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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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
Participatory Planning and Design Research for the ARTery
The ARTery is a proposed cultural corridor spanning historic neighborhood squares and commercial areas in the heart of Black Boston. Running from Jazz Square in the South End through Nubian Square down Dudley Street and along Blue Hill Avenue to Grove Hall, the planned 3-mile route connects clusters of small businesses, numerous vacant lots, and underutilized public spaces with arts and culture initiatives across Boston’s City Council District 7. The initiative aims to hire local artists, activists, and entrepreneurs to reface and beautify small businesses, paint public murals, activate green, open spaces, and improve street safety in ways that express the cultural identities of local communities on city streets. This article presents a case of interdisciplinary research and creative inquiry collaboratively undertaken by community and university partners to develop the vision and concept plan for the ARTery and gain institutional funding and implementation support from the City of Boston. After providing the background and context, we present the participatory planning and design research for the ARTery, corresponding pedagogical approach and teaching methods, initial results, and concluding reflections. Notwithstanding the project’s early stage, it carries implications for aligning university-based teaching and research with municipal governance and repurposing academic and government machinery to advance arts-based and artist-inclusive spatial planning and investments in racialized, low-income neighborhoods.
Cultural Engagements in Nutrition, Arts and Sciences (CENAS)
Virtual Forests as a Creative Medium for Community Co-Creation and Collaboration
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.
Featured Commentaries
Author commentary on Machines That Dream
Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research
Becoming Desirably Strange: A Dialogue between Aaron Knochel and Roger Malina
Aaron D. Knochel and Roger Malina
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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