How the Arts and Humanities are Transforming America

~ Advancing A Holistic and Humanistic Future ~
 forthcoming, under contract

ABOUT THE BOOK
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."
       
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 on the website.

​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.  



With thanks to Yasmin Van Wilt for her contributions to the development of this project.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Christine Henseler
Saving Humanity: 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 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—the authors provide concrete examples of the transformative power of participatory contexts of interaction and storytelling. By transcending divisions, these change agents 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, 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 Díaz, 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, Director of the Scholars Program at Union College, NY
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 wireframes to re-envision the fields of business and finance, technology, science, 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.

Antionette D. Carroll, President and CEO (Founder), Creative Reaction Lab
Overcoming Systemic Oppression and Inequities Using Design

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 whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, culture, and climate change.
Art in Action: Five Strategies to Address Climate Change

Jane Hawley and Jodi Enos-Berlage, Professors of Visual and Performing Arts and Biology at Luther College
Interweaving Dance and Biology to Address Dual Dilemmas in Art and Science

Doris Sommer, Professor of Romance Studies at Harvard University and Founder of the NGO Cultural Agents, and Antonio Copete, 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
Teaching Science with Art: Transforming Perception Into Communication and Action

Gemma Mangione, Lecturer | Teachers College, Columbia University | Arts Administration Program Consulting Analyst | Randi Korn & Associates
Soothing the Savage Beast: Commentary on Art and Health

Ari Epstein, Lecturer in the Terrascope Program and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT
Opening Students' Ears: Radio Production and Understanding Human Context toward Scientific and Technical Problem-Solving

​