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.
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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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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ASKXXI: Ecologies of Interdisciplinary Research and Practice in Art + Science and Technology
ASKXXI: Arts + Science Knowledge Building and Sharing in the XXI (21st) Century was a US-Chile pilot program fostering inquiry and inter-hemispheric collaboration in art, emerging technologies, and the ecological sciences. Funded through a US Embassy public diplomacy grant, ASKXXI was an adaptive curriculum model situated on a collaborative platform of academic partners. This model provided freedom, flexibility, and responsiveness to dynamic learning and professional development opportunities. The year-long pilot was customized to a jury-selected cohort of Chilean professionals working at the intersection of art and science. Experiential, site-based workshops in arts, ecology, embryology, biomechanics, technology research, and science communication provided exposure to frontier research scientists, data visualization and immersive technology innovators, as well as contemporary artists focused on ecology. Despite the inherent challenges in launching such an independent and distributed program, ASKXXI expanded professional capacities and opportunities. Most importantly, the program activated a thriving ecosystem of practitioners working on pressing issues of sustainability, biodiversity loss, and climate change in both regions. An “ecology of practices” is the framework of our transdisciplinary pilot that tested the feasibility of interhemispheric knowledge exchange, interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration, and impact-focused cultural and scientific diplomacy.
Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
Choreografish is a participatory research project leveraging virtual reality, arts engagement, and design to collaborate with young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The research team was motivated by a combination of observations: that some people with ASD experience social anxiety and attendant difficulties accessing social art forms such as dance and choreography, and that some have a predilection for developing patterns as a way of exerting control and making meaning. University of Utah faculty in engineering, dance, and social science collaborated with young adults with ASD on a virtual reality (VR) prototype to explore if synchronizing motion patterns to music may actually play well to the advantages of some on the autism spectrum and lower the barrier to a creative arts experience. Might choreographing in virtual reality help some people with ASD to self-manage anxiety?
Realm of the Dead: A Mixed-Media Installation Performance
Realm of the Dead (“Realm”) is a mixed-media installation performance where the installation can also be given separately as an art exhibit. A blend of social work and arts research, Realm incorporates practice-led, engagement, and design research – visual and performance art practices actively involving both research collaborators and audiences. Grounded in social work research and content, Realm explores my life, the life of an immigrant to the United States who grew up in Brazil at the time of the military dictatorship (1964‒1985). Realm connects social work research content as it explores personal and social consequences of psychosocial issues: grief and loss, gender nonconformity, sexual orientation, and undocumented immigration status. Using critical autoethnography along with visual art and performance, in Realm, I aimed to: (1) excavate my life experiences through self-analysis; (2) develop text and artifacts (assemblage sculptures) representing those experiences, and (3) share the results as performances and art exhibits. Drawing on Popular Education – as advanced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and by Augusto Boal (1932–2009), founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, Realm requires audience participation and fosters social transformation. Realm is based on Marília, a one-person play that was performed on Theater Row New York City where it won the United Solo Festival (2016) Best Documentary Script award. Realm represents the cemetery where Marília, my sister, who died in an accident at the age of three, was buried. Realm is my journey out of a childhood of poverty, sexual trauma, and domestic violence. Arriving undocumented in the United States in 1987, I ultimately built a life as a United States citizen and out, gender non-conforming gay “man.”
Featured Commentaries
Commentary on Cultural Engagements in Nutrition, Arts and Sciences (CENAS)
Groundwork for Ground Works
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.
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Author commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works
Eric Handman
July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0007
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