“Creating Knowledge in Common” Ask Them Anything: Placemaking and Placekeeping
Jan 17, 2025 1-2pm Eastern/10-11am Pacific
Join a2ru for our first 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 Aidan Ackerman, Leann Andrews, and Lily Song. 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: Ackerman’s “Virtual Forests as a Creative Medium for Community Co-Creation and Collaboration,” Andrews’s “Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Supporting Urban Amazonian Floodplain Communities Through Data and Art,” and Song’s “Participatory Planning and Design Research for the ARTery.”
Read ahead of time, then ask them anything—about creative placemaking and placekeeping, creating knowledge in common across institutions and communities, using artistic virtual reality models as a shared space for ideas about sustainable land management, promoting traditional culture and better-informed city-planning in Peru, developing a shared vision for a cultural corridor in Boston, collaborating across boundaries, using art and design as mediums for change—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 associated with “Creating Knowledge in Common” are free and open to the public. Please use the form linked below to register.
Panelists:
Leann Andrews
Dr. Leann Andrews is the Stuckeman Career Development Assistant Professor in Design in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn State University. As a licensed landscape architect with a background in global health, ecological restoration, community design and movement arts, Dr. Andrews’ work blends the arts and sciences for social and environmental activism towards health equity. Dr. Andrews leads transdisciplinary action research and participatory design projects with underserved communities in the United States and Peru, assessing the impacts that built environment interventions have on One Health. Dr. Andrews is a co-founder of the design activism non-profit Traction, a former NIH Fogarty Global Health Scholar, a researcher with the Center for Technological, Biomedical, and Environmental Research (CITBM) in Peru, and leads the Penn State One Health Group and One Health Scholars. She is also a member of the E+D (Ecology Plus Design) Center, the Hamer Center for Community Design, and the Arts and Design Research Incubator (ADRI).
Aidan Ackerman
Aidan Ackerman is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. His research focuses on computational methods for simulating and visualizing landscape ecology leveraging parametric modeling and immersive virtual reality technology. He specializes in creating digital workflows to transform forest data into immersive 3D environments and modeling tree growth based on species characteristics and ecological interactions. Through collaborations with the SUNY ESF Center for Cultural Landscape Preservation, he works with his students on historic and cultural landscape visualization projects in partnership with the National Park Service and other institutions.
Lily Song
Dr. Lily Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar who holds a joint appointment between the School of Architecture and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She is an award-winning educator who teaches courses on anti-displacement, participatory action research, public participation, community-driven design, and community development. Song’s research and scholarship focus on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class, and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. Her work both analyzes and informs infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of historically marginalized groups as bases for reparative planning and design.
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.