
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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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...
MoreFeatured Articles
Just-in-time Ecology of Interdisciplinarity: Working with 'Viral Imaginations' in Pandemic Times
Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork
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
Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research
Ecologies of Transdisciplinary Research
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.
Reviewer commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
Last Word on Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works
Veronica Stanich
July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0008
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