alexis Freeman, Jon Rehm, Juan Concha-Holmes, Cynthia Wilson-Graham, Turbado Marabou, Mosunmola Adeojo, Rujeko Dumbutshena, Magdalena Lamarre, and Robert L. Stevenson

Art should be integral to research, education, and expressing lived experiences. Podcasts, animations, spoken word, video games, and multimodal, born-digital books can be modalities of learning and teaching that decolonize representations, especially when they are founded on deep collaboration. Coming out of IRIE Center (Innovative Research and Intercultural Education), a group of scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, K-12 schools, and community leaders, collectively called The Collaboratory, facilitates research that is timely, evocative, and critical to understanding a fuller history of the Americas. The Collaboratory’s goals are to push the boundaries of grant-funded research, public humanities, and arts-integrated education.

This article highlights two overlapping projects from the past six years. The first is a Decolonizing Representations workshop series that began in 2019 and used Evocative Ethnography including communal experiences of art, critical art making, and deep collaboration to achieve four goals: 1) excavate hidden stories, 2) learn about techniques and concepts like Evocative Ethnography and Afrofuturism, 3) critically create art together and therein bond across cultural differences, and 4) craft evocative products such that content becomes accessible to a larger, public audience. Expanding on these four goals, IRIE Center partnered with WUFT at the University of Florida (UF) College of Journalism on the second project: creating a podcast series Decolonizing Representations: Evoking the Hidden Histories of Black Lives in Florida through a Lens of Afrofuturism. The last episode of the series integrated African American Studies high school students in the process of archival research and podcast creation. These kinds of deep collaborations bring together university scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, librarians, public school systems, K-12 students, museums, and local community organizations and leaders. This work is continuing to develop into animations, a documentary television series, and video games.

January 2025 · 10.48807/2025.0.0134 · CC-BY

Featured Commentaries

As early groundwork for Ground Works, a2ru invited submissions of interdisciplinary projects. Six of those projects played a seminal role in shaping the platform and helping to define the a2ru transdisciplinary space.

November 2020 · 10.48807/2022.1.0003

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This dialogue developed over several months between guest editor Aaron Knochel and Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina regarding the special collection Vibrant Ecologies of Research. Key publications and projects are jumping-off points for this wide-ranging discussion.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0010 · CC-BY-NC

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