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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Call for Proposals

General Call for Submissions

Rolling Submissions

Cripping Creativity & Play: Artist-Led Explorations of Disabled Art-Making

Submit by February 16, 2026

Special Issue: Cripping Creativity & Play: Artist-Led Explorations of Disabled Art-Making

Guest editor: Dr. Elizabeth McLain

Ground Works launches its Reco(r)ding CripTech online archive...

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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

Realm of the Dead: A Mixed-Media Installation Performance

Rogério Meireles Pinto

Realm of the Dead (“Realm”) is a mixed-media installation performance where the installation can also be given separately as an art exhibit. A blend of social work and arts research, Realm incorporates practice-led, engagement, and design research – visual and performance art practices actively involving both research collaborators and audiences. Grounded in social work research and content, Realm explores my life, the life of an immigrant to the United States who grew up in Brazil at the time of the military dictatorship (1964‒1985). Realm connects social work research content as it explores personal and social consequences of psychosocial issues: grief and loss, gender nonconformity, sexual orientation, and undocumented immigration status. Using critical autoethnography along with visual art and performance, in Realm, I aimed to: (1) excavate my life experiences through self-analysis; (2) develop text and artifacts (assemblage sculptures) representing those experiences, and (3) share the results as performances and art exhibits. Drawing on Popular Education – as advanced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and by Augusto Boal (1932–2009), founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, Realm requires audience participation and fosters social transformation. Realm is based on Marília, a one-person play that was performed on Theater Row New York City where it won the United Solo Festival (2016) Best Documentary Script award. Realm represents the cemetery where Marília, my sister, who died in an accident at the age of three, was buried. Realm is my journey out of a childhood of poverty, sexual trauma, and domestic violence. Arriving undocumented in the United States in 1987, I ultimately built a life as a United States citizen and out, gender non-conforming gay “man.”

September 2022 · 10.48807/2022.0.0105 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Centering Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in Movement-Based Interventions

Yasemin Özümerzifon, Allison Ross, Emily Tellier, Gina Gibney, and Carol Ewing Garber

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a prevalent public health issue characterized by a pattern of abusive behavior by an intimate partner in a dating or family relationship, wherein one partner exerts power and control over the victim or survivor. Survivors who have experienced repeated trauma in their relationships utilize several resources and services from mental health support to legal counseling as they work to rebuild their lives. IPV is a complex social issue requiring a collaborative and interdisciplinary response. While the importance of addressing the effects of trauma on the body is recognized, there is a dearth of research exploring the impact of movement on survivors of IPV. Created as a collaboration between dancers, survivors, and social workers, Gibney's interdisciplinary Move to Move Beyond® program (MTMB) has been offered to thousands of IPV survivors since 1999. Recent findings from a randomized controlled trial suggest positive outcomes for female survivors of intimate partner violence who participated in the virtual Move to Move Beyond program during the COVID-19 pandemic. From its inception, the research was designed and conducted using an interdisciplinary approach through a partnership between the New York City-based dance and social justice organization, Gibney; Sanctuary for Families, a non-profit organization dedicated to aiding victims of domestic violence and their children; and Teachers College, Columbia University. Using the MTMB program as a case study, this paper highlights how an interdisciplinary approach to a dance and movement-based intervention is vital in centering the communities the program is designed for. Furthermore, it examines potential benefits of dance and movement for survivors of IPV through the lenses of participants and facilitators. More broadly, it demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary structures between academic and community partners to leverage resources and elevate the impact of the work within the community and beyond.

August 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0121 · CC-BY-NC

Just-in-time Ecology of Interdisciplinarity: Working with 'Viral Imaginations' in Pandemic Times

Lauren Stetz, Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Michele Mekel

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.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.0.0085 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Featured Commentaries

Community commentary on Creating Knowledge in Common

Beyond Authorship: Crediting Contributors to Arts-Integrated Research with CRediT-FAIR

Leann Andrews, Daragh Byrne, Kevin Hamilton, and Mohammad Hosseini

*Ground Works* Technical Director Daragh Byrne developed CRediT-FAIR, an adaptation of [NISO's](https://niso.org/) [CRediT](https://credit.niso.org/), as a means to recognize non-authorial contributions to arts-integrated research. He and other panelists discussed the system's origins, uses, and implementations in [an a2ru webinar in December, 2024](https://vimeo.com/1036884647/1bef6db14e?share=copy). That webinar discussion is the basis for this commentary.

December 2025 · 10.48807/2025.1.0012 · CC-BY-NC-ND

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“Choreografish” thoughtfully applies choreographic practice to virtual reality, work that will no doubt shape dancerly engagement with the digital for years to come. What was most inspiring about the project was how it bravely braided strains of expertise that too rarely come into contact.

July 2021 · 10.48807/2022.1.0005

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