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

Cultural Engagements in Nutrition, Arts and Sciences (CENAS)

Tamara Underiner, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, Robert Karimi, and Seline Szkupinski Quiroga

Borrowing the Spanish word for “dinner,” CENAS is a transdisciplinary working group of scholars and artists developing, implementing and evaluating innovative approaches to healthy eating at the individual and community level, with arts practices at its center. Since 2012, CENAS has been involved with training, workshops, curriculum development, and research into the following questions: (1) Can the arts in general, and theatre-making in particular, empower individuals and communities to take charge of their health? (2) How does theatre-making relate to individual attitudinal and behavioral change? (3) What role does culture play in health? (4) Are the arts more effective in the long term than more traditional educational practices? Our research with young people and community health workers suggests that cooking together, combined with theatre-making activities, is linked positively to “I can do this” attitudes. We believe making theatre, more than merely watching it, is the key. We link the various components involved in making theatre together to factors identified by health scientists as necessary for attitudinal and behavioral change to occur. A growing body of research suggests the importance of culturally informed interventions in health promotion, yet most definitions of “culture” are pretty narrow. We are working to develop a more robust and nuanced accounting for cultural background as health asset, initially through embodied storytelling practices and theatre-making drawn from participants’ experiences of home cooking.

January 2018 · 10.48807/2020.0004

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

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

Eric Handman, Roger Altizer, Cheryl Wright, and Greg Bayles

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?

November 2020 · 10.48807/2020.0044

Featured Commentaries

“Choreografish” thoughtfully applies choreographic practice to virtual reality, work that will no doubt shape dancerly engagement with the digital for years to come. What was most inspiring about the project was how it bravely braided strains of expertise that too rarely come into contact.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0005

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I am glad that I engaged this experiment in transdisciplinary review and feel that the conversational review format served to increase my agency as a maker at the intersection of art, science, and medicine.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0006

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