
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
Machines That Dream
Side by Side: Navigating the Messy Work of Staying Relational in University-Community Partnerships
This article describes community/university partnerships with ArtsAction Group’s work (AAG) situated in Kosovo, Western Sahara, and Sri Lanka and higher education partners in the US and UK. AAG is an international community-based arts collective (artsaction.org) that includes professional and student volunteer arts educators, art therapists, teaching artists, and educators. Our focus is with children and youth in conflict-affected environments impacted by trauma, violence, and/or efforts at cultural erasure. AAG centers arts and healing, to foster capabilities (Deneulin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011; Maguire & McCallum, 2019) critical to functioning and healthy societies and to emphasize relationality (ethics and responsibility towards each other) and impact (self cultivation and responsibility together). AAG involves artful coalitions (Kay & Wolf, 2017) of people from different geographic, cultural, and social positioning. In this article, we share insights on the messiness of transnational, transdisciplinary collaborations. We discuss knowledge generated from experiences navigating the complexities existing in arts and cultural partnerships including the multiple egos, traditions, rules, bureaucracy, expectations, and roles that are entangled in the work– and impossible to avoid. We acknowledge these encounters as necessary pedagogic processes of learning, trust-building, letting go of control, teamwork, and community-building. We resist normative hierarchical community/university partnerships and practices that are ‘conflict averse.’ Staying with the trouble in solidarity forces one to work in unexpected collaborations and combinations which can spark creative solutions and new ways of approaching equitable, community-centered, research projects.
ASKXXI: Ecologies of Interdisciplinary Research and Practice in Art + Science and Technology
Featured Commentaries
Reviewer commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
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
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