Creating Knowledge in Common, Together: A Round Table
Sep 26, 2025 1 to 3:30pm Eastern/10am to 12:30pm Pacific
About the Event
The editors of “Creating Knowledge in Common”, the 2024 special edition of Ground Works focussed on university/community partnered arts integrative research, invite all those engaged in such work to an online session that seeks to turn A2RU’s network towards action in this area. Among the themes that emerged in the special edition and subsequent public programming were the many (and growing) unmet needs associated with realizing these projects; these needs have only increased since the edition’s launch because of the shift in federal priorities and structures. We invite you to join contributors to “Creating Knowledge in Common” in this working session, bringing your experiences with these needs and gaps into lively exchange toward their imaginative and tangible amelioration. Our goal will be to emerge with a better collective view of the many successful systematic and grounded approaches to this collaborative, arts- and design-centered work.
This virtual round table will involve breakout sessions designed to encourage exchange, discovery, and networking for strength and solidarity.
This session will include an introduction to the special edition, and 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. The outcome of this session will be a summary back to the A2RU network of ways to support such work in the present environment.
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.
Speakers
Frankie Foster-Davis
Frankie Foster-Davis is a member of Home Works USA, an organization based in Lawrence, KS that helps bridge the gap for young adults who have aged out of foster care as they transition into adult life. Home Works provides affordable rental housing units and a supportive community to connect residents with resources, and education and job opportunities that can improve their lives.
Anya Sirota
Anya Sirota is a Ukrainian-born architectural designer and urbanist, founding principal of the award-winning studio Akoaki. Her work explores the intersection of architecture, cultural production, and territorial advocacy, advancing interdisciplinary modes of practice and inquiry. With projects ranging from temporary installations to complex urban frameworks, she brings a spatial imagination attuned to questions of equity, performance, and civic life. In Detroit, she leads the transformation of the Cultural District—a reconfiguration of eighty acres of public realm that reconsiders the relationship between institutions, infrastructure, and collective agency. Sirota’s approach merges critical research with unconventional partnerships, producing work that is both materially grounded and conceptually expansive. At the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning she is a Professor of Architecture and serves as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Initiatives. Her academic leadership centers on pedagogical experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, cultivating new models for engaged learning and spatial practice.
Barlow LeVold
Dr. Barlow LeVold joined the Illinois campus community in 1992 as a graduate student. He taught and researched in Communications and later co-directed a professional MS Tax Program in Chicago. In 2013 took on his current duties as a director of Foundation Relations with the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement. His commitment to advancing myriad pursuits of one of the largest and most disciplinarily diverse campuses in the world, as well as a deep commitment to the values of a land grant institution, help him to serve the Champaign-Urbana community. Barlow works at the intersection where private foundations engage Illinois faculty, staff, and students, benefitting each with support for investigations of and services to various local, state, national, and international interests, including everyday people, structural classes, organizations, and governments.
Moderators
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.