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

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

Mapping the Relationship Between a University and Community Music School

Amy Hillis and Richard Marsella

In this article, the authors trace the origins of a unique partnership between a community music school in Toronto, Canada and a  neighboring  university. Co-authored by Dr. Richard Marsella, Executive Director of Community Music Schools of Toronto, and Dr. Amy Hillis, Assistant Professor of Music at York University, their commentary discusses the origins of an endowed, community-university partnership with the Helen Carswell Chair in Community-Engaged Research in the Arts at York University. This partnership supports and facilitates research projects that benefit community arts organizations and the Jane Finch community, an underserved neighborhood near York University and home to the "Community Music Schools of Toronto at Jane Finch." From advancement and knowledge mobilization, through to design and defining a shared mission, this article unpacks the process of building a partnership between a community music school and a university. Dr. Marsella and Dr. Hillis share their unique perspectives in a discussion of the partnership’s challenges, successes and continued evolution. They question how to build an ideal relationship between researchers and research partners that has sustainable alignment between research topics and research needs. How can creativity and artistry be used to support university researchers' objectives in alignment with a community music organization’s infrastructure? This article includes 1) analyses of case studies from the first five years of the partnership’s existence, including research projects that cultivated long-term relationships between researcher and community music school, and 2) recommendations for other academic and community institutions to develop similar partnerships.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0147 · CC-BY-NC-SA

Participatory Planning and Design Research for the ARTery

Lily Song and Tania Fernandes Anderson

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.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0115 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Featured Commentaries

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

Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works

Sydney Skybetter, Lise Worthen-Chaudhari, Eric Handman, and Veronica Stanich

When Ground Works Advisor Cheryl Ball suggested that peer review doesn’t need to be a solitary, purely evaluative process, we got excited about the possibility of a conversation among reviewers. This commentary is a conversation about that conversation.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2202.1.0004

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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

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