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

Side by Side: Navigating the Messy Work of Staying Relational in University-Community Partnerships

Ann Holt and Cindy Maguire

This article describes community/university partnerships with ArtsAction Group’s work (AAG) situated in Kosovo, Western Sahara, and Sri Lanka and higher education partners in the US and UK. AAG is an international community-based arts collective (artsaction.org) that includes professional and student volunteer arts educators, art therapists, teaching artists, and educators. Our focus is with children and youth in conflict-affected environments impacted by trauma, violence, and/or efforts at cultural erasure. AAG centers arts and healing, to foster capabilities (Deneulin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011; Maguire & McCallum, 2019) critical to functioning and healthy societies and to emphasize relationality (ethics and responsibility towards each other) and impact (self cultivation and responsibility together). AAG involves artful coalitions (Kay & Wolf, 2017) of people from different geographic, cultural, and social positioning. In this article, we share insights on the messiness of transnational, transdisciplinary collaborations. We discuss knowledge generated from experiences navigating the complexities existing in arts and cultural partnerships including the multiple egos, traditions, rules, bureaucracy, expectations, and roles that are entangled in the work– and impossible to avoid. We acknowledge these encounters as necessary pedagogic processes of learning, trust-building, letting go of control, teamwork, and community-building. We resist normative hierarchical community/university partnerships and practices that are ‘conflict averse.’ Staying with the trouble in solidarity forces one to work in unexpected collaborations and combinations which can spark creative solutions and new ways of approaching equitable, community-centered, research projects.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0140 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Centering Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in Movement-Based Interventions

Yasemin Özümerzifon, Allison Ross, Emily Tellier, Gina Gibney, and Carol Ewing Garber

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a prevalent public health issue characterized by a pattern of abusive behavior by an intimate partner in a dating or family relationship, wherein one partner exerts power and control over the victim or survivor. Survivors who have experienced repeated trauma in their relationships utilize several resources and services from mental health support to legal counseling as they work to rebuild their lives. IPV is a complex social issue requiring a collaborative and interdisciplinary response. While the importance of addressing the effects of trauma on the body is recognized, there is a dearth of research exploring the impact of movement on survivors of IPV. Created as a collaboration between dancers, survivors, and social workers, Gibney's interdisciplinary Move to Move Beyond® program (MTMB) has been offered to thousands of IPV survivors since 1999. Recent findings from a randomized controlled trial suggest positive outcomes for female survivors of intimate partner violence who participated in the virtual Move to Move Beyond program during the COVID-19 pandemic. From its inception, the research was designed and conducted using an interdisciplinary approach through a partnership between the New York City-based dance and social justice organization, Gibney; Sanctuary for Families, a non-profit organization dedicated to aiding victims of domestic violence and their children; and Teachers College, Columbia University. Using the MTMB program as a case study, this paper highlights how an interdisciplinary approach to a dance and movement-based intervention is vital in centering the communities the program is designed for. Furthermore, it examines potential benefits of dance and movement for survivors of IPV through the lenses of participants and facilitators. More broadly, it demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary structures between academic and community partners to leverage resources and elevate the impact of the work within the community and beyond.

August 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0121 · CC-BY-NC

In a Time of Change: A Nested Ecosystem of Environmental Arts, Humanities, and Science Collaboration

Mary Beth Leigh and Lissy Goralnik

The integration of environmental science with arts and humanities (eSAH) has the potential to advance public understanding of science while inspiring emotional responses and attitude shifts that lead to pro-environmental behavior. The In a Time of Change (ITOC) program, an eSAH incubator in Alaska, uses place as a boundary object to bridge relationships between artists, writers, and scientists. Participants co-investigate a place-based environmental theme over the course of a year, then present their work at a public exhibit. At these exhibitions, the art and writing about place become boundary objects themselves around which broader publics gather to engage with ideas and landscapes. In this article, we describe the ITOC program and the broader ecosystems of eSAH work in which it is nested, including the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, where most sites host some kind of eSAH inquiry. We then use the case study of a recent ITOC project, Microbial Worlds, to demonstrate the ways relationships between artists, writers, and scientists are transmitted to audiences through eSAH collaborative exhibits, resulting in impacts to audience knowledge and attitudes about the natural world and broad support for eSAH approaches to environmental problem solving.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.0.0074 · CC-BY-NC

Featured Commentaries

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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Reviewer commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism

Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works

Sydney Skybetter, Lise Worthen-Chaudhari, Eric Handman, and Veronica Stanich

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.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2202.1.0004

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