Creating Knowledge in Common, Together: A Round Table
Feb 21, 2025 2 to 5pm Eastern/11am to 2pm Pacific
Panelists
“Creating Knowledge in Common” Guest Editors Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire, and select authors and contributors to “Creating Knowledge in Common”.
About the Event
This event brings together community and university partners whose shared art- and design-centered work is published in the Ground Works special edition Creating Knowledge in Common. This session will include an introduction to the special edition, but will quickly move into storytelling, question and answer sessions, and breakouts to get into the personal and creative efforts and energies that drive this work forward. Topics include histories of collaboration, creating visions for research based in the arts and design, challenges, and meaningful outcomes that emerge along these journeys.
Registration
In keeping with the open-access mission of Ground Works, all online events related to “Creating Knowledge in Common” are free and open to the public. Please register using the form linked below.
About the Panelists
Shannon Criss
Shannon Criss is a professor of architecture at the University of Kansas (KU) and licensed architect. She co-directs the award-winning Dotte Agency, a multi-disciplinary design collaborative that enables community engagement processes to create an architecture that serves marginalized communities. Working with community partners, faculty and students she develops and delivers design solutions that shape the built environment in order to improve public health. Her writings have appeared in Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture, Design Build Education in North America, Plan Journal, and All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture. She has received the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Collaborative Practice Award, an International Association for Research on Service-learning and Community Engagement National Public Scholarship Award, and the Steeples Service to Kansans Award. She has served as a Faculty Fellow at KU’s Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and currently serves as a board advisor for Ground Works.
Kevin Hamilton
Kevin Hamilton is an artist, researcher, and administrator, and currently serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A member of the Illinois faculty since 2002, his previous appointments include a term as Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts (2018-2024), and a role as advisor to Illinois’ Humanities Research Institute on Digital Humanities strategy. Trained as a painter, Hamilton turned in his early career to networked and digital media forms as applied in public art settings, merging historical scholarship and practice through gallery exhibition and commissioned projects. While at Illinois, he has been especially active as a collaborator with scientists and scholars, including research on bias in digital search platforms that led to a significant Supreme Court ruling (Van Buren vs. United States, 2021), and the publishing of Lookout America!: the Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (Dartmouth, 2019), a definitive history of nuclear test photography in the United States. His work has earned support and recognition from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Illinois Arts Council. Hamilton also contributed to a leading white paper on recognizing community-engaged research in faculty promotion processes, and is a co-founder of Ground Works.
Mary Pat McGuire
Mary Pat McGuire is a Licensed Landscape Architect and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign where she currently serves as Dean’s Fellow for Research in the College of Fine & Applied Arts. With an interest in urban land as a medium for liberating sites and communities for climate resilience and human well-being, in 2022, McGuire formed Depave Chicago, an initiative to enable communities to remove pavement and transform land into healing and life-supportive landscapes. She and her partners are actively working on their first pilot project in South Side Chicago to break ground in summer 2025. McGuire’s work and collaborations appear in The Plan Journal, Landscape Journal, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, Next City, The Nation, Streetsblog USA, and FRESH WATER: Design Research for Inland Water Territories (AR+D, 2019). McGuire earned her Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia.