Introduction to the collection
This Ground Works special collection, Creating Knowledge in Common, presents ten stories of university-community partnership that address societal issues through co-creative inquiry. As editors, we define co-creative inquiry as collaborative knowledge-building that draws on a variety of tools to foster awareness, exchange, reflection, and creative visioning and making, through which we ask better questions and discover more meaningful and effective answers together. Within collaborative partnerships, the arts and design fields facilitate creative methods for shared expression and exploration, converging multiple viewpoints into broader re-imaginings that result in advocacy, activism, and action with both rational and emotional force.
We (Criss, Hamilton, and McGuire), currently academics working within land grant institutions, recognize the responsibility that universities bear to share resources and directly engage with publics to address needs across society in order to fulfill their institutional mission and educate their students as engaged citizens. In a reciprocal manner, public organizations and communities also seek collaboration with faculty and students to expand resources and organizational capacity, broaden advocacy, and create public programs and spaces that address needs at the community scale. Founding charters, laws, and policies guide public universities in this regard, with publics rightfully calling for accountability to such commitments. Ideally, knowledge drawn from diverse partners creates both common and uncommon grounds for advancing greater understanding and action on entrenched issues within both communities and institutions.
Having participated as well as supported colleagues in this work, we are motivated through the collection to highlight stories of immense commitment to partnered research while also acknowledging the challenges and suspicion that can accompany such endeavors. In the original call for this collection, we asked our submitters: What structures are needed to collectively and meaningfully build on diverse knowledge traditions from across academic and community practices? How do these efforts ensure that both processes of inquiry and the knowledge produced are of value to all parties? What new knowledge about collaboration do these efforts produce? How do arts-based approaches extend and enrich university-community collaborations? The articles in the collection present an array of responses to these prompts and speak to the need for continued support and expanded capacity for these partnerships.
Context of the collection
We three editors of this special collection, also members of the Ground Works Editorial and Advisory Boards, have been in conversation together about how our respective disciplines and institutions recognize the importance of publicly engaged scholarship. We proposed this themed issue to the Advisory Board, who affirmed the value of such a venture for our moment.
That affirmation speaks not only to the need to address the challenges that community-engaged scholarship poses to faculty advancement, but also to the renewed wave of reflection, investment, and policy change in higher education in 2020 following the social disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and national calls to account for anti-Black racism. University administrations are looking to repair or strengthen past commitments to the publics they serve. Similarly, disciplinary organizations and journals are reflecting anew about how their criteria and language might disproportionately advantage white contributors, and many research communities have been coming to terms with how they exclude traditional, place-based, cultural forms of knowledge. Since Ground Works itself was originally created to fill a need for critical review and recognition of work in an underrecognized field—that of arts-integrative research-–the platform seemed an appropriate forum for arts-integrative work that faces an additional challenge to recognition because it is publicly-partnered.
Our application of a more capacious peer-review process joins other efforts within the academy to ensure inclusion of the broadest range of knowledge. For instance, a growing number of university promotion and tenure (P&T) review processes now review faculty research that explicitly values collaboration and knowledge generation practices represented in publicly-partnered research. (sidenote: See, for example: Guidance for Rewarding and Recognizing Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Arts, Research and Scholarship for Promotion, Tenure, and Reappointment in Schools of Architecture, and Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarhip. ↩ ) Essential to the evaluation of such cases is an expansion of criteria beyond the individual faculty member’s contribution to their professional field and academic discipline, to encompass demonstration of direct societal impact as a result of engagement. Such expanded processes typically invite community-based, non-academic constituents to evaluate the contribution of faculty member research to society.
It will take more than revisions to criteria for journal review, or attention to P&T processes, to accomplish the shifts needed for universities to truly benefit the communities their charters often call on them to serve. However, we hope that by including the arts and communities—both sources of knowledge excluded by traditional university structures—in one process and one collection, Creating Knowledge in Common can be a worthy contribution to the cause.
For that purpose, this collection extended the Ground Works review criteria not only to assess a project’s arts integration but also to discern the nature of a project’s university-community partnership. The criterion we added—“Is collaboration between academic and community-based partners integral to this project?”—surfaced meaningful conversations among the reviewers and editors and also invited deeper reflection among authors regarding the complexity of achieving such transformative work.
Entries in the collection
Within the collection, each entry narrates a unique story of community-university partnership, driven by its geographical context, partnership formation, creative research processes, duration of partnering and production, and challenges faced.
Importantly, the entries span diverse physical and cultural geographies and draw on knowledge of place in unique ways that underpin the issues engaged. For example, as described by Andrew Fox and Carla Delcambre in “Engagement, Education and Implementation: Supporting Community Driven Adaptations to Rising Waters in Princeville, North Carolina,” the Town of Princeville, the first established free Black town in the U.S., faced enormous rebuilding challenges in the wake of Hurricane Matthew in 2016. The community sought collaboration with North Carolina State University’s Coastal Dynamics Design Lab (CCDL) to create a resiliency plan founded on community “stay in place” commitments and knowledge of the land, combined with the regional planning and landscape architecture expertise of the CDDL. Other projects in the collection span the geographies of an urban neighborhood district threatened by gentrification in South Boston, Massachusetts; the carceral landscape of New Orleans, Louisiana; a creative, youth community in a low-income neighborhood in Toronto; an Indigenous floodplain community of the Peruvian Amazon; a refugee community in Syracuse, New York; a bottomland neighborhood in the Kaw Valley Watershed of Lawrence, Kansas; conflict-affected areas of Kosovo, Sri Lanka, and Western Sahara; and the virtual environments of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. The range of cultural geographic contexts within each entry set the stage for a wide range of place-specific needs and motivations that drive partners finding each other.
The way these partnerships are formed and structured—whether initiated by the university or the community—informs the process and outcomes of the collaborative projects. One example is an innovative long-term formal program and agreement process for recurring music education in the neighborhood that encompasses both a community music school and York University in Toronto, co-created and developed by Amy Hillis, Richard Marsella, and Diane Kolin in “Mapping the Relationship Between a University and Community Music School.” Another example is a broad, complex coalition of scientists, visual artists, and activists working across two continents with three Indigenous communities in the floodplain of the Amazon, presented in “Tres Comunidades, Un Rio: Supporting Urban Amazonian Floodplain Communities Through Data and Art” by Leann Andrews, Alexandra Jhonston Vela, Xiomara Valdivia Zavaleta, Jorge A. Alarcón Piscoya, Gemina Garland-Lewis, Kathleen L. Wolf, Ursula Valdez, Susana Cubas Poclin, Christian Ampudia Gatty, Carlo Tapia del Águila, Rebecca Bachman, Christina Flores, and Clancy Wolf.
In every project, art-making and design are central to making ideas visible, audible, tangible, and emotionally resonant. This collection showcases a wide range of creative processes and artifacts that have helped to expand conversations within communities and to communicate beyond those directly involved in their creation. In “Apothecarts: Mobilizing Abolition” by Emilie Taylor Welty, Jackie Sumell and Jose Cotto, the presence of incarcerated individuals and their contributions through a medicinal garden is powerfully seen and felt through mobile, interactive education-carts. Observing the project’s evolution—from a collaborative prototype to a fully realized presence in New Orleans and then at international events—highlights the broad impact of this work. Similarly, projects like “Virtual Forests as a Creative Medium for Community Co-Creation and Collaboration” by Aidan Ackerman, Daphna Gadoth-Goodman, Emily Esch, Robert Malmscheimer, Timothy Volk, Sara Constantineau, and Lauren Cooper use visualization, sound, digital media, and immersive processes to engage a broad audience in environmental decision making, without which understanding and investment would not occur. In “Participatory Planning and Design Research for the ARTery” by Lily Song and Tania Fernandes Anderson, the asset map and artist-informed site design schemes were critical in organizing and communicating a variety of local business and art-incubator opportunities, which are now being leveraged for public dialog, policy support, and city financial commitments.
Creating participatory and co-creative work takes time. At the start of any project, time must be dedicated to listening to one another, ensuring that all essential voices are “at the table,” establishing genuine trust, building networks, strengthening capacities, securing funding, carrying out the work, and incorporating reflective processes—all processes crucial for healthy outcomes. However, challenges, detours, and unforeseen disruptions (like the 2020 pandemic) inevitably arise and impact intended timelines. Additionally, academic calendars can be restrictive, often requiring projects to extend across multiple semesters or even years to build the sustainable partnerships desired. For example, “New Americans’ Pavilion: A Space of Cosmopolitan Cooperation in Syracuse, New York” by David Shanks, recounts the development of a project that began as a seemingly straightforward community partner initiative but ultimately took four years to complete in a way that established the needed connections between university and community participants as well as the technical development required. Likewise, the elementary school design-build project described in “Engagement, Education, and Implementation…” is one in a series of projects in that team’s long-term resiliency plan for the Town of Princeville, North Carolina after the devastation of Hurricane Matthew.
Beyond surprising detours in time, community-university co-creative projects face additional challenges and detours including resource limitations, varying levels of institutional support, miscommunication, personality conflicts, burnout, and more. For instance, “Side by Side: Navigating the Messy Work of Staying Relational in University-Community Partnerships” by Ann Holt and Cindy Maguire focuses on building capacity for faculty and students to travel and work within three distinct, distressed international communities. This entry illustrates the adaptability necessary to manage the “messiness” of transnational, transdisciplinary collaboration, underscoring the resilience needed to work across cultures and borders. Meanwhile, “Prairie Block: Designing and Building Community Resilience in the Heartland” by Suzan Hampton and Keith Van de Riet, a local project in a small town, highlights the extensive network of community partners and institutional support required to make design-build projects possible. With limited financial resources, the project relies on in-kind contributions and local partnerships, navigating a winding path to address obstacles through trust and commitment from both community and professional alliances.
Navigating the collection
The Ground Works platform is dedicated to publishing work from diverse disciplines using rich media. By extension, this collection for university-community partnerships that center the arts and design foregrounds their social aims and relationships through media-rich stories. The people behind this collection’s entries—from within universities and within communities—are deeply engaged in traditions of craft, discipline, community, and ritual that specifically informed the very projects presented and thus the stories of process and creative making presented in each entry. Contributors draw on experience and knowledge at the top of their respective fields, and we are eager for readers to familiarize themselves with a breadth and depth of collaborative arts- and design-driven practices that advance partnered research.
As editors, we want to invite all readers in, pulling out common threads across these projects while also respecting the distinct knowledge traditions at their foundation. To this end, we created an indexing and navigation system that we hope will facilitate discovery, providing a means to draw comparisons across projects as well as to learn more about their respective traditions and forms.
A keyword-based taxonomy groups the projects according to their “forms and structures,” their “processes and practices,” and their “motivations and goals.” A “form and structure” keyword such as placemaking invites learning about the projects that cohere under it just as they would in a journal dedicated solely to placemaking work. But the same projects invite different scrutiny and appreciation as they cohere with other projects under a “motivations and goals” keyword such as power which identifies projects by a critical motive we discerned in the project’s leaders, or a “processes and practices” keyword such as scalability, which identifies a unique value for those looking to grow such community-based processes and practices. This edition’s index page also offers an introductory bibliography titled “To learn more” for those seeking further information and scholarship about the traditions and conversations associated with these projects.
One more way this issue brings attention to diverse domains of expertise is through its pilot of the “CRediT-FAIR” system of acknowledging non-authorial contributions to knowledge production. This issue inaugurates a new taxonomy that acknowledges the different ways individuals contribute to a project that may not look like “authorship” in the traditional form. CRediT-FAIR adapts the “Contributor Role Taxonomy” (CRediT) stewarded by the National Information Standards Organization, adding new roles that accommodate both arts-integrated and community engaged research.
Reflecting on the collection
As with all Ground Works publications, this special collection aims to bring new visibility to groundbreaking projects and the distinctive processes that make them sing. However, some aspects of the material also remain unseen. Consistent with many of the critiques brought by this collection’s contributors, readers may well ask “Who or what might be missing from this picture through exclusion or occlusion?”
In reviewing the collection in near-finished form, a group of our reviewers observed a few such absences. For example, as focused as these projects are on the people they serve, we see and hear quite sparingly from those people directly. In its economy of presentation, the collection also occludes the sheer difficulty of achieving such work—the waiting for resources or institutional approval, the navigation of systems at times seemingly designed to prevent success, the wrestling over interpersonal disagreements or misalignments in goals, or the walking with community partners on whom many may depend for stability amidst inhospitable conditions.
In other words, it is important to note in an introduction to a collection like this one that the work at hand is importantly human and as a result, often messy, slow, and challenging. Consider how the CRedit-FAIR system employed here to give appropriate visibility to all contributors also multiplies the labor-hours needed to see these projects to publication. Or how the seemingly resolved matter of a built public structure or well-designed exhibit stands to occlude the unusually challenging work undertaken by those who made it. Different versions of this collection could offer a myriad different perspectives on these projects, highlighting such factors as the changes in heart or mind that took place in contributors, the changes in conditions for those served, or even the changes in institutional process or policy necessary to achieving them.
One way that we seek to better foreground the experiences and stories of project participants is through a virtual round table in spring 2025. We are inviting participants across this edition’s partnerships to come together to share and discuss their experiences, to reflect on the value of partnering, and to offer suggestions on improving the processes within university-community collaborations. The round table also provides an opportunity for readers to join the conversation. Materials coming out of the round table such as recordings and reflections will become part of Creating Knowledge in Common.
-Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire
