Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Creating Knowledge in Common
Editors: Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire
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General Call for Submissions
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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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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...
MoreFeatured Articles
Mapping the Relationship Between a University and Community Music School
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.
Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork
The Home We Made: Illustrating Filipino Migration
The Filipino migrant worker’s story takes place across continents, resulting in gaps and silences within their story when viewed from a single perspective. How can techniques in illustration be used to challenge linearity and dominant perspectives? How can it be used to record and retell histories of marginalized/migrant populations? In a collaboration with Damayan Migrant Workers Association and Barnard College History Department, the project utilizes both art-based research and field work methodologies toward an illustrated visual essay of the experience of the Filipino migrant domestic worker in New York City. It looks at how illustration can be used as a tool for documentation and journalism. Illustration can record and inform, but it can also fill silences in the archive, as well as protect subjects who may be undocumented or trafficked, especially in contexts in which photography might have jeopardized their safety. Field work, reportage drawing, and interview aid in recording my experience as a volunteer staff member in Damayan. In late 2023, I illustrated and designed 20 Years of Damayan, a visual historical timeline for the organization, assisted by collaborative archival research with Barnard College History. I then brought my illustration methodology to Little Manila, the Filipino im/migrant enclave in Queens, New York.
Featured Commentaries
Reviewer commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works
When Ground Works Advisor Cheryl Ball suggested that peer review doesn’t
need to be a solitary, purely evaluative process, we got excited about
the possibility of a conversation among reviewers. This commentary is a conversation about that conversation.
Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research
Ecologies of Transdisciplinary Research
Paul Shrivastava, Laszlo Zsolnai, David Wasieleski, and Philippe Mairesse
There is a need to bridge the arts with the sciences to fully address the social and environmental crises facing the planet. Transdisciplinarity can meet this need if certain barriers are overcome: namely, delimited thinking and dysfunctional institutional structures.
August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0009 · CC-BY-NC-SA
View Commentary