Ground
Works

The Pennsylvania State University 'Viral Imaginations: COVID-19' project is a curated, online, publicly-accessible gallery and archive of Pennsylvanians’ creative expressions in response to their first-person, lived coronavirus pandemic realities. Constructing a safe and empowering space for sharing experiences across strata of race, ethnicity, language, age, socioeconomic status, education, and ability, the archive provides a platform for the preservation of unique and diverse narratives. Designed as a highly interdisciplinary endeavor, 'Viral Imaginations' brings together specialists from multiple domains— including art education; bioethics; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; communication arts and sciences; information technology; and data analytics—into a robust, just-in-time ecology that produces public good and hybrid scholarship. Arising from a university seed-funding call for proposals during pandemic exigencies, this project demonstrates how coalescing around crisis can yield critical theory, scholarly discourse, and pedagogical opportunities across various fields through arts and humanities inquiries. Such scholarship, in turn, has cultivated interrelationships among 'Viral Imaginations' faculty, fomenting deep disciplinary integration, such as academic collaboration, faculty cross-appointment, and the introduction of expanded courses and novel academic program offerings. Artistic works within the 'Viral Imaginations' archive often challenge existing worldviews and traditions, calling individuals to question perceptions of reality, along with ethical judgments made in times of collective trauma. Ecologies of epistemology manifested in the visual and poetic work produced and exhibited in 'Viral Imaginations,' disrupting how we have known ourselves and our environment. Utilizing digital capacities to rearrange and reimagine order and relationality, the pandemic stories that emerge provide poignant insights into the affective state of humanity in crisis.

The New Americans’ Pavilion at Salt City Harvest Farm (SCHF) is an interdisciplinary community-university partnered design project that supports food sovereignty for refugees in Syracuse, New York. The building is an important social hub for the refugee diaspora, and also a research testbed for an innovative off-the-grid, solar-powered cold storage system that is intended to become a model for small community farms. Syracuse is home to more than ten thousand refugees, with origins ranging from Somalia to Bhutan to Cambodia. Many refugees live in areas of the city with limited access to a variety of fresh food. SCHF was established in 2014 to provide the refugee community with farmland where they can grow the kinds of food they want to eat, as well as educational programs where they can learn to farm and bring their produce to market. In 2020, SCHF began a collaboration with faculty and students at Syracuse University to design and build the New Americans’ Pavilion. The pavilion includes covered space for washing, packing, and storing produce from the farm, as well as flexible space for dining and educational events. The building was designed and constructed over a three-year period by a team comprising university faculty and students, community volunteers, professional contractors, and Salt City Harvest Farm staff. The project was supported by funding from the Chobani® Community Impact Fund, the Central New York Community Foundation, the Reisman Foundation, and an Innovative and Interdisciplinary Research Grant from Syracuse University.