Ground
Works

The Filipino migrant worker’s story takes place across continents, resulting in gaps and silences within their story when viewed from a single perspective. How can techniques in illustration be used to challenge linearity and dominant perspectives? How can it be used to record and retell histories of marginalized/migrant populations? In a collaboration with Damayan Migrant Workers Association and Barnard College History Department, the project utilizes both art-based research and field work methodologies toward an illustrated visual essay of the experience of the Filipino migrant domestic worker in New York City. It looks at how illustration can be used as a tool for documentation and journalism. Illustration can record and inform, but it can also fill silences in the archive, as well as protect subjects who may be undocumented or trafficked, especially in contexts in which photography might have jeopardized their safety. Field work, reportage drawing, and interview aid in recording my experience as a volunteer staff member in Damayan. In late 2023, I illustrated and designed 20 Years of Damayan, a visual historical timeline for the organization, assisted by collaborative archival research with Barnard College History. I then brought my illustration methodology to Little Manila, the Filipino im/migrant enclave in Queens, New York.

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.