Incubating “Forms of Freedom” for a2ru Ground Works

Mar 13, 2026

Veronica Stanich, a2ru Ground Works Managing Editor

At Ground Works, a2ru’s peer-reviewed platform for arts-integrated research, we seek not only to highlight “exemplary interdisciplinary arts-inclusive collaborative research projects,” but also to reflect on the processes that drive such work. We strive to do that with compact and compelling entries written for a broad academic readership. In that spirit, I am reflecting here on the processes that underlie Ground Works itself, and in particular our latest published entry—in a way that, I hope, is of interest to those same readers.

After seven years at Ground Works, I’ve found that time is unruly; it gets away from us. We promise a quick turn-around on initial reviews, but editors have ailing parents and children, they have important grant proposals due, and sometimes they just need a break. As a result, we can fall short of our promised review time. When we get to the more in-depth review stage, we have a collaborative and social process, and we strive to mentor promising projects to publication. This doesn’t happen quickly. Then, it takes some time to familiarize authors with the rich-media affordances of the Ground Works platform and how it allows images, video, sound, maps, and code to do a fair amount of the storytelling. It takes more time to collaboratively reshape their entry accordingly. In short, publishing on Ground Works has many merits, but nimbleness and agility are not among them.

Even within the context of this laissez-faire approach to time, our most recent entry on Ground Works, “Forms of Freedom: The Art and Design of Black and Indigenous Creative Collectives,” represents an exceptionally long journey to publication. It was officially published on February 26, 2026, but I see emails on this submission going back to late 2023. This is a protracted timeline even at Ground Works, and I am grateful to “Forms of Freedom…” authors Emery Petchauer and Ruth Nicole Brown for their perseverance. 

And yet…I’m so excited about the final product that this extraordinarily long on-ramp to publication feels like an opportunity to celebrate all that happened in that time. There were many fronts on which this submission pushed and challenged Ground Works, in really good ways. 

With its exchange between Performance Studies and Black Studies and its participatory art-making methods, “Forms of Freedom…” inspires its readers, beginning with our editorial staff, to see afresh how interdisciplinarity can play out in research and to re-examine (again) what we mean by “research.” The authors explain, “A traditional case study approach would parse these artifacts [an extensive collection of audio recordings] as data for analysis. Imposing or extracting meaning from them would ostensibly answer our research question…We break from this trend, positioning these artifacts as a shared archive open for iterative play, creation, and exploration.” Indeed, “…making art from the shared archive of materials was the method and rhythm of ongoing sensemaking against the fixity of social science case study methods.” 

For readers who have never encountered iterative play and creation as research methods, “Forms of Freedom…” is a wonderful entry point, demonstrating how these methods can both constitute a way of knowing and contribute to new knowledge. Emery and Ruth Nicole and their collaborators on the project created audio compositions informed by Black Studies, and these compositions in turn enrich and expand the field of Black Studies.

“Forms of Freedom” leans heavily on sound—on audio files—asking readers to listen more often than look. This is unique among Ground Works entries, where most authors rely on images and video for their storytelling. 

These audio files also challenged us to reconcile our commitment to accessibility with the authors’ nuanced understanding of the experience of listening. At Ground Works, we follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They establish a baseline for making the internet accessible to people of all abilities, addressing such issues as color contrast and compatibility with screen-readers and other assistive technology. Accordingly, playable media like audio and video files must have subtitles. But when I requested subtitles for the audio files in “Forms of Freedom…” Emery and Ruth Nicole replied that subtitles raise a lot of generative questions when sound design elements like panning, delay, and reverberation are involved: “Since the sound is often performative, affective, and non-discursive, it resists being reduced to what people are saying or the ‘mood’ of music. I can see how putting words on it (e.g., ‘sad music plays’) forecloses on the meaning by making it discursive rather than material/felt/embodied.” Emery and Ruth Nicole were also sensitive to how deaf and hard-of-hearing people experience embodied listening, feeling the sounds.

This led to a rich exchange about how we could honor these truths about the sound in “Forms of Freedom…” while also reaching towards at least some accessibility measures. We arrived at a compromise that falls far short of the non-discursive, embodied experience Emery and Ruth Nicole have in mind, but is nonetheless a huge leap forward for Ground Works accessibility measures. (Our team on the Reco(r)ding CripTech project has taught me that accessibility is always a work in progress: you do your best, knowing that you’re unlikely to achieve the goal of universal accessibility.) For the audio subtitles in “Forms of Freedom…” individual voices are differentiated with unique colors, and the direction from which the sound emanates (right or left speaker) is denoted by right-side and left-side positioning of the words onscreen. These measures, and the way that at times the screen becomes too crowded with words to take them all in before they disappear, only begin to reproduce the experience of hearing these audio files.

In all, it took two-plus years to get the right editors and reviewers, to have the conversations about whether and how “Forms of Freedom…” meets Ground Works’s publication criteria, to go through rounds of revision, to figure out the subtitles. All of this was, of course, compounded by the realities of academic publishing: everyone is too busy. Our authors, editors, reviewers, and technical director are all faculty who often face formidable workloads and deadlines, and PS, their work on Ground Works is largely uncompensated. I feel confident, though, that “Forms of Freedom…” was worth the wait, and I look forward to an ongoing Ground Works conversation with these researchers and their community.