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

Announcements

Ground Works Releases Second Special Edition: Creating Knowledge in Common
November 14, 2024

Ground Works is excited to launch its latest special edition, Creating Knowledge in Common, featuring academic community/partnerships that center the arts and design. The projects in this colle...

More


See All Announcements




Featured Articles

Prairie Block: Designing and Building Community Resilience in the Heartland

Suzan Hampton and Keith Van de Riet

Design for community resilience requires a multi-dimensional approach addressing the three pillars of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. The Prairie Block project in Lawrence, Kansas integrated all three pillars in a novel way to generate a replicable model of sustainable design that can be used in other communities.

Within the context of a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-identified low-moderate income neighborhood, vanguard public, private, nonprofit, and institutional partnerships were facilitated by university design-build architecture students, faculty, and a community leader. Through this constellation of partners, a formerly under-utilized park was transformed in five months and with zero budget into a thriving neighborhood landmark complete with a community orchard, shade structure, walking trails, and creek access.

The catalyst of this revitalized public amenity is Kaw Pavilion, an artistic shade structure fabricated by the students that honors the area’s Indigenous and other early inhabitants while celebrating the neighborhood’s iconoclastic character and strong activist identity.

Other park improvements include a 35-tree free-fruit community orchard and walking trails, with prairie plants and carved limestone benches, that connect the playground and the creek. Subsequent park additions include a new splash pad, public restroom, and bus stop. The park now serves as a node on a trail network that connects all the neighborhoods in Lawrence.

Prairie Block strengthens a sense of place and fosters sustainability on economic, social, and environmental levels by pulling together shared history, present-day neighborhood identity, and connections to the rest of the city. The Parks and Recreation Department is replicating this partnership and multi-faceted design model in other low-moderate income neighborhoods on the trail system.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0146 · CC-BY

Virtual Forests as a Creative Medium for Community Co-Creation and Collaboration

Aidan Ackerman, Daphna Gadoth-Goodman, Emily Esch, Robert Malmscheimer, Timothy Volk, Sara Constantineau, and Lauren Cooper

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.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0148 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork

Ben Spatz, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, and Agnieszka Mendel

“Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” was a two-year research project that explored the construction of identity through the act of singing. The heart of the project was a six-month laboratory period in which the three of us worked closely together, on a full-time basis, as skilled performance practitioners investigating the cultural and epistemic potential of songs. In response to critical work in the humanities and social sciences calling for greater recognition of embodied knowledge and practice in emerging research paradigms, the Judaica project implemented a new type of laboratory, in which interactions of technique, identity, and place gave rise to new forms of knowledge. Drawing on critical theories of identity, as well as studies of laboratory research in the sciences, the project offers a model for the post-technoscientific laboratory as a “place of making” in which bodies, songs, actions, objects, and concepts come together in unexpected and generative ways. Among the key discoveries of the project was a new method for sustained, experimental, embodied practice, grounded in critical theories of gender and racial identity, as well as a new approach to the editing and co-authorship of video works generated through this process. These video materials are both data for cultural researchers and research outcomes in their own right.

October 2020 · 10.48807/2020.0039 · 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