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Works

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.

Design for community resilience requires a multi-dimensional approach addressing the three pillars of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. The Prairie Block project in Lawrence, Kansas integrated all three pillars in a novel way to generate a replicable model of sustainable design that can be used in other communities.

Within the context of a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-identified low-moderate income neighborhood, vanguard public, private, nonprofit, and institutional partnerships were facilitated by university design-build architecture students, faculty, and a community leader. Through this constellation of partners, a formerly under-utilized park was transformed in five months and with zero budget into a thriving neighborhood landmark complete with a community orchard, shade structure, walking trails, and creek access.

The catalyst of this revitalized public amenity is Kaw Pavilion, an artistic shade structure fabricated by the students that honors the area’s Indigenous and other early inhabitants while celebrating the neighborhood’s iconoclastic character and strong activist identity.

Other park improvements include a 35-tree free-fruit community orchard and walking trails, with prairie plants and carved limestone benches, that connect the playground and the creek. Subsequent park additions include a new splash pad, public restroom, and bus stop. The park now serves as a node on a trail network that connects all the neighborhoods in Lawrence.

Prairie Block strengthens a sense of place and fosters sustainability on economic, social, and environmental levels by pulling together shared history, present-day neighborhood identity, and connections to the rest of the city. The Parks and Recreation Department is replicating this partnership and multi-faceted design model in other low-moderate income neighborhoods on the trail system.