Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Editors: Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire
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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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Decolonizing Representations to Evoke the Complexity of Black Lives in Florida
Art should be integral to research, education, and expressing lived experiences. Podcasts, animations, spoken word, video games, and multimodal, born-digital books can be modalities of learning and teaching that decolonize representations, especially when they are founded on deep collaboration. Coming out of IRIE Center (Innovative Research and Intercultural Education), a group of scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, K-12 schools, and community leaders, collectively called The Collaboratory, facilitates research that is timely, evocative, and critical to understanding a fuller history of the Americas. The Collaboratory’s goals are to push the boundaries of grant-funded research, public humanities, and arts-integrated education.
This article highlights two overlapping projects from the past six years. The first is a Decolonizing Representations workshop series that began in 2019 and used Evocative Ethnography including communal experiences of art, critical art making, and deep collaboration to achieve four goals: 1) excavate hidden stories, 2) learn about techniques and concepts like Evocative Ethnography and Afrofuturism, 3) critically create art together and therein bond across cultural differences, and 4) craft evocative products such that content becomes accessible to a larger, public audience. Expanding on these four goals, IRIE Center partnered with WUFT at the University of Florida (UF) College of Journalism on the second project: creating a podcast series Decolonizing Representations: Evoking the Hidden Histories of Black Lives in Florida through a Lens of Afrofuturism. The last episode of the series integrated African American Studies high school students in the process of archival research and podcast creation. These kinds of deep collaborations bring together university scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, librarians, public school systems, K-12 students, museums, and local community organizations and leaders. This work is continuing to develop into animations, a documentary television series, and video games.Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Supporting Urban Amazonian Floodplain Communities Through Data and Art
In the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, Indigenous communities have been living in river floodplains for millennia and have developed unique cultural connections with the living waters and their rich biodiversity. To escape hardship (e.g. over extraction of resources, slavery, climate change impacts etc.), or seek opportunities (e.g. health, education, economic etc.), hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people have migrated from the jungle to Amazonian cities such as Iquitos over the past hundred years. Referencing traditional lifestyles, many of these migrants created floating and stilted communities in the city’s floodplain edges. Their multi-generational knowledge of floodplain agriculture, amphibious housing, and deeply-rooted community structures provides cultural, economic, and ecosystem services to the whole city. However, this mass migration also created challenges in housing, infrastructure and public services for the whole city. The Iquitos regional government has responded by enacting mandatory relocation for these residents to new highland developments far from the river, threatening their unique riverine cultures and deforesting a rare white sand rainforest ecosystem. In this visual narrative, we describe a blended arts and sciences project, Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Life Within Peru’s Urban Amazonian Floodplains, in which a highly collaborative team of 24 Peruvian and U.S. researchers and artists worked closely with 136 residents across three communities to showcase their life, health, and environmental connections, promoting traditional cultures and better-informed city planning that includes Indigenous Amazonian voices. We describe our interdisciplinary arts and sciences mixed-methods approach which included a public health survey, documentary photography, community drawings, and biodiversity/environmental measures that incorporated a community training program and local/traditional-scientific knowledge exchange workshop. Lastly, we discuss the value we found in pairing data with artistic storytelling, engaging diverse disciplines and academic-community partnerships, and uplifting underserved communities via an art and data exhibition.
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Featured Commentaries
Reviewer commentary on Forms of Freedom: The Art and Design of Black and Indigenous Creative Collectives
Incubating "Forms of Freedom..." for Ground Works
For readers who have never encountered
iterative play and creation as research methods, “Forms of Freedom…” is a
wonderful entry point, demonstrating how these methods can both
constitute a way of knowing and contribute to new knowledge.
Ground Works is a project of a2ru
Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research
Becoming Desirably Strange: A Dialogue between Aaron Knochel and Roger Malina
Aaron D. Knochel and Roger Malina
This dialogue developed over several months between guest editor Aaron Knochel and Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina regarding the special collection Vibrant Ecologies of Research. Key publications and projects are jumping-off points for this wide-ranging discussion.
August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0010 · CC-BY-NC
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