EXTRAORDINARY PARTNERSHIPS:
How the Arts and Humanities are Transforming AMERICA
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Extraordinary Partnerships gives voice to artists and humanists across America who are building partnerships, developing new methodologies, launching projects and starting initiatives that are affecting positive and lasting social change. These individuals are transforming their communities, their businesses, their environments and building more inclusive, holistic and humanistic solutions to our contemporary challenges. In this edited volume the personal accounts of cultural community leaders, artists, educators, scholars and business professionals from all fields and disciplines enter into dialogue to showcase how deeply social and responsible transformations are being driven in partnership with the arts and humanities. As such, the personal essays compiled in this volume exemplify how individuals, groups, and organizations use artistic and humanistic principles to explore new structures and new ways of thinking and interacting to reimagine society. The material in this volume serve to engage high school, undergraduate and graduate students who are getting excited about the national conversation about the arts and humanities and see themselves as changemakers who wish to impact their communities through holistic and humanistic frameworks. The essays in this book teach us how to perceive our lives and our disciplines through a broader context; they refresh and re-interpret the ways in which we have traditionally assigned space and value to the arts and humanities. The goal of this project is to demonstrate through concrete examples and personally transformative stories, that the arts and humanities are entering a renaissance that stands to change the direction of humanity. Extraordinary Partnerships is an invitation to all, an invitation to participate and make space for more participation. The goal is not a product, but a way to emphasize process through concrete case studies and vivid portraits upon which other examples, reflections, and analyses can evolve and grow. My hope is that this publication will embody the lifelong learning and open dialectic values of the Liberal Arts as an environment that makes space for our individual voices to connect with each other more fluidly and in partnership, contribute to claiming and shifting our narratives from crisis to rise and renaissance. Jenny Gottstein, Director of Games at The GoGame, a company that builds interactive experiences and high-tech adventures around the world, recently remarked that, "Studying Arts & Humanities engenders a healthy sense of curiosity and wonder - not only with regards to how the world actually is, but how it might be. Some might call those who chose this path of study ‘dreamers’ but the truth is, they are ‘futurists.’ And having produced interactive games for thousands of companies around the world, I can tell you, the best ones are powered by futurists."
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Christine Henseler Humanities Rising: How the World Is… and Might Be. PART I: TOWARD A COMMON HUMANITY Creating Space, Context and Moment The authors in the first section of this book identify ways in which the arts and humanities serve to build shared contexts that expand and enrich our social fabrics and open our minds to the far-reaching impact of the arts and humanities. Contributors speak of the impact of making spaces to build bridges between us and to give voice to historically marginalized and politically disenfranchised populations, such as the disabled, the undocumented, Native American youth, sexually abused children, female artists and Muslim communities halfway around the world. By making space, context, and moments of interactions possible through unusual partnerships, such as those between a Tribal nonprofit and a video game company, circus performers and disabled youth, a group of dancers and farmers—authors provide concrete examples of the transformative power of participatory contexts of interaction and storytelling. By transcending divisions, these change makers open new spaces for creative dialogue, scholarly engagements, and concrete applications. Amar Bakshi | Multidisciplinary Artist Lessons from the Launch of Portals Kim Cook | Director of Civic Engagement for Burning Man When Art Lives as Culture Christine Lanzl | Director of the Urban Culture Institute Toward a New Paradigm: Placemaking in the Twenty-first Century Charles R. Batson | Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Union College Circus as Transformation: Musings on the Circus Arts as Agent and Medium for Change Rebecca Volino Robinson, Claudia Lampman, Brittany Freitas-Murrell, Jennifer Burkhart, and Amanda Zold | Doctoral Candidates and Professors of Psychology Speaking the Unspeakable: Integrating Science, Art, and Practice to Address Child Sexual Abuse Cook Inlet Tribal Council | Tribal non-profit organization in Anchorage, Alaska Storytelling for the Next Generation: How a Nonprofit in Alaska Harnessed the Power of Video Games to Share and Celebrate Cultures Amy Hamlin | Professor of Art History at St. Catherine University “We Can [Edit]”: Writing Women Artists into Wikipedia Ella Maria Diaz | Professor of English and Latino Studies at Cornell University Poster Dreams: The Art of Protest & Social Change Betsy Anderson | Executive Director of Museo Eduardo Carrillo and Julia Chiapella, Executive Director of the Young Writers Program’ Hablamos Juntos Project Partners Young Writers with Contemporary Latinx Art Margaret Graham | University Director of Academic Affairs, Univ. of Rochester. Humanizing American Prisons PART II: TOWARD A BROADER HUMANITY Expanding Partnerships and Shifting Paradigms The second part of the volume affirms that we can’t use old structures to solve unprecedented problems. As such, the essays highlight the role of the arts and humanities as fundamental wire frames to re-envision the fields of business and finance, technology, science, sociology, education and medicine. Contributors suggest that all disciplines are standing before a much-needed currency change, one in which the systems by which they operate must understand how we can impact and inform one another through more fluid and inter-related structures. As such, they too discuss how their unusual partnerships have emboldened and transformed the way individuals understand themselves and their environments, the conflicts that are determining their lives as well as their own responsibility in action or inaction. Their partnerships teach us how to perceive our lives and our disciplines through a broader context. They refresh and re-interpret the ways in which we have traditionally assigned space and value to the arts and humanities themselves. Susan Frost | President of Frost Marketing Communications, Inc The Humanities Biosphere - New Thinking for 21st Century Capitalism Bailey Reutzel | Financial Technology Writer Money Over Meaning: Tech is Winning Minds But Not Hearts Chantal Bilodeau | Playwright, Translator, and Research Artist Hit Me Where It Hurts: At the Intersection of Theatre and Climate Change Jane Hawley and Jodi Enos-Berlage | Professors of Visual and Performing Arts and Biology at Luther College Body of Water: Merging Biology and Dance to Reach New Communities Gemma Mangione, Lecturer | Lecturer in the Arts Administration Program at Columbia University's Teachers College| Arts Administration Program Consulting Analyst with Randi Korn & Associates Unlikely Partnerships: On Sociology and Art Rebecca Kamen | Sculptor and Artist, Professor Emerita, Northern Virginia Community College Humanizing Science: Awakening Scientific Discovery Through the Arts and Humanities Doris Sommer, with Antonio Copete | Professor of Romance Studies at Harvard University and Founder of the NGO Cultural Agents | Postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Afro-Latín America on STEAM Luke Keller and Madeline Fuchs Holzer | Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Ithaca College | Educator in Residence at the Academy of American Poets Why Science is Not a Recipe: Expanding Habits of Mind Through Art Ari Epstein | Lecturer in the Terrascope Program and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT When An Engineer Tells A Story.... EPILOGUE Julia Hotz | Sociology Graduate Student at the University of Cambridge Two Birds with the Philosopher’s Stone: How the Humanities will Redefine and Reinvigorate the Future of Work for Millennials |