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

View Now




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...

More


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...

More


See All Announcements




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

New Americans’ Pavilion: A Space of Cosmopolitan Cooperation in Syracuse, New York

David Shanks

The New Americans’ Pavilion at Salt City Harvest Farm (SCHF) is an interdisciplinary community-university partnered design project that supports food sovereignty for refugees in Syracuse, New York. The building is an important social hub for the refugee diaspora, and also a research testbed for an innovative off-the-grid, solar-powered cold storage system that is intended to become a model for small community farms. Syracuse is home to more than ten thousand refugees, with origins ranging from Somalia to Bhutan to Cambodia. Many refugees live in areas of the city with limited access to a variety of fresh food. SCHF was established in 2014 to provide the refugee community with farmland where they can grow the kinds of food they want to eat, as well as educational programs where they can learn to farm and bring their produce to market. In 2020, SCHF began a collaboration with faculty and students at Syracuse University to design and build the New Americans’ Pavilion. The pavilion includes covered space for washing, packing, and storing produce from the farm, as well as flexible space for dining and educational events. The building was designed and constructed over a three-year period by a team comprising university faculty and students, community volunteers, professional contractors, and Salt City Harvest Farm staff. The project was supported by funding from the Chobani® Community Impact Fund, the Central New York Community Foundation, the Reisman Foundation, and an Innovative and Interdisciplinary Research Grant from Syracuse University.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0131 · CC-BY

Mapping the Relationship Between a University and Community Music School

Amy Hillis and Richard Marsella

In this article, the authors trace the origins of a unique partnership between a community music school in Toronto, Canada and a  neighboring  university. Co-authored by Dr. Richard Marsella, Executive Director of Community Music Schools of Toronto, and Dr. Amy Hillis, Assistant Professor of Music at York University, their commentary discusses the origins of an endowed, community-university partnership with the Helen Carswell Chair in Community-Engaged Research in the Arts at York University. This partnership supports and facilitates research projects that benefit community arts organizations and the Jane Finch community, an underserved neighborhood near York University and home to the "Community Music Schools of Toronto at Jane Finch." From advancement and knowledge mobilization, through to design and defining a shared mission, this article unpacks the process of building a partnership between a community music school and a university. Dr. Marsella and Dr. Hillis share their unique perspectives in a discussion of the partnership’s challenges, successes and continued evolution. They question how to build an ideal relationship between researchers and research partners that has sustainable alignment between research topics and research needs. How can creativity and artistry be used to support university researchers' objectives in alignment with a community music organization’s infrastructure? This article includes 1) analyses of case studies from the first five years of the partnership’s existence, including research projects that cultivated long-term relationships between researcher and community music school, and 2) recommendations for other academic and community institutions to develop similar partnerships.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0147 · CC-BY-NC-SA

Featured Commentaries

Delight, because Ground Works is so young, and so many risks have been taken but not all of them have proven fruitful (yet), and it’s very satisfying to see confirmed our hunch that reviewing together could be a generative thing.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0008

View Commentary
I’m reminded of choreographer Sean Curran once telling me in a rehearsal as he cut and reorganized sections of choreography, “It’s not what you do with the pencil that counts, it’s what you do with the eraser!”

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0007

View Commentary