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Works

ASKXXI: Arts + Science Knowledge Building and Sharing in the XXI (21st) Century was a US-Chile pilot program fostering inquiry and inter-hemispheric collaboration in art, emerging technologies, and the ecological sciences. Funded through a US Embassy public diplomacy grant, ASKXXI was an adaptive curriculum model situated on a collaborative platform of academic partners. This model provided freedom, flexibility, and responsiveness to dynamic learning and professional development opportunities. The year-long pilot was customized to a jury-selected cohort of Chilean professionals working at the intersection of art and science. Experiential, site-based workshops in arts, ecology, embryology, biomechanics, technology research, and science communication provided exposure to frontier research scientists, data visualization and immersive technology innovators, as well as contemporary artists focused on ecology. Despite the inherent challenges in launching such an independent and distributed program, ASKXXI expanded professional capacities and opportunities. Most importantly, the program activated a thriving ecosystem of practitioners working on pressing issues of sustainability, biodiversity loss, and climate change in both regions. An “ecology of practices” is the framework of our transdisciplinary pilot that tested the feasibility of interhemispheric knowledge exchange, interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration, and impact-focused cultural and scientific diplomacy.

Art should be integral to research, education, and expressing lived experiences. Podcasts, animations, spoken word, video games, and multimodal, born-digital books can be modalities of learning and teaching that decolonize representations, especially when they are founded on deep collaboration. Coming out of IRIE Center (Innovative Research and Intercultural Education), a group of scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, K-12 schools, and community leaders, collectively called The Collaboratory, facilitates research that is timely, evocative, and critical to understanding a fuller history of the Americas. The Collaboratory’s goals are to push the boundaries of grant-funded research, public humanities, and arts-integrated education.

This article highlights two overlapping projects from the past six years. The first is a Decolonizing Representations workshop series that began in 2019 and used Evocative Ethnography including communal experiences of art, critical art making, and deep collaboration to achieve four goals: 1) excavate hidden stories, 2) learn about techniques and concepts like Evocative Ethnography and Afrofuturism, 3) critically create art together and therein bond across cultural differences, and 4) craft evocative products such that content becomes accessible to a larger, public audience. Expanding on these four goals, IRIE Center partnered with WUFT at the University of Florida (UF) College of Journalism on the second project: creating a podcast series Decolonizing Representations: Evoking the Hidden Histories of Black Lives in Florida through a Lens of Afrofuturism. The last episode of the series integrated African American Studies high school students in the process of archival research and podcast creation. These kinds of deep collaborations bring together university scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, librarians, public school systems, K-12 students, museums, and local community organizations and leaders. This work is continuing to develop into animations, a documentary television series, and video games.