“Creating Knowledge in Common” Ask Them Anything: Design/Build
Feb 14, 2025 1-2pm Eastern/10-11am Pacific
Join a2ru for our third Creating Knowledge in Common “Ask Them Anything” webinar. Creating Knowledge in Common is a special collection on Ground Works, a2ru’s online platform for arts-integrated research. Through peer-reviewed projects, it explores partnered university/community research that centers the arts or design.
Bring all your questions for Creating Knowledge in Common Editors Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire, and for project authors Andy Fox, Suzan Hampton, David Shanks, and Emilie Taylor-Welty. This webinar will have only brief presentations, allowing maximum time for your questions and comments about the collection as a whole and about these authors’ projects: Fox’s “Engagement, Education and Implementation: Supporting Community-Driven Adaptations to Rising Waters in Princeville, North Carolina,” Hampton’s “Prairie Block: Designing and Building Community Resilience in the Heartland,” Shanks’s “New Americans’ Pavilion: A Space of Cosmopolitan Cooperation in Syracuse, New York,” and Taylor-Welty’s “Apothecarts: Mobilizing Abolition.”
Read ahead of time, then ask them anything—about design-build projects and pedagogy, creating knowledge in common across institutions and communities, creating a community hub with little to no budget, sustaining design/build projects across academic terms, using design to promote advocacy and education, collaborating across boundaries—whatever sparks your interest in these readings! You are warmly invited to bring your questions and your lunch/coffee/snack (depending on your time zone).
Registration
In keeping with the open-access mission of Ground Works, all online events in association with “Creating Knowledge in Common” are free and open to the public. Please use the form linked below to register.
Panelists
Andy Fox
Andrew ‘Andy’ Fox, PLA, FASLA is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning, University Faculty Scholar, and Community Engaged Faculty Fellow at North Carolina State University. He is also a licensed landscape architect and the director of the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, an interdisciplinary technical assistance initiative that addresses critical ecological and built environment challenges in climate-vulnerable communities across North Carolina. The goal of Andy’s work is actionable change in the context of the public realm. His expertise resides at the intersection of civic landscapes, nature-based infrastructure, resilient community design, and hazard mitigation. He uses action research and service learning to strategically advance community, pedagogical, and scholarly goals. To date, projects completed under his direction have resulted in commitments of nearly $35M to fund community-based projects. The outcomes of his work across the realms of teaching, research, engagement, and design have been published and presented in peer-review, professional, and popular media venues and distinguished by numerous national and international awards.
Suzan Hampton
Combining her interdisciplinary design practice with a first career in IT, sixth-generation Kansan and doctoral student in architecture at the University of Kansas Suzan Hampton explores the potential of synthesizing place-identity with public/private partnerships and site-specific public art to foster community and environmental resilience. Her architecture experience includes residential, small commercial, higher education, and museum architectural design, exhibition design, landscape architecture, and land use planning. At Apple Inc., she was a member of the early FaceTime and iPhone core development teams, among others. A LEED AP BD+C since 2010, Hampton earned her M.Arch at The University of New Mexico where her research focused on both vernacular natural building systems and advanced sustainable building technologies.
David Shanks
David Shanks, RA, NCARB is an Assistant Professor in the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture. He is co-founder of the architectural practice ASDF, which was named Best of Practice by The Architect’s Newspaper in 2021, and received a Merit Award from the American Institute of Architects New York State Chapter in 2023. Previously, he practiced in globally recognized offices such as Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), Gluckman Tang Architects, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. David has exhibited his design work in venues such as the Boston Society of Architects, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Biennale di Architettura di Pisa. He has published his written research in journals such as Pidgin and the Journal of Architectural Educations, and in the edited volume Mies van der Rohe: The Architecture of the City (Il Poligrafo, 2023). David has been a resident fellow of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust and the MacDowell Colony.
Emilie Taylor Welty
Emilie Taylor Welty is a leader in design build education whose research and practice are grounded in material explorations and expanding access to design. She is an architect and associate professor at the Tulane School of Architecture where she serves as the architecture program director. Emilie is co-founder and principal at Colectivo, a New Orleans based architecture firm grounded in making as part of the design process. Her award winning practice has built internationally recognized projects that focus on material investigations and affordability. At Tulane, Welty has led over thirty applied research projects, teaching design/build studios that make a positive impact in New Orleans neighborhoods. The community-based work of the Small Center includes award-winning and transformative projects such as Grow Dat Youth Farm and Parisite Skatepark. Welty recently received a national Practice and Leadership award from the AIA/ACSA as well as a Collaborative Practice Award for her work with Small Center from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).
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.