Ground
Works

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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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

Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork

Ben Spatz, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, and Agnieszka Mendel

“Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” was a two-year research project that explored the construction of identity through the act of singing. The heart of the project was a six-month laboratory period in which the three of us worked closely together, on a full-time basis, as skilled performance practitioners investigating the cultural and epistemic potential of songs. In response to critical work in the humanities and social sciences calling for greater recognition of embodied knowledge and practice in emerging research paradigms, the Judaica project implemented a new type of laboratory, in which interactions of technique, identity, and place gave rise to new forms of knowledge. Drawing on critical theories of identity, as well as studies of laboratory research in the sciences, the project offers a model for the post-technoscientific laboratory as a “place of making” in which bodies, songs, actions, objects, and concepts come together in unexpected and generative ways. Among the key discoveries of the project was a new method for sustained, experimental, embodied practice, grounded in critical theories of gender and racial identity, as well as a new approach to the editing and co-authorship of video works generated through this process. These video materials are both data for cultural researchers and research outcomes in their own right.

October 2020 · 10.48807/2020.0039 · CC-BY

Engagement, Education and Implementation: Supporting Community-Driven Adaptations to Rising Waters in Princeville, North Carolina

Andy Fox and Carla Delcambre

This article describes a collaboration between a STEM-focused land grant university in Raleigh, North Carolina and the Town of Princeville, North Carolina. Princeville experienced severe flood damage in 2016 due to Hurricane Matthew. As an important community hub, Princeville Elementary School, a Title 1 school, was heavily impacted by the floodwaters. After renovations, the school was set to re-open in January 2020 but had to pivot to online learning in March 2020 due to the pandemic. The North Carolina State University (NCSU) Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, who had been working with the Town of Princeville on disaster recovery planning, conducted a survey with the school that revealed that the teachers at Princeville Elementary School needed outdoor learning opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers wanted to challenge traditional indoor learning settings and promote access to fresh air and tactile outdoor learning opportunities for their students. The Design + Build Studio at NCSU, in the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning, was invited to collaborate but the studio was not originally structured to operate as an off-campus model. The pandemic provided an opportunity for graduate students to continue the Design + Build program during the pandemic; yet the challenge was to adapt the traditional, hands-on studio to online instruction. Students faced design constraints but adapted to fabricating modular structures off-site and installing site furnishings for the outdoor learning environment during the summer of 2021 and 2022. The collaboration between the university and the Town of Princeville demonstrates the potential for such partnerships to make a positive impact in the community, even in the face of pandemic-era conditions and shifted modalities of shared creativity.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0153 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Cultural Engagements in Nutrition, Arts and Sciences (CENAS)

Tamara Underiner, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, Robert Karimi, and Seline Szkupinski Quiroga

Borrowing the Spanish word for “dinner,” CENAS is a transdisciplinary working group of scholars and artists developing, implementing and evaluating innovative approaches to healthy eating at the individual and community level, with arts practices at its center. Since 2012, CENAS has been involved with training, workshops, curriculum development, and research into the following questions: (1) Can the arts in general, and theatre-making in particular, empower individuals and communities to take charge of their health? (2) How does theatre-making relate to individual attitudinal and behavioral change? (3) What role does culture play in health? (4) Are the arts more effective in the long term than more traditional educational practices? Our research with young people and community health workers suggests that cooking together, combined with theatre-making activities, is linked positively to “I can do this” attitudes. We believe making theatre, more than merely watching it, is the key. We link the various components involved in making theatre together to factors identified by health scientists as necessary for attitudinal and behavioral change to occur. A growing body of research suggests the importance of culturally informed interventions in health promotion, yet most definitions of “culture” are pretty narrow. We are working to develop a more robust and nuanced accounting for cultural background as health asset, initially through embodied storytelling practices and theatre-making drawn from participants’ experiences of home cooking.

January 2018 · 10.48807/2020.0004

Featured Commentaries

Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research

Cripping Media Art Ecologies

Lindsey D. Felt and Vanessa Chang

By remaking the creative design cycle through an accessibility and disability justice lens, Leonardo CripTech Incubator scaffolds new forms of artistic access. Bringing a disability justice lens to art-and-technology research practice and to this incubator’s design, we position ourselves as facilitators in this vibrant ecology, calling up other critical voices in this process.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0011 · CC-BY-NC-SA

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

Reviewing “Choreografish” for Ground Works

Lise Worthen-Chaudhari

I am glad that I engaged this experiment in transdisciplinary review and feel that the conversational review format served to increase my agency as a maker at the intersection of art, science, and medicine.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0006

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