Land and Equity

Land, Equity, and Teaching (Calderon, Arroyo, Jojola, Noorani) - The means by which land is acquired, apportioned, controlled, owned, and preserved in this country have embedded within them our national legacies of racism. Land and race are historically intertwined in this country. Meet artists and professors whose practices seek to reconfigure these disparities that have existed historically and hear the ways in which they are radically reimagining land control in their communities. Learn how to challenge the historical relationship between land and race through such examples as cooperatives, land trusts, banks, vacant lot possession, and other tactics. And learn how universities can address these relationships and issues in their curricula, courses, and community-based learning.



Leading with community (Barash, Song) - In Boston, an ambitious partnership among the Boston Foundation, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and place-based community organizations intends to disrupt land development patterns. Through the lens of equitable placemaking and placekeeping, Harvard and TBF are supporting the capacity of communities to mitigate market forces, strengthen civic infrastructures, and express cultural identity. In its pilot phase, this community-determined, cooperative model is already generating learning and building power throughout neighborhoods.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 2 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved shortly after submitting the Zoom form.

Critical Gardening and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (McMullen, Winkler) - This presentation introduces critical gardening as an emerging art practice that explores the ideological, political and narrative qualities of gardens at the intersection of nature and technology. Using examples from their own critical gardening art and research practice, the authors discuss challenges and opportunities for artist-led interdisciplinary collaborations in the context of a STEM-focused Midwest R1 land grant university. They also introduce the potential of art & technology collaborations to help publics narrate, debate and act on possible future natures (desirable and potentially undesirable ones) and the politics that shape them.

Shale Play (Kasdorf, Rubin) - In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, “shale play” refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—transient industrial processes that often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, Kasdorf and Rubin have gathered evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play in Pennsylvania. Poet and photographer follow in the footsteps of the documentarians of the 1930s, taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach to gather the stories of workers on pipelines and well pads, landowners and leaseholders, waitresses, ministers, farmers, retired miners, teachers, and neighbors. The poet and photographer will discuss the inception of their documentary project, their collaborative process, and offer samples of their work of witness, inviting the audience to look beyond the easy caricatures of the white working class to create an urgent, authentic representation of a sacrifice zone that fuels America.

Please use this link to register for the Zoom session: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VYehS5G_Tv6AWb2C_QvKJg
If you have added the session to your Zoom schedule, you will be approved to enter the room.

This series of short talks will offer a nuanced picture of the interconnected issues surrounding psychedelic ritual/therapy, art/music, and land/equity, in the context of both research universities and indigenous cultural practices. The series of talks will begin by highlighting the relationship between the Huichol (Wixáritari) peyote ritual, their art and music traditions, and the fight for land and equity to sustain their culture. The second portion of the session will feature talks focusing on dimensions of art/music and land/equity within the context of psychedelic clinical trials. Each speaker will offer different and vital perspectives gained from a variety of fields of expertise--in ethnobotany, pharmacology, music theory, history of science, human development and family studies, Latin American studies, environmental studies, and rhetorical science and technology studies. The lightning talks will then culminate in a formal presentation/performance given by a Huichol artist.

Please register using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6W10o0guTKS9K0Fw40LPBg

If you have added the session to your Schedule, you will be admitted to the room. 

This series of short talks will offer a nuanced picture of the interconnected issues surrounding psychedelic ritual/therapy, art/music, and land/equity, in the context of both research universities and indigenous cultural practices. The series of talks will begin by highlighting the relationship between the Huichol (Wixáritari) peyote ritual, their art and music traditions, and the fight for land and equity to sustain their culture. The second portion of the session will feature talks focusing on dimensions of art/music and land/equity within the context of psychedelic clinical trials. Each speaker will offer different and vital perspectives gained from a variety of fields of expertise--in ethnobotany, pharmacology, music theory, history of science, human development and family studies, Latin American studies, environmental studies, and rhetorical science and technology studies. The lightning talks will then culminate in a formal presentation/performance given by a Huichol artist.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

“Quilting Reparation” (Thompson, Pearsall) focuses on blankets and quilts as collaborators and coproducers in the resistance to ongoing extractivism, the construction of pipelines, and the work to memorialize and commemorate sites of cultural and personal trauma. It features the visual art of contemporary Lakota artists who contributed a quilt and quilt pieces to Takuwe, an ongoing exhibition by Craig Howe (Oglala Sioux Tribe) about the 1890 massacre of 300 Lakotas at Wounded Knee. Their work shows how quilts and blankets become agitators for land reparation, carriers of memory, and monumental collaborators.

Public Art and Post-Pandemic Place (Tarantino) explores how research universities can support community-engaged projects that dialogue with the emerging "new normal" of how civic space is negotiated, described, used, and shared. Projects emerging from member institutions, including Penn State University and Ohio State University, will be presented and discussed. Highlighted projects will explore how research universities can invest in projects that strengthen social fabric and connection to place; support immigrant and refugee communities; and rethink issues of accessibility. Particular emphasis will be placed on how the current global health crisis has illuminated a need for projects that explore access to shared space and how public art can address create a platform for diverse, equity, and inclusion.

On Specters of Home (Avnisan) - Who should be held accountable for the dark legacies of colonialism? And whose responsibility is it to work towards undoing colonialism’s persistent forms of violence today? On Specters of Home is a hybrid lyric essay / multimedia artist’s talk that meditates on these complex questions by exploring how new media technologies including 3d scanning, augmented reality and virtual reality can be used as tools for artistic research through which to better understand histories of settler-colonialism, dispossession and exile in Israel-Palestine.

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

Social Practice Composition in the Choral Arts: Composer Reena Esmail’s Take What You Need in Skid Row, Los Angeles (Murray) - Every year since 2016, Street Symphony and the Urban Voices Project – two musical service organizations and ensembles based in Skid Row, Los Angeles – have given annual performances of composer Reena Esmail’s “Take What You Need.” A unique piece of contemporary choral-instrumental art music, “Take What You Need” requires the collaboration between two musical groups representing differing musical and socio-economic backgrounds: an ensemble and choir of professional musicians, and a second choir of singers and audience members who are currently experiencing or have previously experienced living in a condition of homelessness. Drawing on an analysis of Esmail’s score for the work, her pre-compositional notes, as well as fieldwork with the Urban Voices Project, I contend that Esmail’s work exemplifies an emerging “social turn” in contemporary choral art music composition, illuminated by a theoretical linkage between scholarship on facilitation and hospitality drawn from Community Music (Higgins 2012) and dialogue and performance in the social practice arts (Jacskon 2011; Kester 2013). I argue that Esmail employs her socio-musical compositional techniques towards an overarching goal of encouraging personal and social healing through community-based musical performance.

“In C”: Using Terry Riley’s masterpiece for operationalizing a social justice approach to music pedagogy with refugee children (Samson) - The compositional structure that Terry Riley uses in “In C” is ideal for reconstruction and experimentation when teaching music composition to children. In this session I will describe my work using “In C” as a point of entry for composition lessons with refugee students. I will also introduce a new framework for a social justice approach to music pedagogy that motivates these composition lessons.

The Songwork Catalogue (Ercin, Mendel, Spatz) - Members of the research project “Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council 2016-2018) will share and discuss the Songwork Catalogue, a webpage containing 308 short video clips selected from more than 500 hours of video created during the Judaica project lab. We will discuss a number of possible ways of accessing and using this rhizomatic archive and consider the ethical and political implications of audiovisual embodied research, especially how it reveals the inextricability of technique, identity, and place.