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

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

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

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

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

View Commentary

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