Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices (The Arts in Higher Education) 3031298101, 9783031298103

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THE ARTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education Transdisciplinary Practices Julia Listengarten · Keri Watson

The Arts in Higher Education Series Editor

Nancy Kindelan Department of Theatre Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA

Julia Listengarten • Keri Watson

Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education Transdisciplinary Practices

Julia Listengarten School of Performing Arts University of Central Florida Orlando, FL, USA

Keri Watson School of Visual Arts and Design University of Central Florida Orlando, FL, USA

The Arts in Higher Education ISBN 978-3-031-29810-3    ISBN 978-3-031-29811-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Lilian Garcia-Roig This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To our students, past, present, and future

Acknowledgments

Socially engaged transdisciplinary projects are not possible without multiple collaborators. We worked with faculty colleagues from across the university and community and we would like to acknowledge the many researchers, stakeholders, community partners, and scholars who participated in and contributed to these projects. At the University of Central Florida, we thank Mark Brotherton, Christopher Niess, Kate Ingram, Elizabeth Brendel Horn, and Holly McDonald in the School of Performing Arts and Debbie Starr, Margaret Ann Zaho, Jason Fronczek, Hadi Abbas, Ilenia Colón Mendoza, Carla Rossi Poindexter, Brooks Dierdorff, Molly Reilly, Greyson Charnock, Shannon Rae Lindsey, Hannah Estes, and Jean-­ Claude Rasch in the School of Visual Arts and Design. We benefited from the expertise and participation of Connie L.  Lester, Robert Cassanello, Scot A.  French, and Rosalind Beiler in history, Lisa Mills in film, John Fauth in biology, Güneş Murat Tezcür in political science, Luciana Garbayo and Loretta Forlaw in medicine, Maria Cristina Santana in women and gender studies, and Terry Ann Thaxton, Obi Nwakanma, David James Poissant, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Anastasia Salter, and Laurie Rachkus Uttich in English. We are grateful to our community partners: Shannon Fitzgerald at the Mennello Museum of America Art, C. Keith Beasley at the Terrace Gallery of Orlando; Gisela Carbonell at the Rollins Museum of Art; Eve Payor, Nancy Lowden Norman, and Vicki Gross at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; K.C. Williams at the Mattie Kelly

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Arts Center; Rebecca Larson at the City of Maitland Art Museums; and Peter Schreyer at the Crealdé School of Art. Appreciation to Kathi Efland and Virginia Howerton of the Seminole County Public Libraries, Jeannie Economos and Becky Wilson of the Farmworker Association of Florida, and Leticia Silva, Raymond Childs, and Carl Jacobson of the Florida Department of Corrections. We also benefited from guest speakers and presenters, including Susan Shillinglaw, Cindy Hahamovitch, Dale Slongwhite, Cesar Cornejo, Linda Lee, Emily St. John Mandel, and Dinaw Mengestu who lent their disciplinary knowledge and creative energy to the programming. Transdisciplinary projects are not possible without collaborators, and we thank you for your patience and generosity. These projects benefited tremendously from undergraduate and graduate students and interns. In theatre: Kate Kilpatrick, Joshua Campbell, Christopher Creane, Sarah Hubert, Jessica Johnson, Amy Livingston, and Janice Munk, as well as student actors, designers, and stage managers made this work possible. In art: Chelsea Hilding, Dylan Auerbach, Noelle Mason, Tim Reid, Jenn Allen, Matthew Dunn, Forrest Deblois, Ryan-­ Michael Gleason, Jason Gregory, Nicholas Kalemba, Lana Lasher, Theresa Lucey, Tim Reid, Matin Salemirad, Christopher Santos, Michael Smart, Ericka Sobrack, Nick Twardus, Nicole Valee, Sean Vanzyl, and Mauro Wieser lent their skills to these projects, as did pre-med students Mary Shinanberry, Jake Howard, and Krisandra Hardy. We would also like to thank Michael D.  Johnson, Provost of the University of Central Florida, Jana Jasinski, Vice Provost for Faculty Excellence, Jeffrey M. Moore, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Michael Wainstein, Director of the School of Performing Arts, T. Rudy McDaniel, Director of the School of Visual Arts and Design, Peter Larson, Chair of the History Department, Trey Philpotts, Chair of the English Department, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Chair of the Writing and Rhetoric Department for their support of these projects. The transdisciplinary projects discussed in this book were made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEA Big Read in association with Arts Midwest, the UCF College of Arts and Humanities, the Learning Institute for Elders (LIFE) at UCF, the Pabst Steinmetz Foundation, and the Laughing Gull Foundation. These projects would not have been possible without the generous support of these public and private funders. We

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also would like to thank the UCF staff members who supported the administration of these grants: Kara Gajentan, Kristin Wetherbee, Christine Michel, Heather Gibson, Azela Santana, Christopher Hixon, and Kara Robertson. Finally, we would like to thank our families who put up with us as we spent long hours facilitating these projects. Thank you to Alex, Philip, Frank, Cliff, Wes, and Jason. Without your support, projects like these are next to impossible. Thank you!

Praise for Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education “This book is an important contribution to the fields of higher education and arts and wellness. Framed as practice led research, the case studies demonstrate how collaborative practices between the University of Central Florida and community partners cultivate the understanding of the transformative and healing power of the arts.” —Eve Payor, Community Arts Director, Atlantic Center for the Arts, USA “Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices is a beautiful provocation to create meaningful change through arts-­ based practice. Julia Listengarten and Keri Watson seamlessly dance at the intersections of theory, methodology, and practice to offer a critically engaged framework to socially engaged and collaborative practice.” —Megan Alrutz, Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Crafting Transdisciplinary Collaborations 19 3 Bringing  Ecocriticism to Life: A Look at Florida’s Changing Landscape 35 4 Finding  Home: Staging Refugee Stories and Creating Spaces for Social Engagement 67 5 Challenging  the Narrative of Decline: An Intergenerational Creative Community of Care 95 6 Our  Carceral Landscape: Imagining a Thirdspace of Social Justice119 7 Concluding Thoughts147 Bibliography153 Index167

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1

Diagram of transdisciplinary deep learning 7 Installation view of “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape,” UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Hannah Estes. Image courtesy of the authors) 25 Don’t Be Afraid to Stand By My Side: Voices From the Florida Prison Education Project. Chapbook of students’ poems and paintings. (Cover image by Omari Booker) 31 Installation view of “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape,” UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Jason Fronczek. Image courtesy of the authors) 40 Puddin’ and the Grumble, UCF Theatre for Young Audiences. (Photograph by Ground Up Pictures. Image courtesy of the authors)53 Of Mice and Men, UCF Black Box Theatre. (Photograph by Tony Firriolo. Image Courtesy of the authors) 55 Dinaw Mengestu author talk in the UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Jean-Claude Rasch. Image courtesy of the authors)72 Pentecost, Theatre UCF, School of Performing Arts. (Photograph by Tony Firriolo. Image courtesy of the authors) 79 Pentecost, Theatre UCF, School of Performing Arts. (Photograph by Tony Firriolo. Image courtesy of the authors) 83 The Refugee Plays, UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Keri Watson. Image courtesy of the authors) 86 UCF students facilitate community of care model at the Harris House, Atlantic Center for the Arts. (Photograph by Keri Watson. Image courtesy of the authors) 108 xv

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Kate Kilpatrick and theatre graduate students present research at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. (Photograph by Keri Watson. Image courtesy of the authors) Installation view of “Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape,” UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Hannah Estes. Image courtesy of the authors) Installation view of “Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape,” Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. (Photograph by Jason Fronczek. Image courtesy of the authors)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Even though public funding for the arts increased by nearly 20 percent over the past twenty years, many pundits and politicians discredit the importance of the arts to contemporary life.1 In 2012 Consumer Reports listed drama, film, photography, graphic design, and architecture as “useless” degrees, and in 2016 Kiplinger named art and photography among the “worst college majors for a lucrative career.”2 From Barack Obama’s 2014 exhortation that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree” to Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate federal funding for the arts, the visual and performing arts come under fire frequently, which can lead to lower student enrollments in university fine arts departments.3 In addition to decreased funding for arts departments, financial support for higher education has declined overall, leading colleges and universities to slash academic budgets. Higher education’s growing emphasis on career training has had a profound impact on the arts, and as college degrees have become increasingly monetized, students are choosing majors, such as business and engineering, that are linked to higher earnings and better job prospects.4 According to the College Art Association, some colleges and universities went so far as to eliminate their arts departments in response to the reduced enrollment and financial stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.5 In short, as society and higher education’s focus shifts to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_1

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measurable “skills” as opposed to “inventing, innovating, creating, and critical thinking,” arts practitioners, whose pedagogies often stress the personal and affective nature of art, value non-hierarchical interactions, and engage in non-propositional forms of learning, can find themselves in conflict with the metrics-driven values of the contemporary university.6 What is the role of the arts in higher education? And how can the visual and performing arts stay relevant in the twenty-first century? Fine arts departments prepare students for roles in the creative economy, which contributes 6.1 percent to the global gross domestic product, and employers in the United States rate creativity and innovation among employees’ most desirable skills. The arts create “empowered,” “informed,” and “responsible” citizens,7 and, as theatre scholar Nancy Kindelan notes, they inspire creativity and innovative thinking that prepare “students for work and citizenship.”8 The arts “help college students become intentional learners who can adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning throughout their lives.”9 They encourage the development of “advanced thinking skills, flexibility to adapt to change, and interpersonal skills to succeed in multi-cultural, cross-functional teams.”10 Moreover, the arts provide the university with creative programming that helps students, staff, faculty, and community members grapple with difficult and divisive topics. Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices examines the role of the visual and performing arts in higher education and argues for the importance of socially engaged transdisciplinary practices, not only to the college curriculum but also to building an informed and engaged citizenry. Several volumes on the role of the arts and practice as research (PaR) have been published over the last decade. Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter’s Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies and Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt’s Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry provide readers with examples of practice-based research that demonstrate how creative practices advance knowledge.11 Similarly, Marit Dewhurst’s Social Justice Art: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy and Barbara Beyerbach and R. Deborah Davis’s Activist Art in Social Justice Pedagogy: Engaging Students in Glocal Issues through the Arts offer readers a series of case studies illustrating how arts education teaches multiculturalism and social justice.12 In addition to this scholarship, recent literature on activist curatorial practices and public and participatory arts projects demonstrates the power of visual art to engage with

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social issues. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating, Nato Thompson’s Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century, and Maura Reilly’s Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating deconstruct notions of aesthetic disengagement and argue that exhibitions can and should challenge prevailing hegemonies.13 Cameron Cartiere and Anthony Schrag’s edited collection The Failures of Public Art and Participation teases out the degree to which socially engaged artistic practices can impact public policy, whereas Cynthia Fowler’s Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Colonial Period to the Present celebrates the ability of smaller, regional museums and galleries to use their peripheral positionalities to disrupt dominant discourses.14 In the field of the performing arts, recent scholarship and creative practice also have focused on developing methodologies and strategies to engage various communities to address social issues in non-traditional theatre settings. Jan Cohen-Cruz’s Remapping Performance: Common Ground, Uncommon Partners, Shannon Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson’s Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, and Megan Alrutz and Lynn Hoare’s Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth explore ways in which theatre practices activate diverse communities.15 Whereas much of this scholarship is discipline specific, examining either the performing or visual arts, or focusing on work occurring in urban cultural centers, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education shifts the emphasis to a discussion of local, socially engaged, transdisciplinary arts projects staged in Central Florida between 2017 and 2022.

The Local Turn Local narratives are useful in countering national hegemonies, as the local offers an accounting of the specific “social, cultural, ecological, and political processes” that inform our environment, and encourages people to see how their engagement with their particular place has global consequences.16 By centering the local and attending to the specific ways artists and scholars interact with their immediate surroundings, research becomes grounded in the here and now. Emphasizing local geographic places and site-specific socio-political circumstances encourages intersubjectivity and community engagement, pushes participants beyond passive spectatorship, and sets the stage for meaningful actions and interactions. Focusing on the local, also positions the less celebrated, non-canonical artists, who

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are often overlooked or marginalized by exclusive national narratives in a more inclusive history of visual and performing arts.17 When shifting one’s focus to the local, it is important to acknowledge the history of the region and its residents. In this case, Central Florida encompasses the unceded homelands of Timucua, Tocobago, and Seminole Peoples, many of whom were killed, enslaved, or displaced by White settler colonists. Established as Fort Gatlin in 1838, Orlando was once largely agricultural, notable for its sugarcane and cotton plantations, citrus groves, and cattle ranches, many of which depended on enslaved labor. After the Civil War, Central Florida stayed predominantly rural but the proliferation of railroads at the turn of the twentieth century opened the state to increased tourism. Today, Orlando’s metro area is home to about two million permanent residents who identify as follows: 57.4 percent White, 32.7 percent Hispanic or Latino, 24.2 percent Black, and 4.7 percent Asian. These demographics are echoed in the population of the University of Central Florida (UCF), which was founded in 1963 and opened in 1968 as the Florida Technological University to train personnel to support the U.S. Space Program. Today, UCF is a large research university of 80,000 students that is designated as both Minority and Hispanic Serving. Central Florida also has a vibrant arts-entertainment industry, led by its theme parks (Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld), and the region is home to museums including the Orlando Museum of Art, the Mennello Museum of American Art, the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, and the Rollins Museum of Art, and theatres including Orlando Shakes, Orlando Rep, and the Garden Theatre. Unfortunately, these cultural resources are not especially accessible to UCF students, as they are expensive to attend and located at a distance from the campus, which is sited fifteen miles east of downtown on the border of Orange and Seminole counties on what was once a turpentine farm. Due to UCF’s distance from downtown, it is essential that the university provide on-campus arts experiences, and the UCF Art Gallery and Theatre UCF are key venues for bringing the arts to the campus and local communities. Unlike civic museums and professional theatres that rely on ticket sales and therefore must offer programs that appeal to broad and general audiences, university art galleries and theatres can take risks and engage students and visitors in radical critical thinking about art, display, performance, social issues, and the role of the arts in society. The role of arts institutions in contemporary society has been critiqued for the past forty years by artists, including Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren,

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Louise Lawler, and Marcel Broodthaers, and art historians, including Marcia Pointon, Carol Duncan, Andrew McClellan, and Alan Wallach (among others), who argue that art museums are bastions of cultural elitism.18 While critics note that museums and collections in major urban centers are dependent upon capitalism’s exploitation of the working classes, regional museums and university art galleries, which operate at the periphery, offer alternative narratives of art and art history. As noted by art historian Marjorie Devon in her recent discussion of Indigenous art, “Although the periphery may not always be a comfortable place, it is potentially a highly creative place.”19 Similarly, the regional movement in theatre has played a major role in decentering Broadway and disrupting the pervasive homogeneity of mainstream theatre by engaging with local communities and responding to community needs, but regional theatres rely on external funding, as well. As theatre scholar Elizabeth A. Osborne posits, “theatres that rely on community support are likely to be more diverse, but history shows that external funding is likely to favor highprofile, wealthy theatres that cater to primarily white audiences.”20 Tied to the academic budget rather than outside funding, university theatres have the potential to create community-centered work that challenges elitism, asks difficult questions, and illuminates socio-political shifts. Working from the position that the theatre is a space to embody philosophical and social ideas and to hold “the mirror up to nature,”21 that the university art gallery is “a laboratory for thinking,”22 and that both the university theatre and gallery serve the entire university community, we have created opportunities for students from across the disciplines to have meaningful interactions with the arts. Tackling challenging topics such as climate change and sustainable development, war and displacement, disability and aging, and systemic racism and mass incarceration, the projects discussed in this book allowed students and the public to engage with and explore social issues salient to our local community. As the art historians Julia Silverman and Mary McNeil remind us, “the local is transformed into a specific, individuated place through human and more-than-human engagement and meaning-making.”23

Transdisciplinary Collaborations In addition to shifting the focus to the local, the projects discussed in the following chapters employed a transdisciplinarity framework that fostered collaboration between different disciplines and intellectual domains of

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knowledge to instigate social change. Not just interdisciplinary, which refers to cooperation between different disciplines, or multidisciplinary, which juxtaposes a variety of disciplinary contributions, transdisciplinarity, as theorized by Swiss psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget, is “a higher stage” order that “place[s] these relationships within a total system without any firm boundaries between disciplines.”24 Transdisciplinary research requires merging divergent value systems and knowledge streams to create new understandings of issues and posit potential solutions. Or, as argued by Julie Thompson Klein who is often regarded as a pioneer in interdisciplinary studies, “the core idea of transdisciplinarity is different academic disciplines working jointly with practitioners to solve a real-­ world problem.”25 Researchers following Piaget, Thompson Klein, and others argue that transdisciplinary projects follow seven principles26: . They are best applied to complex problems 1 2. They are place-based 3. They are time intensive 4. They relate to academe 5. They require well-developed leadership skills 6. They are intensely collaborative 7. They merge different value systems to create new knowledge Transdisciplinarity “transcend[s] individual disciplines in order to collaborate and construct knowledge and create solutions to global issues.”27 Transdisciplinary projects, which require scholars, practitioners, and stakeholders from across fields of knowledge to work together to devise solutions to real-world problems, result in richer learning experiences and promote cooperation and deeper engagement with various viewpoints. Whereas often considered the domain of the hard sciences, the arts are a vital part of transdisciplinary projects (Fig. 1.1). Significantly, collaboration is inherent to transdisciplinarity. As art historian and critic Grant H. Kester argues, “collaborative practices suggest a paradigm shift in contemporary art production,” complicating notions of “aesthetic autonomy,” cultivating active audience engagement, stimulating a co-production of new “forms of knowledge,” and inspiring transformative actions.28 In an educational context, it is essential to model collaborative and transdisciplinary practices for students, and the projects discussed in this book, though not without risk, illuminate the power of transdisciplinary collaboration to advance ideas, create opportunities for

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Fig. 1.1  Diagram of transdisciplinary deep learning

effective communication among students, and inspire new ways of thinking about social issues from a multiplicity of perspectives–geographic, cultural, and disciplinary.

Socially Engaged Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education builds on existing transdisciplinary research but employs culturally responsive pedagogies to inculcate “call-in” practices that challenge politics of exclusion and involve students and communities in socially responsible dialogues. Today’s political and cultural landscape is divided as never before, and the projects under consideration were selected because of their interest in initiating civil discussions of difficult topics. Recognizing the importance of the arts in helping students grapple with social issues and realizing the need to critically engage them in conversations about contentious cultural and political topics, the projects discussed in Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education address what Donna Haraway has

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termed “systemic urgencies,” or those issues such as climate change, displacement, disability, and systemic racism that mark our historical epoch.29 We take our cue from the cultural geographer Edward W. Soja who conceives of space as both literal and metaphorical and argues that postmodern spaces must go beyond inclusivity and diversity to enable the contestation and renegotiation of boundaries and cultural identities.30 Theorizing spatial justice as a Thirdspace, Soja draws upon Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the spatial triad, bell hooks’s recognition of the interrelatedness of sex, gender, race, and class, Michel Foucault’s theorization of heterotopias, and Homi K. Bhabha’s conceptualization of cultural hybridity, to propose a theoretical Thirdspace where “everything comes together … subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential.”31 Following Soja’s reminder that the “meaning and significance of space and those related concepts that compose and comprise the inherent spatiality of human life: place, location, locality, landscape, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography”32 are impacted by individual action, the projects discussed in this book serve three interrelated functions: . They engage the specifics of a local environment 1 2. They search for meaning in the past, present, and future of a particular place 3. They foster artistic engagement with social issues across disciplines that are relevant to regional stakeholders Furthermore, these projects gesture toward the possibility of creating “a space of extraordinary openness … where issues of race, class, and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other … a place of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives.”33 Inspired by Soja’s imagining of Thirdspace, recognizing the importance of transdisciplinary collaboration, and emphasizing the local as a site for radical change, the following chapters apply multiple methodological frameworks—ecocriticism, post-colonial theory, disability and age studies, and critical race theory—to local manifestations of global issues. As applied theatre scholar Helen Nicholson argues, theory offers “a way of looking at

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the world differently, a focus for asking risky questions,”34 and the projects discussed in this volume involved students at all levels and encouraged them to both expand their disciplinary learning and develop transdisciplinary thinking as they were introduced to multiple perspectives on the same issue. Bringing together scholars and researchers from art, art history, theatre, history, English, music, biology, women and gender studies, environmental studies, disability studies, medicine, humanities, political science, modern languages, philosophy, digital media, journalism, and film, projects considered include art exhibitions, staged readings, fully mounted theatre productions, community events, film screenings, panel discussions, and lectures. Higher education often confines the teaching of methodologies to upper- and graduate-level theory and criticism courses within the major, but transdisciplinary projects benefit students regardless of level or discipline, helping them become critical and engaged citizens. One of the strengths of this book is its focus on localized, transdisciplinary, socially engaged practices. Focusing on local geographies and site-­specific socio-political circumstances encourages intersubjectivity, pushes participants to action, and sets the stage for meaningful exchanges. By offering a place-based analysis that addresses the collective problems of a large public university that is at a remove from a major cultural center, and by presenting readers with a reflection on a series of transdisciplinary projects in which students and scholars from different departments and backgrounds worked together on specific projects, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education offers tangible examples of socially engaged, collaborative, and transdisciplinary practices that are replicable in other locations. As these projects engaged multiple stakeholders—artists, patrons, undergraduate and graduate students, farmworkers, schoolaged children, immigrants and refugees, people who are incarcerated, people with disabilities, and those from local organizations—they endeavored to reach diverse and underrepresented audiences. The effectiveness of these projects and their ability to disrupt the wider artistic, social, and political landscape are evaluated through historical contextualization, review of impact on policy and action, and analysis of reflective essays, surveys, and interviews with participants and audience members.

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Pedagogically Responsive In What Universities Owe Democracy (2021), Ronald J.  Daniels argues that universities serve four essential functions.35 They increase social mobility, educate democratic citizens, create expert knowledge, and encourage dialogue across differences. These functions correlate to the four key Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) articulated by the American Association of Universities and Colleges (AAC&U) as part of the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) report.36 This framework for college-level learning includes a set of broad learning outcomes, high-­ impact educational practices, and authentic forms of assessment that can be adapted to transdisciplinary research.37 The AAC&U’s first ELO, “Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World,” is focused on engagement with essential or big questions such as what does it mean to be human? What is the difference between culture and nature? And how does learning about other cultures and traditions teach us about our own? These questions are often addressed in lower-level courses in the sciences and mathematics, social sciences, humanities, history, and modern languages, but, as we will show, also can be explored through transdisciplinary projects, specifically art exhibitions, theatrical productions, and discussions. The second AAC&U ELO, “Intellectual and Practical Skills,” shifts to the application and practice of skills, such as inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, quantitative literacy, information literacy, and teamwork and problem solving through projects. The acquisition of skills through project-based learning (PBL) is a hallmark of the arts, where technique is taught through the creation of art and staging of exhibitions and plays, and transdisciplinary research, where the application of knowledge to real-world issues is paramount. The third AAC&U ELO, “Personal and Social Responsibility,” asks students to engage with diverse communities and stresses civic knowledge and engagement, intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, and building the foundations and skills for lifelong learning. These skills are promoted by the visual and performing arts and transdisciplinary projects, which encourage “participants to move beyond reading and discussing ideas and toward embodied ways of knowing and sharing knowledge.”38 The final ELO as articulated by the AAC&U, “Integrative and Applied Learning,” asks students to synthesize knowledge gained through both generalized and specialized study and to apply it to complex problems in new settings. The integration and application of

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new knowledge is a characteristic of effective artists, performers, and transdisciplinary researchers who take a hands-on approach to the cultivation of their creative practices. The fourth ELO is often addressed in internships, service learning, and capstone projects, all of which are standard parts of visual and performing arts curricula and transdisciplinary practices. Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education presents readers with four examples of projects that demonstrate how transdisciplinary collaborations in the arts help students achieve the four key ELOs articulated by the AAC&U.  As the following chapters show, transdisciplinary projects foster student and community engagement, create spaces for the interrogation of complex and contentious social issues, and prepare students to be productive, engaged, and socially mobile citizens.

Chapter Summaries The following chapters outline how to facilitate socially engaged transdisciplinary collaborations and create projects that address systemic urgencies. “Crafting Transdisciplinary Collaborations” provides a framework for planning and executing transdisciplinary collaborative arts projects. It provides readers with a multi-step model for facilitating arts programming and transdisciplinary research that brings together scholars, students, and community members to explore societal issues from a variety of perspectives, overcome adversity, pose solutions, and impact the wider community. Both benefits and obstacles are discussed, as are administrative issues, including scheduling, funding, and curriculum integration. Chapters 3 through 6 present examples of transdisciplinary projects facilitated in Central Florida between 2017 and 2022. Chapter 3, “Bringing Ecocriticism to Life: A Look at Florida’s Changing Landscape,” examines a series of transdisciplinary student and community facing arts programs related to Florida’s ecology that were staged in 2017. Addressing ideas including unpaid and underpaid farm labor, overdevelopment, and climate change, an art exhibition, theatre events, and associated guest lectures investigated the interconnectedness of migration, poverty, racism, and environmental degradation. Programming involved participants from across the disciplines and approached climate change as a local issue. Chapter 4, “Finding Home: Staging Refugee Stories and Creating Spaces of Social Engagement,” extends the discussion of ecology and migration to displacement. The programming, held in 2018, included an art

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exhibition, a fully mounted theatrical production, a staged reading, and guest lectures engaged with exilic narratives. Chapter 5, “Challenging the Narrative of Decline: An Intergenerational Creative Community of Care,” explores how the visual and performing arts offer positive intergenerational interactions for those with dementia. Seeking to reach the elderly population of Central Florida and address burgeoning generational divides, we collaborated with the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach in 2019 to provide programming for students, caregivers, and senior citizens with dementia. Drawing on philosopher Ronald J. Manheimer’s argument that intergenerational programs “enable members of different generations to exchange knowledge and experience, and to benefit from different perspectives,” this chapter employs theatre scholar Anne Davis Basting’s Creative Community of Care model.39 The sixth chapter, “Our Carceral Landscape: Imagining a Thirdspace of Social Justice,” examines the effects of arts-based interventions on those who are incarcerated. Florida has the third largest prison system in the United States, and Orlando has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates. For the past five years we have been offering courses on visual arts and theatre to men incarcerated in Central Florida. This chapter situates our work in prisons within the larger discourse of arts-based prison education and draws upon participant and audience feedback to explore efficacy. Each of these chapters includes descriptions of the transdisciplinary projects under review and outlines how they integrated Essential Learning Outcomes articulated by the AAC&U. Finally, a concluding chapter provides reflections on our transdisciplinary collaborative work and poses questions for further discussion of the role of the arts in higher education. Whereas the issues addressed in this volume—climate change, displacement, aging, and incarceration—may seem best addressed by scientists, politicians, doctors, and criminologists, we contend that the arts provide a vital but underutilized tool in addressing societal issues and that transdisciplinary research is best suited to confronting big social problems. Similarly, by focusing on the local, global issues become manageable and relatable. Our engagement with theoretical concepts in each chapter helps strengthen the connection between the global and the local, offers the opportunity to discover transdisciplinary intersections, frames our practice within existing discourses, and investigates further pathways for engaging students in challenging topics across disciplines. Theory provides the foundation to facilitate critically engaged conversations with students and collaborators, and the transdisciplinary projects discussed here share an

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interest in the capacity of the arts to give shape to shared experiences of vulnerability, belonging, and displacement. With this in mind, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices will be of use to undergraduate and graduate students, artists, scholars, and practitioners from across the disciplines but especially in art, art history, art education, theatre, and performance studies at colleges and universities in cities large and small. There has been recent interest in socially engaged artistic practices and artists/theatre makers who create artistic interventions that initiate civil dialogues on difficult topics, and this volume offers timely examples of how scholars, practitioners, and teaching artists can engage students in socially responsible, collaborative, and activist practices and conversations. Finally, a word on the authors: Julia Listengarten is a professor of theatre and the artistic director of theatre in the School of Performing Arts at the University of Central Florida. She is an artist scholar who has worked in professional and academic theatre and whose research interests include avant-garde theatre, socially engaged arts practices, and performances of national identity. She served as the editor (2013–2020) of Stanislavski Studies: Practice, Legacy and Contemporary Theater and currently edits the Bloomsbury books series “Reflections on Contemporary Performance Process.” Her recent publications include Modern American Drama: Playwriting 2000–2009, Voices, Documents, New Interpretations (with Cindy Rosenthal; Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945 (with Stephen Di Benedetto; Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (with Yana Meeerzon; Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). Keri Watson is an associate professor of art history in the School of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Central Florida where she teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth century art, art of the United States, African American art, and the art of Walt Disney. She served as a co-executive editor (2020–2023) of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and her recent publications include the Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (with Timothy W.  Hiles, 2022) and This Is America: Re-viewing the Art of the United States (with Keidra Daniels Navaroli, Oxford University Press, 2023). Her research has been recognized and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists.

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Notes 1. Over the past thirty years there has been a significant growth in the areas of public and participatory art. See: Cameron Cartiere and Anthony Schrag, eds., The Failures of Public Art and Participation (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 9l; and Ryan Stubbs and Patricia Mullaney-­ Loss, “Public Funding for Arts and Culture in 2019,” GIA Reader 31, no. 1 (2020): 9. 2. Stacy Rapacon, “Worst College Major for your Career, 2015–2016,” Kiplinger.com, September 15, 2015. https://news.yahoo.com/worst-­ college-­majors-­career-­2015-­180641513.html?guccounter=1&guce_referr er=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQA AAI4PdeOphlj-­6wDGnTsMkYzDhSnu-­j6CZuEap7Zcsj74cT2C98eaglaZ 5G19SCe_KQUL7RPZl_yaMyHw5guP8cS_8l8cprk73imer6qwM4703I Hx3V2OM_dm3_NE1iSZqDZF8z4bUc207TBn0URI08w7 ClelZatmN9zTz4Wji223 (accessed March 10, 2021). 3. Scott Jaschik, “Obama vs. Art History: President Joins the Ranks of Politicians Who Suggest Liberal Arts Disciplines Don’t Lead to Jobs,” Inside Higher Ed, January 31, 2014. https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2014/01/31/obama-­becomes-­latest-­politician-­criticize-­liberal-­ arts-­discipline (accessed March 10, 2018). 4. Ryan Gerald Wilkinson, “Creative Arts Personal Pedagogy vs Marketised Higher Education: A battle between values,” International Journal of Arts and Design Education 39, no. 3 (2020): 537 and 539. 5. Nathan M.  Greenfield, “In the Image Era, Why is Art History being Squeezed?” University World News, December 17, 2021. https:// www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20211217111143231 (accessed January 20, 2022). 6. Wilkinson, “Creative Arts,” 541. 7. Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, National Panel Report (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002), iv. 8. Nancy Kindelan, Artistic Literacy: Theatre Studies and a Contemporary Liberal Education (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ix. 9. Greater Expectations, xi. 10. Jill Casmer-Lotto and Linda Barrington, Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S.  Workforce (Washington, DC: The Conference Board, Inc., the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families, and the Society for Human Resource Management, 2006), 24.

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11. Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, eds., Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London, New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010). 12. Marit Dewhurst, Social Justice Art: A Framework for Activist, Art Pedagogy (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2014) and Barbara Beyerbach and R.  Deborah Davis, Activist Art in Social Justice Pedagogy: Engaging Students in Glocal Issues through the Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 13. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (London: Melville House, 2015), and Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (London: Thames and Hudson, 2018). 14. Cartiere and Schrag, eds., The Failures of Public Art and Participation; and Cynthia Fowler, ed., Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Colonial Period to the Present (London and New  York: Routledge, 2016). 15. Jan Cohen-Cruz, Remapping Performance: Common Ground, Uncommon Partners (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London and New  York: Routledge, 2011), Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson, Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Megan Alrutz and Lynn Hoare, Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 16. Julia Silverman and Mary McNeil, introduction to “Art History and the Local,” In the Round, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 1 (Spring 2022), https://doi. org/10.24926/24716839.13157. 17. Fowler, Locating American Art, 5. 18. See: Marcia Pointon, ed., Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Andrew McClellan, ed., Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2003); and Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 19. Marjorie Devon, ed., New Directions in Native American Art (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 13. 20. Elizabeth A. Osborne, “Money Matters: Dismantling the Narrative of the Rise of Regional Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to American

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Theatre Since 1945, eds. Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 151. 21. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, Second Edition, eds. Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan, and Richard Proudfoot (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 3.2.21-24. 22. Anna Hammond et  al., “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (2006): 21. 23. Silverman and McNeil, “Art History and the Local,” np. 24. Jean Piaget, “The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Relationships,” in Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, ed. L.  Apostel (Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1972), 136–138. 25. Julie Thompson Klein et  al., Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving Among Science, Technology, and Society (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001), 4. 26. Bill Dennison, “Transdisciplinary Literacy: Seven Principles that Help Define Transdisciplinary Research,” University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Integration and Application Network, March 6, 2017. https://ian.umces.edu/blog/transdisciplinary-­literacy-­seven-­ principles-­that-­help-­define-­transdisciplinary-­research/ (accessed July 15, 2020). 27. Amanda Smothers, “Transdisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches,” Northern Illinois University, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, November 17, 2020. https://citl.news.niu.edu/2020/11/17/ transdisciplinary-­interdisciplinary/ (accessed September 1, 2022). 28. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 29. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 161. 30. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-­ Imagined Places (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 5. 31. Soja, Thirdspace, 57. 32. Edward W. Soja, “Thirdspace: Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” in Communicating in the Third Space, eds. Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 50. 33. Soja, “Thirdspace: Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” 50. 34. Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14. 35. Ronald J.  Daniels, What Universities Owe Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). 36. Association of American Colleges and Universities, Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work Selected

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Findings from Online Surveys of Business Executives and Hiring Managers (Washington, DC: Hart Research Associates, 2018), https:// dgmg81phhvh63.cloudfront.net/content/user-­p hotos/Research/ PDFs/2018EmployerResearchReport.pdf (accessed September 20, 2017). 37. Association of American Colleges and Universities, Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2009), https://www. aacu.org/initiatives/value (accessed September 20, 2017). 38. Alrutz and Hoare, Devising Critically Engaged Theatre, 36. 39. Ronald J.  Manheimer. “Generations Learning Together,” Journal of Gerontological Social Work 28, no. 1–2 (1997): 79–91; and Anne Davis Basting et al., The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016) and “Building Creative Communities of Care: Arts, Dementia, and Hope in the United States,” Dementia 17, no. 6 (2018): 744–754.

CHAPTER 2

Crafting Transdisciplinary Collaborations

Facilitating collaborative projects that engage students and faculty from across the university and broader community can be challenging. Creating truly transdisciplinary projects that integrate knowledge from numerous perspectives, employ various methodologies and theoretical frameworks, and incorporate multiple value systems to engage diverse learners is an especially formidable endeavor. The financial and administrative structures of universities, as well as location, class schedules, course loads, and research and service commitments, can make transdisciplinary projects feel like extra work that is neither recognized nor rewarded. Personalities, disciplinary differences, and educational siloing can further frustrate the best laid plans. Still, transdisciplinary projects are worth the effort, not just for what they offer students, but for their generative potential and community impact. Iterative and collaborative in nature, transdisciplinary projects can create new knowledge, transform systems, and enrich participants. This chapter sets the stage for the individual projects discussed in chapters two through five by providing an outline of how to plan and execute transdisciplinary projects. In 1972 Jean Piaget coined the term transdisciplinary and advocated for a “systems approach” to education that would frame it as “purposeful human activity.”1 Over the past fifty years, universities have begun “moving closer to a vision of higher education that entails a common

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_2

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agenda—one that values broadening access and enhancing quality and that views higher education as a public good.”2 Researchers who promote transdisciplinary education note that it “is key to solving complex social problems”3 because it brings together researchers and practitioners from different fields, industries, and disciplines to work together collaboratively and create innovative solutions to big problems. But where to begin? How do you go about choosing a topic and assembling a team? What problems are you trying to confront? Who should be involved and why? Why is this issue important to your local community and what is at stake? All projects begin with questions (and perhaps a bit of optimism), but challenges, including timing, territorial disputes, lack of funds and institutional buy-in, knowledge barriers, and disagreements over methodologies, can hamper transdisciplinary projects. Creativity and tenacity go a long way, though, and in our projects, programming was facilitated by Julia’s appointment as the artistic director of theatre in UCF’s School of Performing Arts. In this role, she meets with students, faculty, community members, and donors to plan each production season. She balances the diverse perspectives of these stakeholders with the curricular needs of the department’s multiple degree programs (acting, musical theatre, design, and stage management), as well as her own research in transdisciplinary collaboration. Similarly, Keri’s various roles as a tenured art historian in the School of Visual Arts and Design, a former fellow in UCF’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, and director of the Florida Prison Education Project helped facilitate programming in the UCF Art Gallery, make connections across the university community, and coordinate programs in area prisons. Still, communication, respect for diverse perspectives, and the ability to compromise are key to overcoming conflicts and crafting transdisciplinary projects for maximum impact. It is important to approach projects, especially those outside one’s area of expertise, with humility and to cultivate trust with potential collaborators. It can be hard to garner support from colleagues and administrators who do not see the value of transdisciplinary and collaborative projects or those who may be protective of their areas of specialization. For many, working within one’s discipline and producing single-authored research are highly valued endeavors, and tenure and promotion committees may not always recognize the significance or impact of collaborative, multi-­ authored, transdisciplinary projects. Similarly, many teach as they were taught, which often means emphasizing content coverage via discipline-­ specific lectures over participating in projects that may appear tangential to

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subject matter. Moreover, department chairs and deans may not see the benefits of working across areas or supporting co-teaching, especially if credit-splits and budgets don’t appear equitable. Institutional buy-in is key to building a community where transdisciplinarity is valued. It can be helpful to offer presentations at your university’s faculty center to disseminate scholarship on the benefits of transdisciplinary research to the broader university community. Sharing research studies or engaging colleagues from your university’s College of Education can also help promote pedagogical research on teaching and learning. As noted in a recent study: The organization of teaching and learning in higher education has often been described as students passively absorbing material presented by an expert, drawing on processes of memorization, learning material in ways unrelated to what they already know, and often is disconnected from other learning within and between courses. We know from discoveries by learning scientists that these traditional views of learning and the pedagogies supporting them do not work in educational settings, and yet the vast majority of students experience this passive method of delivery in university classrooms. Furthermore, the 21st century needs citizenry and workforces able not only to master knowledge, but also create knowledge.4

Rather than working within narrow disciplines, students need to “ask deep questions” and anchor their “learning in real world contexts.”5 Even though most universities are not yet organized to support these types of experiences, thematic, topical projects centered on “big, fascinating, important, and often beautiful questions and problems,”6 such as those explained in the following chapters, can encourage students to engage in “deep learning.”7 As Ken Bain, a leading researcher in emerging educational strategies, posits, “deep learning occurs only when students have thought a great deal about the nature of their own intellectual growth and have begun to formulate profound ideas about its meaning.”8 Deep learning is grounded in self-reflection. Bain contends that when students are guided through self-reflection with intentionality, they can observe their self-growth, reflect on their evolving insights, and articulate their reasoning for shifting their thinking in new directions. Strategies to engage students in deep and meaningful learning include recognizing the diversity of student backgrounds in crafting a course, encouraging self-­ directed inquiry, bringing multiple disciplines together to explore questions, and

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guiding students to expand their perspectives by shifting “from the specific to the general.”9 Just as some faculty colleagues and administrators may be leery of transdisciplinary research, students may not immediately appreciate why they are being asked to read a novel for an art class, see an art exhibition for an English class, or attend a play or concert for a science class. Many people believe that higher education exists to train students to excel at specific tasks, and disciplinary siloing has trained students and faculty to “stay in their lanes.” In contrast, “a transdisciplinary approach to learning aims to enhance students’ ability to be lifelong learners” and reduce the fragmentation of knowledge.10 Today, as society is increasingly specialized and ideologically divided as never before, it is critical to provide opportunities for students to think across domains. When preparing students for careers in the twenty-first century creative economy, it is important to empower them to be informed, creative, and innovative thinkers who can see “the big picture” and make connections across areas of inquiry. When working “away” from disciplinary perspectives and vocabularies, students are often inspired to forge new concepts and practices. Much work can be done within specific classes to encourage transdisciplinary thinking, but funding goes a long way to earning institutional buy­in and is always an important consideration when planning transdisciplinary projects. We have been lucky to have received six National Endowment for the Arts Big Read grants, which have been crucial to the conception and implementation of our projects. Created in 2004, the NEA Big Read offers funding to support innovative community reading programs designed around a single book. An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read helps broaden a community’s understanding of the world through literature. Over the last eighteen years, the NEA has funded over 1700 Big Read programs, and each year from 2015 to 2021, we brought the NEA Big Read to Central Florida to enrich the lives of students, faculty, and underserved communities including people in prisons, migrant farm workers, at-risk youth, veterans, and elderly people with dementia, among others. Although individual NEA Big Read grants are less than $20,000, they are designed to foster transdisciplinary thinking and enhance community engagement. The NEA Big Read was important to each of our projects, as we integrated Big Read books including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven into our transdisciplinary research.11 We have also been funded by two private foundations and

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received a National Endowment for the Arts Artworks grant, an Association of American Colleges and Universities Endeavor Foundation Grant, an American Association of State Colleges and Universities First Year Experience Grant, several grants from our institution including a University of Central Florida Quality Enhancement Plan Grant, a grant from the Learning Institute for Elders at UCF, and in-kind support from the School of Visual Arts and Design. In addition to securing funding, careful planning is essential to executing successful transdisciplinary projects. For our projects, we followed the seven steps outlined by cultural geographer Cara Steger.12 These are: 1. Exploration 2. Partnership Formation and Design 3. Drawing on Multiple Knowledge Systems 4. Co-Designing Research and Goals 5. Co-Producing Research and Action 6. Communicating and Acting 7. Co-Developing Future Opportunities During Step 1, the exploration stage, we came up with our topic or “big idea,” assessed its history and local context, and acknowledged existing and ongoing initiatives surrounding the problem. We sought out colleagues and community stakeholders who study the topic, and we connected with groups interested in participating or contributing to our investigation. In the case of the project discussed in Chap. 3, “Bringing Ecocriticism to Life: A Look at Florida’s Changing Landscape,” which applied the themes of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to Florida’s local ecology, we began by brainstorming ideas and choosing a topic. Living in Florida, we are constantly reminded of the effects of global warming as we face stronger, more frequent hurricanes each year. We see fewer citrus groves, shrinking natural areas, and land reuse projects that transform swamps and oak hammocks into subdivisions and strip malls, and we witness migrant farmworkers marching for fair wages and unhoused people soliciting donations on street corners. Faced with these environmental circumstances, we asked ourselves: How can the university and the arts address ecological and humanitarian crises? How should we respond to our changing natural and cultural environments? To help answer these questions, we issued a general call for participation and held meetings across campus and in the community to identify stakeholders. We worked with several departments, schools, and programs

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at the University of Central Florida, including biology, English, history, film, women and gender studies, and the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, in addition to our home departments of art and theatre. We also engaged local professional societies and community groups including the Florida Historical Society (founded in 1856, the FHS works to preserve Florida’s past through the collection of historical documents and photographs and the publication of scholarly research), Seminole County Public Libraries (a five-branch library system that serves 200,000 people), the New Journey Youth Center (an after-school program that offers enrichment programs to at-risk youth in Apopka), the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida (​​a non-profit community group that serves unhoused people in the region), the Farmworker Association of Florida (an advocacy group for farmworker and rural low-­income communities), the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (a worker-­based human rights organization that focuses on social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence), and Jobs for Justice (a coalition of labor unions, community based organizations, and student groups that mobilize workers to lobby for fair wages and humane working conditions). Furthermore, we worked with artists from across the country, as well as with arts institutions including the Crealdé School of Art, the Art and History Museums of Maitland, the Mattie Kelly Arts Center at Northwest Florida State College, the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University, the National Steinbeck Center at San Jose State University, and the Library of Congress. Although we used John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a jumping off point, it was important to localize the novel’s themes and engage with issues specific to Florida’s history and geography. We held brainstorming meetings with local groups and faculty representatives from interested departments during which we gained insight into one another’s objectives, agreed on desired outcomes, and sketched out a plan for the programming, including how it would be marketed and assessed. During meetings with faculty from the sciences, a UCF biology professor volunteered to offer a lecture on the Econlockhatchee River, a tributary of the St. Johns River that abuts the UCF campus, and the history department decided to host a panel discussion on the history of agriculture, migrant labor, and environmental degradation in Florida. The chair of the women and gender studies program volunteered to offer a book club to high school students at the New Journey Youth Center, and a faculty member in the English department hosted a book club with the Coalition for the

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Homeless. A ceramics professor taught Indigenous pottery techniques to a class of undergraduate art students, who donated the resulting bowls to raise money for the Florida Farmworkers Association, and faculty from the film and history departments collaboratively produced a film about environmental racism in Central Florida. The theatre department staged a black box production of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, a staged reading of an adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, and a theatre for young audiences production of Puddin’ and the Grumble. The UCF Art Gallery hosted an art exhibition (Fig. 2.1) and invited contributing artists and scholars to give talks in the gallery, attend critiques, and present demonstrations in the art studios. During meetings with community stakeholders, we brainstormed ideas for extending programming beyond the campus and discussed how we could help serve their constituents. With a representative from the local municipal library system, we explored ways to support public programs at their five branch locations that would complement our on-campus events.

Fig. 2.1  Installation view of “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape,” UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Hannah Estes. Image courtesy of the authors)

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They decided to host seven book clubs, a teen book club that raised money for food pantries at public schools, and a “Farming Fun” program for each of its Library Explorers Clubs during which kids (kindergartners through fifth graders) learned about the science of farming, participated in handson activities, enjoyed puppet shows, and explored the causes of environmental degradation. Additionally, the library hosted an exhibition of early twentieth-century agricultural photographs culled from the Florida Memory Project at their central branch in Casselberry. The director of the Farmworker Association of Florida facilitated the loan of the Apopka Farmworker Memorial Quilts to the art exhibition at the UCF Art Gallery, arranged for a talk by a local author who wrote a book about the Apopka Farmworkers and their exposure to unregulated pesticides, and contributed an essay to the catalogue that was published to accompany the art exhibition. The catalogue also included poetry written by a faculty member in the creative writing program and an essay by a faculty member from the history department. During the exploratory phase of any project, it is important to cast a wide net and be prepared for a variety of responses. Sometimes stakeholders you think will be enthusiastic about a project are either not interested or too busy to participate. Sometimes, values and goals just don’t align. At the same time, partners and collaborators can come from unexpected places. In this case, we originally planned to host a screening of John Ford’s Academy Award-winning film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath at a local movie theatre. Although those plans fell through, we ended up finding a collaborator in the theatre department who not only organized a staged reading of The Grapes of Wrath at UCF Celebrates the Arts (a two-week festival at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Orlando) but also directed a production of Of Mice and Men in the black box theatre on UCF’s main campus. We also originally booked the UCF Art Gallery for a four-week exhibition, but the show’s run was cut short so the gallery could be used for an extended installation by Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students (a collision of discipline-specific and transdisciplinary pedagogies). While this was initially upsetting, it turned into an opportunity when the City of Orlando agreed to mount the exhibition in the gallery at City Hall across the street from the Dr. Phillips Centre for the Performing Arts during UCF Celebrates the Arts. This provided the exhibition with a second venue, a new audience, and more exposure. Power dynamics and a lack of shared interests or motivations can sometimes foreclose opportunities, but meeting challenges with

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flexibility and an open mind enabled us to find innovative solutions to problems as they arose. In Step 2, partnership formation and design, we identified shared interests, established a core leadership team, and defined the roles and duties of everyone involved. It is vital to include individuals with experience working with community groups, and it is important to engage with people on a personal level outside of project meetings. It is helpful to hold regular meetings with participant groups on neutral territory and to identify collaborators who have an interdisciplinary mindset. For instance, when planning the project discussed in Chap. 4, “Finding Home: Staging Refugee Stories and Creating Spaces for Social Engagement,” which responded to the refugee crisis that began in 2011 with the start of the Syrian civil war and adopted the themes of Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, we met with partners from across the university community to plan programming, which ultimately included an art exhibition, theatre production of David Edgar’s 1994 play Pentecost, and a staged reading of The Refugee Plays (2017). We knew we wanted to have an exhibition in the UCF Art Gallery, so it was crucial to meet with the newly hired gallery director and gauge her interest in the project. We needed to establish a relationship with her and involve her in the planning, while also clearly delineating our roles and responsibilities. Luckily, the gallery was available, and the new director was interested in co-­curating an exhibition. Similarly, we knew we would be mounting a full mainstage theatre production, so it was important to meet with the theatre faculty to brainstorm ideas. We were fortunate to find collaborators in the theatre department who were enthusiastic about planning a project on the theme. Since the topic was displacement, we also needed to engage people in the local community affected by migration. The chair of the political science department was an important ally in this respect, as he was interested in funding a displaced Kurdish artist and giving a lecture on the Syrian crisis. An MFA student in film who had recently come to Orlando from Syria was a key consultant on the project, as well. For the theatre production, a dialect coach invited faculty members from the departments of modern languages and community members who originally came from Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Russia to introduce student actors to their cultures and languages. An art historian who specializes in Renaissance frescoes reminiscent of the one included in the play was invited to share her insights with the student actors and scenographers. While planning the programs, we also met with the author of the novel, Dinaw Mengestu, whose family

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escaped Ethiopia during the Red Terror in the late 1970s and whose insight into the refugee experience informed our planning process. Not everyone we invited to participate in the programming shared our interest in transdisciplinary research and saw the benefits in contributing their efforts to the collaborative initiative. Our hope to coordinate the opening reception of the art exhibition with the opening of the theatre production fell through. Since most production schedules are usually created a year in advance, it is imperative to start coordinating specific dates for inclusion in transdisciplinary projects ahead of time, but it is also critical to keep open and direct communication and flexibility for scheduling events. In Step 3, drawing on multiple knowledge systems, we worked to accommodate different work processes and procedures while fostering appreciation for the diverse knowledge, experiences, and worldviews of the group’s members. We attended each other’s meetings and events, explored how to use multiple types of knowledge, and shared experiences with each other. For instance, in the project discussed in Chap. 5, “Challenging the Narrative of Decline: An Intergenerational Creative Community of Care,” which involved working with the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) and elderly people with dementia and their caregivers, the acknowledgment of various and diverse knowledge systems was crucial as we were working with colleagues from the colleges of arts and humanities, medicine, and nursing and facilitating several programs that occurred off-campus. While conceiving and executing the project, which was funded by a private foundation, we held numerous meetings. The donor had specific ideas about her expectations, as did the community partner. We met with the donor, with the leadership of the ACA, and with university stakeholders to outline our shared goals and objectives and determine the ways in which we could support one another as we formulated the project. These meetings happened over the phone, on the UCF main campus in Orlando, at the ACA in New Smyrna Beach, and at the Alfond Inn in Winter Park. Working with a private foundation is different from working with a federal funding agency, which can complicate processes and procedures. At UCF, private grants are administered through the UCF Foundation rather than the Office of Research, which required working with new personnel and adopting a different reporting process, but it also gave us a larger budget, as the Foundation did not charge overhead. With the extra funds, we were able to expand the circle of participants. In addition to collaborating with colleagues in medicine, nursing, and theatre, we were able to fund several undergraduate and graduate students, including

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two pre-med students and ten theatre graduate students. During the execution of the project, we met with caregivers and clients of ACA’s Creative Caregiving Program and an art therapist employed by ACA. The various stakeholders had different ideas about appropriate outcomes, expectations, and even what constituted research, but by facilitating numerous meetings, sharing scholarship with one another, and hosting social events and ice breakers, we cultivated mutual respect and formulated an innovative and creative intergenerational and transdisciplinary project. In Step 4, co-designing research and action goals, we worked collaboratively with stakeholders to define the specific issues addressed by the initiative, developed project goals for both research and action, and decided on our data collection methods. For the project outlined in Chap. 6, “Our Carceral Landscape: Imagining a Thirdspace of Social Justice,” which examines the impact of an arts-based curriculum on incarcerated learners, we interviewed faculty from across the university who were interested in teaching in prison, we met with wardens, chaplains, and education coordinators at area prisons, and we consulted administrators in the Tallahassee office of the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC). We also met with administrators working in UCF’s offices of admissions, continuing education, financial aid, online learning, and transfer services, and we met with deans and prospective students. The FDC’s primary goals are safety, security, and developing curricula with achievable and measurable learning outcomes, whereas UCF’s primary goals included increasing educational access and reaching underserved communities. By fostering mutual understanding and trust, co-designing outputs, and sharing concerns, we were able to work together to devise reasonable and achievable action items that satisfied the goals of all the participants. Leaders and stakeholders agreed that increasing access to higher education, studying the effectiveness of arts-based prison education, and working to raise awareness about mass incarceration were among the project’s key objectives. We agreed to share samples of student work, while the prisons agreed to share recidivism rates. We also collected data on non-incarcerated student involvement in the project and its impact on the wider college community. In Step 5, co-producing research and action, we worked collaboratively to interpret the results of programs, build capacity, analyze data, and develop outputs and outcomes. In each of the projects discussed in Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, we recorded the number of participants and attendees at each event, collected written

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reflections, and administered surveys and interviews. We then worked together with the appropriate stakeholders to interpret the data and reflect on the projects’ strengths and weaknesses. We adapted the AAC&U’s Civic Engagement VALUE Rubric to evaluate student participation and learning outcomes in all the projects, and the Florida Prison Education Project (FPEP) developed advisory and advocacy boards and received a capacity building grant to scale its programs. In all cases, the projects developed curricula that follow best practices in both higher education and transdisciplinary research, and we worked with our partners to adapt and improve our methods with each new undertaking. In Step 6, community and action, we communicated the results of our transdisciplinary research to people outside the immediate project, university, and local community. This can take a variety of forms, such as holding workshops and symposia, attending professional society meetings and public conferences, exchanging feedback, and meeting with donors and funders to discuss impact. The projects outlined in chapters three through six were shared with the wider community in a variety of ways. A synopsis of the project discussed in Chap. 3 was published in an article in Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse and the exhibition won the Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Historical Materials.13 We presented the project discussed in Chap. 4 at the International Federation for Theatre Research conference in Belgrade, Serbia, and published an article in the journal Scene.14 The Aging initiative discussed in Chap. 5 was featured at several Arts and Wellness symposia in Central Florida, and its outcomes were presented at the Arts and Society conference in Lisbon, Portugal and published in the International Journal of Arts Education.15 The research discussed in Chap. 6 was presented at two convenings of the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison, the Art and Society conference in Lisbon, at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, and in a virtual Four Freedoms Town Hall. It also was included in the Academic’s Handbook (Duke University Press, 2020).16 Professionally conducted, written, and peer-reviewed research is an essential part of academic scholarship, and publishing analyses of the projects we conducted in a variety of venues (peer-reviewed scholarly journals and conference proceedings, as well as public facing essays and pedagogical workshops) was important for a variety of reasons. Publishing transdisciplinary research unveils the mystery of conceiving and facilitating transdisciplinary projects in academe and leads to more opportunities for innovative collaborative

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practice. It is crucial to share research with broad audiences, especially when it deals with urgent social issues such as climate change, displacement, disability, and mass incarceration. With this in mind, we published a chapbook of poetry and artwork by our incarcerated students (Fig. 2.2) and several exhibition catalogue, all of which are available to attendees at college and community events. Only by writing for both specialized and general audiences and by sharing transdisciplinary scholarship widely can one hope to impact public policy. In the case of the project discussed in Chap. 6, UCF faculty, through the policy and curriculum committee, and students, working through the student government association, recently

Fig. 2.2  Don’t Be Afraid to Stand By My Side: Voices From the Florida Prison Education Project. Chapbook of students’ poems and paintings. (Cover image by Omari Booker)

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recommended that UCF “ban the box” on college applications and no longer ask potential students questions about their criminal background. In Step 7, co-developing future opportunities, we assessed participants’ learning, discussed opportunities for ongoing collaborations, and reflected on the quality and usefulness of outcomes and outputs and the strengths and weaknesses of the collaborative process. We collected feedback from a variety of sources including students and community members. Students enrolled in participating courses were given prompts to respond to individual events (i.e., gallery exhibitions, theatre productions, and lectures) but also to assess the impact of the programming on their learning and co-producing of new knowledge. Incarcerated students shared their thoughts about their classroom experiences through writing assignments. Community partners provided feedback on the topics and book selections to inform future projects. For our collaboration with ACA’s Creative Caregiving Program, we developed an instrument to assess the effects of the creative activities facilitated by our graduate students on the well-being of participants. Not all feedback was productive, however, and as we assessed student responses and survey results, we continued to improve our prompts and survey questions to receive more specific and useful input. As Bain posits, to facilitate “deep learning,” it is crucial to engage students “to become deeply involved in assessing their work. To make that happen they need some help in learning how to measure their growth.”17 Crafting prompts and questions that compel students to “understand their own learning, analyze it, and make a case (in their reflections and essays) about its meaning, influence, and value”18 guided our efforts to improve the quality of our assessments. Following Bain’s suggestions for strengthening student self-assessment, we asked students to reflect on how their previously held assumptions were challenged through their experiences of attending gallery events, watching theatre productions, meeting with community partners, and listening to guest lectures and talkbacks. We asked them to consider what insights they gained from these experiences and to gauge what stimulated their self-growth. Reflecting on the overall efficacy of our assessment process, and after attending a seminar on transdisciplinary research, we realized that we needed to design more effective processes for coordinating feedback during future collaborations. Each new project leads to new ideas and presents new challenges. With different partners and opportunities, the scope and structure of projects shift. The programming discussed in each chapter took place in both university and off-campus spaces including art galleries, theatres, lecture halls,

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prison facilities, retirement centers, community art centers, youth centers, public libraries, and homeless shelters. As the parameters for new iterations were discussed, it became crucial to embrace the fluidity embedded in transdisciplinary collaborative work. Covid-19 lockdowns necessitated further shifts in our transdisciplinary practice and compelled us to reassess modalities. Although we conceived of virtual programming as temporary, it has become an important option that reaches people who, for a variety of reasons, cannot attend in-person events. Certainly, facilitating transdisciplinary research that engages students, faculty, administrators, and stakeholders from across different domains of knowledge is demanding. At a large research university this can be a significant undertaking, and despite efforts by national organizations such as the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of State Colleges and University, it can be difficult to reimagine the college experience, enhance curricular requirements, and revamp assessments. Traditional organizational systems and pedagogies, as well as individual ideologies, pose challenges. Still, transdisciplinary research, because of its commitment to integration and application, its respect for multiple value systems, and its embrace of various theoretical frameworks, holds the potential to engage diverse learners in the consideration of social issues. Transdisciplinary projects are iterative, generative, and transformative, and they teach students the skills they need to be successful in the twenty-first century. The following chapters provide an in-depth look at four transdisciplinary projects we facilitated between 2017 and 2022. Although not easy, we found these projects immensely rewarding and hope they inspire you to pursue transdisciplinary research on your campus and with your local community.

Notes 1. Jean Piaget, “The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Relationships,” in Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, ed. L.  Apostel (Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1972), 129. 2. Nancy Budwig and Achu Johnson Alexander, “A Transdisciplinary Approach to Student Learning and Development in University Settings,” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2020.576250.

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3. Silvia Tobias, Maarit F. Ströbele, and Tobias Buser, “How Transdisciplinary Projects Influence Participants’ Ways of Thinking: A Case Study on Future Landscape Development,” Sustainability Science 14 (2019): 405. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11625-­018-­0532-­y. 4. Budwig and Alexander, “A Transdisciplinary Approach,” 2. 5. Ibid. 6. Ken Bain, Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 31. 7. Budwig and Alexander, “A Transdisciplinary Approach,” 2. 8. Bain, Super Courses, 67. 9. Ibid., 33. 10. Budwig and Alexander, “A Transdisciplinary Approach,” 9. 11. We have also hosted transdisciplinary NEA Big Read projects on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow. 12. Cara Steger et  al., “Science with Society: Evidence-based Guidance for Best Practices in Environmental Transdisciplinary Work,” Global Environmental Change 68 (2021): 10. 13. Keri Watson, “Curating Controversy in the Trump Era,” Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse 12, no. 2 (2017): 75–82. 14. Julia Listengarten and Keri Watson, “Staging Representations: Reflections on Performing Activism in a Visual Art and Theatre Collaboration,” Scene 6, no. 1 (2019): 29–50. 15. Julia Listengarten, Keri Watson, and Kate Kilpatrick, “Building Affective Solidarity and Creating Healthier Communities through the Arts: Interactions, Elaborations, and Interventions in Multiple Contexts,” International Journal of Arts Education 14, no. 4 (2019): 1–14. 16. Keri Watson, “The Florida Prison Education Project,” in Academic’s Handbook, eds. Lori Flores and Jocelyn Olcott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 335–338. 17. Bain, Super Courses, 67. 18. Ibid.

CHAPTER 3

Bringing Ecocriticism to Life: A Look at Florida’s Changing Landscape

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought environmental concerns to the attention of the American public, but it took humanities scholars another thirty-some-odd years to adopt ecocriticism as a transdisciplinary mode of cultural and historical inquiry.1 Even then, though quickly adopted by literary historians, ecocriticism was slow to find footing in the fine arts. Despite the popularity of landscape painting across nations and eras, not to mention the emergence of Earth Art in the 1970s, ecocriticism has not been widely embraced by those working in the fine arts, leading art historian Suzanne Boettger to remark in 2016 that, “in relation to literary ecocriticism, ecocritical analysis of visual art is in a nascent stage.”2 Some notable exceptions are found in the exhibitions, “Fragile Ecologies, Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions” (Queens Museum, 1992), “Examples to Follow! Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability” (Uferhallen Kulturstandort, 2010), and “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment” (Princeton Art Museum, 2018), and in anthologies such as A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009) and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (2014), all of which have inspired movement into this arena of scholarship.3 Similarly, in the performing arts, the shift toward embracing ecocriticism has been relatively recent. In the foundational essay “Greening the Theater: Taking

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_3

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Ecocriticism from Page to Stage” (2005), artist scholar Theresa J.  May envisioned theatre as a site of ecocriticism to “reconstitute the world, to reconceive our notions of community in such a way that the very boundaries between nature and culture, self and other, begin to dissolve.”4 As she encouraged theatre artists and ecocritical scholars to engage in a dialogue about theatre’s possibilities to foster a “deeper sense of our own ecological identity,”5 she called for the development of “a green dramaturgy, an ecological theater, which will not only tap the power of performance to shape culture but also revive and transform the art of theater.”6 A sign of the growing attention to the field of ecological theatre, the Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) Festival was founded in 2004 to represent a blend of artistic trends within eco-theatre. Since then, ecodramaturgy, a critical framework in playwriting and staging, has emerged to address climate crisis, environmental racism, and other forms of oppression. In theatre criticism and performance studies, recently published collections and monographs on theatre and ecocriticism such as Wendy Arons and Theresa J.  May’s Readings in Performance and Ecology (2012)7 and Una Choudhuri and Shonni Enelow’s Research Theatre, Climate Change, and Ecocide Project (2014)8 also signal an ecological turn, which was documented in Ecocriticism in Theatre and Performance Studies: A Working Critical Bibliography (1991–2014), a list compiled by members of the ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research) performance and ecology working group in 2015.9 For the most part, however, fine arts’ practitioners, whether in the visual or performing arts, largely ignore issues related to climate change, even as students and community members express sustained interest in environmental issues. Transdisciplinary in nature and emphasizing the interconnectedness of nature and culture, ecocriticism “asks us to examine ourselves and the world around us, critiquing the ways that we represent, interact with, and construct the environment.” 10 Looking beyond conventional frameworks, ecocriticism poses new questions, such as how is nature constructed by cultures and economies? And how do metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? Whereas the adoption of ecocriticism as a methodology by curators, dramaturgs, and other arts practitioners lags behind other disciplines, the global environmental crisis presses ahead with increasing urgency. In February 2022, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” its sixth report assessing the impact of climate change on our world. The findings are grim. The report acknowledges that global

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capitalism has supported the “unsustainable consumption of natural resources” and notes that, “the extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments.”11 It goes on to say that, “some losses are already irreversible, such as the first species extinctions driven by climate change,” whereas “other impacts are approaching irreversibility, such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers.”12 The report also departs from previous versions by recognizing the degree to which ecological crises exert an unequal impact on vulnerable populations. This latter admission points to the growing movement among scholars to address the ways in which the formulation of the Anthropocene, a term often used to describe our current geological epoch that links climate change to increased urbanization since the Industrial Revolution, does not account for the ways in which environmental crises unequally impact people of color and those living in poverty, thereby allowing us to ignore systemic inequalities.13 As such, many now favor the term Plantationocene, a concept developed by the agricultural economist George Beckford, that traces our current ecological crisis to the Middle Passage and the rise of the plantation economy and global capitalism in the sixteenth century.14 Adoption of the Plantationocene as a theoretical framework also encourages an accounting of the local. Despite the global scale of climate change, it is vital to attend to the local—the specific and particular politics, ecologies, and social processes that make up one’s locale—when engaging with environmental concerns and applying an ecocritical lens to the arts and their operations. By centering the local and the specific ways artists and scholars engage with their immediate surroundings, environmental activism becomes grounded in the here and now. Rather than focusing on faraway disasters, which, while important, can easily morph into abstract concepts, centering the local opens myriad opportunities to ground one’s artistic practice, engage the community, and initiate substantive change. Whereas carbon emissions, polluted water, and floating islands of plastic in the Pacific Ocean quickly spring to mind as urgent ecological disasters, focusing on the “global” at the expense of the “local” allows an easy escape route. These problems are simultaneously so large and ubiquitous that they become both overwhelming and removed from daily existence. As noted presciently by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan some fifty years ago, “What begins as undifferentiated space [only] becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”15 Focusing on local geographic places and site-specific socio-political circumstances encourages

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intersubjectivity, pushes participants beyond passive spectatorship (a convenient positionality encouraged by the static and removed nature of both the visual and performing arts), and sets the stage for meaningful actions and interactions. The local turn operates within the concept of the Plantationocene, compelling a rethinking of the interconnections between the environmental and the social and invoking cultural geographer Edward W. Soja’s theory of Thirdspace, a space “of radical openness … of resistance and permanent struggle … of various representations … a meeting point, a hybrid place, where one can move beyond the existing borders.”16 Following the local turn in ecocriticism, we organized a series of transdisciplinary student and community facing programs related to Florida’s fragile ecosystem and art’s multivalent responses to it. Though inspired by The Grapes of Wrath—John Steinbeck’s 1939 critique of capitalism seen through the lens of a family of tenant farmers pushed from their home in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl—the art exhibition, theatre productions, lectures, and talks applied the themes of the novel to the local Florida environment and investigated the relationship between unpaid and underpaid labor, exurban development, rising sea levels, and pesticide runoff.17 Migration, poverty, racism, and environmental degradation are persistent issues that plague Florida’s past, present, and future, and the programming, influenced by the work of ecocritical theorists Donna Haraway, T.  J. Demos, and others, approached “ecology as a mode of intersectionality, insisting on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and socio-political and economic frameworks of injustice.”18 Participating in the conception, framing, and execution of an art exhibition and theatre events, attending associated programs, and writing reflective essays on these experiences offered students, whether enrolled in participating classes, completing internships, or just attending events, the opportunity to achieve the Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) articulated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U): to ask big questions (ELO #1), practice intellectual skills (ELO #2), engage with real-world and diverse issues (ELO #3), and apply their knowledge to new environments (ELO #4).19 This chapter provides an overview of this transdisciplinary project and situates it within the wider landscapes of higher education, art, and ecocriticism to illustrate how socially engaged, community-based initiatives help students achieve deep learning, actively interact with their local environment, and recognize the ability of the arts to address “systemic urgencies” such as climate change.

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The Art Exhibition University art galleries are designed to operate as teaching spaces; they exist in an atmosphere of learning where the protections of academic freedom not only allow for risk taking but also demand it. This makes the gallery an ideal place for students to engage in project-based learning (PBL), or learning that is context-specific, active, and constructivist.20 Community and curricular needs intersect in the teaching gallery, where students participate in the design, curation, and marketing of exhibitions, engage with content, and hone professional skills. A primary location for the interface of students and community members, the university art gallery also enables students to put their educational goals into real-world contexts. As Pamela Franks of the Yale University Art Gallery argues, “The critical thing is the depth of the interpretation that can happen by making connections … [and] uncovering new knowledge and interpretation, so the understanding of the field of study is enhanced.”21 Or, as Katherine Hart of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum notes, “[Our main goal is] to create a sense of visual literacy among the widest number of students possible by reaching as far into the curriculum as possible”22 (Fig. 3.1). With these goals in mind, “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape,” which opened at the UCF Art Gallery on February 27, 2017, before traveling to the Terrace Gallery at Orlando City Hall for exhibition March 13–April 23, 2017, was designed with student and community input at every step of the process. Graduate students enrolled in a theory and criticism of art course worked with faculty to create artwork, write interpretive labels, design and execute promotional materials, plan programming and advertising, and print, mount, and frame artwork (ELO #2), and undergraduate students enrolled in an American art history course helped select historical images related to Florida agriculture (ELOs #1 and 2) and created a video that blended historical and contemporary images of migrant labor (ELOs #3 and 4). Undergraduate students enrolled in upper-level history, English, and creative writing classes participated in the project by studying The Grapes of Wrath (ELO #1) and writing poetry inspired by its themes (ELO #2). Community groups created, selected, and loaned artwork and held events in the gallery during the exhibition, which included photographs, paintings, prints, textiles, videos, and installations that explored ideas ranging from migration, tourism, and ecology to agriculture, industrialization, and conservation (ELO #4). The exhibition and programming worked together to demonstrate

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Fig. 3.1  Installation view of “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape,” UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Jason Fronczek. Image courtesy of the authors)

Florida’s dependence on paid and unpaid migrant labor, agriculture, and tourism, as well as the interdependence of these issues, and to highlight how the lack of unified environmental policies can have devastating consequences on the local economic and natural landscapes (ELO #3). Over the course of two months, more than a thousand students and visitors engaged with the seventy-two pieces on display, each of which visualized the relationship between humans and the wider natural, cultural, and social landscape of Florida (ELO #1). Students selected an array of photographs made during the 1930s under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), an economic recovery program established as part of the New Deal, to hang throughout the gallery space. Created in 1935 as the Resettlement Administration and reorganized in 1937 as the FSA, the program not only relocated farmworkers to land that is more arable, created land-use

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projects to repurpose depleted properties, and offered educational programs through agriculture extension offices, but also hired photographers who created more than 175,000 images of American life between 1933 and 1941. Many of these images were used in photographic magazines such as Life (first issue November 23, 1936) and Look (first issue February 1937) and in photo-books including Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), Paul S. Taylor and Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus (1939), and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and all of them were archived and indexed by the Library of Congress in its Prints and Photographs Collection. This collection is digitized and available online, making it a vast and accessible resource for student researchers and curatorial interns. After studying FSA photographs via the Library of Congress website and comparing the different ways Depression-era photographs have been used over the last ninety years (ELO #2), students and gallery interns selected, printed, and framed photographs and wrote labels for the exhibition (ELO #4). This activated student learning and prompted them to apply what they had learned in the archive to the gallery setting (ELO #4). FSA photographs, which are among the most visible and enduring symbols of New Deal ideology, offer researchers a vast and accessible resource that resides in the public domain, providing students and exhibition audiences important primary sources and insights into the politics of the period (ELO #1). Though many may conjure images of the Dust Bowl when they recall the work of the FSA, several of its most famous photographers visited Florida during the Great Depression and documented sharecroppers and migrant laborers working in citrus packing houses and tomato fields or on turpentine farms and chain gangs. Researching these photographs brought the national disaster of the Great Depression into a localized context for students (ELO #1). Nearly one thousand FSA photographs were taken in Florida by now-famous artists Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, and Gordon Parks. From images of migrant farmworkers in Sanford, Lakeland, and Homestead and pictures of land reuse projects in Withlacoochee and Welaka, to pictures of students at Bethune-Cookman College working for the National Youth Administration, FSA photographers captured life and labor in Depression-era Florida. Students paired these historical photographs with contemporary footage of farmworkers harvesting tomatoes, peppers, and melons in Immokalee in the early 2000s in the student-produced short film One More Dollar, which featured Gillian Welch’s 1996 song of the same title, a gesture that

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emphasized the continuation of labor issues (ELO #4). Immokalee farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented, have been fighting for higher wages for years through the Fair Food Program, an initiative of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). This program, which has been signed by Walmart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Burger King (Publix, the largest supermarket chain in the state and one of Florida’s top employers, refuses to sign), asks retailers to pay a penny more per pound for Florida tomatoes to increase workers’ wages. The selection of historical images taken in Florida and the study of the CIW helped students localize national issues, elucidate the relevance of history, and show the persistence of labor struggles across time (ELO #3), whereas the inclusion of the student film One More Dollar,23 which was projected on the gallery wall on a loop, raised awareness of the social issues facing the CIW (ELO #3). To situate labor and environmental concerns historically, students planned a screening and discussion of the 1960 documentary exposé Harvest of Shame, which begins with a scene of migrant laborers accompanied by Edward R. Murrow’s booming voice-over narration: This scene is not taking place in the Congo. It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town. It is not Nyasaland or Nigeria. This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960. This is a shape-up for migrant workers. The hawkers are chanting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.”

Illustrating the continuation of the plantation economy through the exploitation of migrant labor, Harvest of Shame aired in 1960 the day after Thanksgiving (ELO #1). It was the first time many Americans were exposed to the impoverished living and working conditions of sharecroppers and migrant farm laborers, and students’ planning of the film screening and discussion of Harvest of Shame brought these issues to life for viewers (ELO #3). Although today’s farmworkers are more likely to be Latine than Black, the low wages and substandard housing conditions have remained the same, both are byproducts of the Plantationocene, which has replicated the denigrations of chattel slavery in tenancy, sharecropping, migrant labor, and agribusiness. Hosting a film screening and discussion of labor and the Plantationocene in the John C. Hitt Library, located in the center of campus, widened the circle of impact and brought

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the themes of the exhibition to students not affiliated with the School of Visual Arts and Design and to those who had not visited the campus art gallery (ELO #3). Involving students in the planning and execution of this public event allowed them to synthesize the knowledge they gained through their study of Florida migrant labor and FSA photographs and to see these issues through the eyes of the 1930s, the 1960s, and today (ELO #4). It is important to invite community members to contribute their experiences when organizing transdisciplinary projects that address the localization of global issues, and a significant aspect of the exhibition was art created by farmworkers from Apopka, a community about twenty miles northwest of Orlando. The photographs collected in the series The Last Harvest: A History and Tribute to the Life and Work of the Farmworkers on Lake Apopka came out of a collaborative project between the Farmworker Association of Florida and students enrolled at a local community college. Young adults and teenagers from Apopka photographically documented the last season of the town’s muck farm industry (1997–1998) and the resulting images depict farmworkers and their families at work and home. These photographs are in the collection of a local arts organization where UCF visual arts students serve as interns and student-­teachers as part of the William and Alice Jenkins Community Arts Scholars Program. Interns selected photographs from the series to include in the exhibition (ELO #4). Artists, interns, and farmworkers involved in the project attended the exhibition’s opening reception and participated in associated programming. In addition to including the photographs from the series, the exhibition organizers borrowed the Lake Apopka memorial quilts from the Farmworker Association of Florida, an activist group that serves predominantly Hispanic and Black laborers, to feature as part of the exhibition. These quilts were made in 2009 by farmworkers from Apopka and Indiantown to honor deceased loved ones and raise awareness about unsafe labor conditions. Principal quilter Linda Lee, who led the community quilt making initiative, also gave a lecture about the project to a student and public audience in the UCF Art Gallery. Each quilt square relates the stories of individual workers and their families. Many of the Lake Apopka Farmworkers died due to health complications caused by pesticide exposure between 1940 and 1992 when the Environmental Protection Agency Worker Protection Standard was adopted. Until then, farmworkers received minimal pesticide training and did not have access to bathrooms while working in the fields.24 In the case

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of Lake Apopka, organochlorines such as DDT not only harmed farmworkers but also resulted in “one of the worst bird mortality disasters in US history,” when in the winter of 1998 more than one thousand birds, including White Pelicans, Great Blue Herons, and Bald Eagles, died at Lake Apopka.25 Following the deaths, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Migratory Bird Act, began a special investigation that revealed a ten-acre “hot spot” of toxaphene in Apopka. Studying the photographs and quilts and attending the presentation prompted students to see the interdependence of human and non-human animals (ELO #1), engage with local communities and diverse forms of knowledge (ELO #2), and think about how they can live ethically in the world (ELO #3). As one student responded to Lee’s presentation, “Why didn’t they get these people out of that environment?”—a sentiment that echoes the observation, noted in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, that “politics of citizenship, specifically the rights and protection of those residing in the democratic nation-state of the United States, are clearly not available in some communities, which suggests that the black and poor subjects are disposable precisely because they cannot easily move or escape.”26 Seeing the farmworkers’ photographs and quilts and attending the associated programming helped students make connections across areas of inquiry (ELO #4) and develop personal and social responsibility (ELO #3). To clarify big ideas (ELO #1) and help students see the role Florida played in the foundation of the United States, the exhibition and programming pointed to the settler colonial history of the state and unearthed the relationship between migration, the plantation economy, and human and ecological crises. More than a dozen Indigenous Nations, including the Pensacola, Apalachee, Guale, Timucua, Potano, Ocale, Tocobaga, Mayaimi, Ais, Calusa, Jeaga, Tequesta, and Matecumbe, lived in what is now known as Florida for more than 12,000  years before the arrival of Europeans, who quickly transformed the landscape. As Seminole Chief Sitarky said in 1822, “When I walk about these woods, now so desolate, and remember the numerous herds that once ranged through them, and the former prosperity of our nation, the tears come into my eyes.”27 The transformation of Florida’s landscape from oak hammocks, forests, and swamps to agricultural land was aided by muck farming, in which wetlands were drained so that the peat rich “muck” could be used to fertilize cotton, sugarcane, and celery and cultivate citrus. Today two-thirds of Florida is farmland, and agriculture is the state’s largest industry after tourism. According to recent statistics compiled by the Department of Agriculture,

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Florida depends on approximately two hundred thousand seasonal workers to harvest crops annually. Thirty-five thousand of these workers live in migrant labor camps, 50 percent of which “received an unsatisfactory grade from the Florida Department of Health.”28 Wages for migrant farmworkers are exempt from many of the protections provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act, such as the federal minimum wage and overtime provisions. Instead, farmworkers are often paid on a piece-rate basis that leaves them living below the poverty line. Despite these statistics, many of these social issues are largely invisible to students. Working on the exhibition became an active way to learn about the plantation economy and apply ecocritical and transdisciplinary lenses to the study of Florida’s history (ELO #4). To demonstrate the interconnectedness of farm labor, ecology, and food insecurity, UCF undergraduate art students enrolled in Professor Hadi Abbas’s ceramics class created bowls (ELO #2). Applying techniques practiced by the state’s Indigenous communities, students made bowls to represent the 100,000 people in Florida who are food insecure and sold them to visitors to raise money for the Farmworker Association of Florida (ELOs #2 and 3). Exhibition visitors were encouraged to bring a non-­ perishable food item to donate to the Knights Helping Knights Pantry, a student-led UCF program that provides food and clothing to students in need (ELO #3). According to data compiled from Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, more than twenty-five hundred college students in Florida were unhoused in 2021.29 Raising awareness about the ubiquity of housing and food insecurity and encouraging students who attended the exhibit to donate to the Farmworker Association and Knights Pantry provided an active way to practice individual and collective accountability (ELO #3). Disciplines approach social problems from different perspectives, and an Essential Learning Outcome of the AAC&U is to help students make connections across coursework and to see how national issues are reflected in local contexts (ELO #4). Florida’s history of racial injustice was highlighted in the short, experimental documentary film Hymns of Three Cities, created by UCF film professor Lisa Mills and UCF history professor Robert Cassanello. Including work by faculty from outside the School of Visual Arts and Design in the gallery exhibition brought another department into the project, modeled to students how different disciplines grapple with issues, and highlighted the importance of transdisciplinary collaboration (ELO #4). Accompanied by a suite of poems by local poet

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Stephen Caldwell Wright, the film explores incidents of racial violence from Central Florida’s history (ELO #1). Visualizing the issues of the Plantationocene, it begins with the 1920 Ocoee Massacre during which Black homes, churches, and schools were burned and at least fifty people murdered after two prominent Black businessmen, Mose Norman and July Perry, tried to vote. As citizens fled the White mob, they hid in irrigation ditches around Lake Apopka’s muck farms. The film continues with the fatal bombing of the home of civil rights activists Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida on December 25, 1951, by the Ku Klux Klan. The film concludes with the razing of public housing in Sanford, Florida in 2010. As Wright narrates: All of America has its ghosts the spirits of the dead will not die the arms of the dead still reach out the hands of the dead still touch… Florida is no exception.30

The ongoing legacy of anti-Black racism in Florida is often hidden beneath the gloss of tourism, but as one student said in response to viewing the film and visiting the exhibition, “Many of the scenes depicted throughout the exhibition showed citrus farmers and their relationship with nature and how it’s developed and grown, and again, maybe it’s because I’m a native Floridian, but these especially resonated with me. I can’t really say what Central Florida looked like before Mickey Mouse came to town because, at twenty-two, I’ve only lived in the mouse’s kingdom, but exhibitions like this really give me a deeper understanding and appreciation for rural Florida life” (ELO #1). Exposing students to the history of the state, to different ways of life, and to the diversity of the human experience instigates deep learning and builds empathy, which improves academic performance and relationships with one’s peers, and helps students become better listeners, colleagues, and citizens (ELO #3). As argued by feminist scholar and cultural critic Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “We are always already being hailed by our various (be)longings from the moment of our birth, from those moments well before our births: moments of conquest and settlement, moments of miscegenation and antimiscegenation, of mixing and blending and resistance. We tend to overlook the ways that power is transmitted through our affective ties. Who we love, the communities that we live in, who we expend our

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emotional energies building ties with—these connections are all functions of power.”31 As indicated by the misuse of power and the resulting tragedies at Lake Apopka, Ocoee, Mims, and Sanford, human and environmental concerns are intertwined, and the exhibition also included work that explored the ways in which unchecked development and minimal environmental regulations have altered the physical landscape of the state (ELO #1). Climate-change denial is specifically dangerous in Florida, a state where rising sea levels, population density along the coasts, and overdevelopment put the local ecosystem at increased risk. A recent study by Florida Atlantic University estimated that six inches of sea level rise, which is expected to occur within the next twenty years, could devastate South Florida.32 Students were encouraged to think about these issues, as well as artistic responses to them, by viewing and writing about work in the exhibition that foregrounded climate change and environmental concerns (ELO #2). Featuring artwork by local or Florida-based artists made the exhibition more relevant to UCF art students, 88 percent of whom are from Florida and many of whom will stay in Florida after graduation. Local self-styled “suburban primitivist” artist Carl Knickerbocker explores the tension between consumer society, exurban development, and the environment. His internationally screened film The Last Orange Grove of Middle Florida traces Florida’s shift from an agricultural to tourist-based economy, whereas his film SP#24 documents the recent clearcutting of land east of Orlando in Oviedo (ELO #1). Flagler College art professor and printmaker Donald Martin also engages with Florida’s natural environment, often depicting human encroachment, in this case the growing threat to sea turtle nesting grounds near St. Augustine (located a hundred miles northeast of Orlando). Cuban-born artist and Florida State University painting professor Lilian Garcia-Roig merges the abstract nature of oil paint with the wilderness of Florida’s landscape in large-scale images of fallen trees and Mangrove swamps. Painting with lush, gestural brushwork, Garcia-Roig translates representational scenes into urgent environmental concerns (ELO #4). Similarly, FSU painting professor Mark Messersmith crafts complex and large-scale mixed media pieces to expose the devastating effects of development on native, endangered species (ELO #1). Several students commented on the power of the works on display, one of them writing, “I feel as though I am drawn to the paintings because I am a Florida native. The worlds of fauna and flora explored by Messersmith and Garcia-Roig are those that are the most vulnerable to

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urbanization and extinction because of their sort of dangerous beauty, one that both attracts and repels, and is often recreated in zoos or relegated to the contained areas of forest on the sides of highways” (ELO #3). These works also provided formal and technical exemplars (ELO #2). It is important to show students how artists and faculty in their own state have crafted successful careers making ecocritical artwork (ELOs #1 and #4). Local contemporary artist Peter Schreyer and UCF photography professor Brooks Dierdorff take different approaches to their visualizations of Florida’s environment. Following the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Schreyer creates black-and-white documentary-style images of Florida’s uprooted communities and urban sprawl, seeking out bits of “Old Florida.” Dierdorff, on the other hand, uses conceptual photographic installations to interrogate environmental degradation and human intervention. His installation of Styrofoam coolers paired with a color aerial photograph of Lake Okeechobee, also known as the “Liquid Heart of Florida,” whose water level is creeping lower each year, represents the human impact on the natural environment (ELO #3). Whereas the works of Messersmith and Martin draw attention to endangered species and the environment, the work of University of South Florida professor Cesar Cornejo exposes the human cost of Florida’s overdevelopment. Cornejo’s photographs of old oak trees draped with red and green rubber hoses and a site-specific sculptural installation of extruded concrete challenge economic displacement, disenfranchisement, and gentrification, and offer a biting indictment of US discrimination against migrant laborers from Mexico (ELO #3). UCF is a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, so it is imperative to feature work by Latine artists in the gallery.33 When creating transdisciplinary exhibitions for a university art gallery, it is essential to include content that addresses the interests of the various departments and colleges that comprise the university community (ELO #3). Accordingly, the exhibition included a variety of works that would appeal to students and faculty from several fields. Historical paintings of Florida before its overdevelopment were of particular interest to students of history, art history, sociology, and the environmental sciences. Beginning in the 1930s, artists such as Jules André Smith moved to Central Florida in search of warm weather and scenic landscapes. In 1937 Smith established the Research Studio, an artists’ colony in neighboring Maitland, and others soon followed, setting up residencies across the state. Contributing artist William Jenkins moved to nearby Winter Park in the 1940s; American Scene painter Emil Holzhauer retired to Niceville on the

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Florida panhandle in 1953; painter Linda Van Beck relocated to Lake Worth in Palm Beach County in 1954; and painter and sculptor Doris Leeper moved to Eldora on the Canaveral National Seashore in 1958. Since then, Florida has attracted numerous artists interested in capturing the tranquility of its beaches, Oak hammocks, and Cypress swamps. Compared to the Northeast and Midwest, Florida appeared wild to many visiting artists, a feature capitalized upon by the Florida Highwaymen, a group of twenty-six local, African American self-taught landscape painters who created more than two hundred thousand paintings between the mid-1950s and 1980s. For more than thirty years, Highwaymen painters such as Livingston “Castro” Roberts created idyllic images of Florida’s untouched marshes and wetlands. Primarily from the Fort Pierce area (about one hundred miles southeast of Orlando), the Highwaymen navigated the racism of the Jim Crow South to make a living selling their paintings door-to-door and out of the trunks of their cars along A1A and US1. Known for the speed with which they painted, as well as their resourcefulness, this group created an astonishing record of Florida’s natural landscape before its overdevelopment. Despite the number of artists who have worked in Florida, the art historical scholarship on southern artists and artists in Florida is thin, offering multiple opportunities for students to engage in sustained research (ELOs #2 and #4). By contrasting representations of the landscape from the past with those of the present, students were also encouraged to think deeply about their connection to history and the natural environment (ELO #1), to alter the way they think about their relationship to conservation (ELO #3), and to consider the impact of their personal and political choices (ELO #3). To appeal to students and faculty in English, writing and rhetoric, and history, connect the exhibition to The Grapes of Wrath more explicitly, and emphasize the importance of history and literature to contemporary politics (ELO #1), the show included excerpts from the novel, which were printed on black vinyl and affixed to the wall. Quotes such as “How can we live without our lives? and How will we know it’s us without our past?” were placed above historical paintings and photographs, which were hung adjacent to contemporary works. This arrangement mimicked the novel’s use of intercalary chapters (ELO #2). The vacillation between history and narrative in the novel and between representational and conceptual work in the exhibition drew attention to the ways different media work and how form and content convey meaning (ELO #4). The exhibition’s layout was also designed to cultivate empathy (ELO #3), as Steinbeck’s prose

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emotionally resonates with readers and encourages them to make connections between the past and present, and between themselves and others (ELO #3). As Susan Sontag noted in 1961 “A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world” (emphasis in the original).34 In addition to the exhibition in the UCF Art Gallery, a largely student-­ facing venue, “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape” was shown at the Terrace Gallery at Orlando City Hall, a free and public venue that is open seven days a week. The exhibition at City Hall coincided with UCF Celebrates the Arts, an annual festival held at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, which is in downtown Orlando, across the street from City Hall. This venue attracts a large cross section of the population, as the Terrace Gallery is located between the building’s main atrium and a popular restaurant. City Hall attracts businesspeople, government workers, and those coming to pay parking tickets or getting married, among other things; so it is an accessible and heavily trafficked space. In addition to reaching a broad community audience, it also gave students another chance to see the exhibition (due to a scheduling conflict the exhibition was only up in the UCF Art Gallery for one week) and to share that experience with others. As one student recalled, Unfortunately, I was not able to see the exhibit when it was at the University Art Gallery, but the Terrace Gallery had a lovely set up for the exhibit. What I felt made this trip to this museum worthwhile was being able to see [it] with my family who was also intrigued by the photographs and the paintings. As we walked, my mother informed me that my grandfather was a migrant worker and one of the locations in which he worked was photographed in one of the pieces. My father also informed me that my grandpa on his side was a migrant worker as well but, like my grandfather on my mother’s side, when he saw what he was going to be doing and how he would be living, he left Florida and headed straight for New Jersey. I got to hear stories from my parents as well as the stories the photographs were telling.

The exhibition enabled this student to learn more about their heritage and their personal relationship to the themes on display. This was a common thread, as many visitors shared that they or their relatives had worked as migrant laborers. To bring these stories to an even wider audience, we published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. It included color photographs of each

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of the pieces featured in the exhibition, biographies of the contributing artists, information about participating community groups, poetry, and essays. An essay on Florida agriculture in the 1920s was contributed by Connie L. Lester, a UCF history professor, agricultural historian, and editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly, whereas an essay detailing the history of pesticide use in Apopka was written by Jeannie Economos, the Coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida’s Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Program. Two poems about migrant laborers and food insecurity written by UCF creative writing professor Terry Ann Thaxton were also included.35 The catalogues were distributed to visitors as they entered the exhibition. Some twelve hundred people visited the art exhibition at its two venues. Student, faculty, and community responses were overwhelmingly positive. One visitor noted, “All of the pieces in this exhibition work together in such a way that they are able to say completely different things yet, at the same time, they are all screaming the same desperate call for awareness and action regarding the ecological, agricultural, and environmental strife that has bellowed through Florida for centuries.” While another commented: “This exhibition was a perfect response to The Grapes of Wrath in the context of Florida. The pieces were organized in such a way as to capture the variety of Florida landscapes and their changes over time, as well as the relationship of the landscape to those who inhabit it, especially animals and farmers.” “In the Eyes of the Hungry” won the 2018 Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Historical Materials from the Southeastern Art Conference, and Benjamin Gallagher, in his review of the show for Artborne Magazine, wrote: “Migration becomes a way of life for man and beast as their existence faces extinction due to either industrial growth or the pollution that is a result of industry. The show allows the viewer a glimpse into these plights and a chance to understand a history that might not otherwise be told.”36 Students, whether conducting research, working as curatorial interns, or just visiting the exhibition, engaged with local issues surrounding climate change, exurban development, and migrant labor by reading the novel, viewing the artwork, reading the exhibition catalogue, and attending accompanying programming. Breaking classes into groups who work together to produce semester-long collaborative projects, which included transdisciplinary exhibitions with visual, written, oral, and hands-on components, provides students with opportunities to apply different learning styles and skills (ELO #4). Curation assignments demonstrate the impact

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of point of view on the interpretation of art (ELO #1) and writing labels and marketing the exhibition help students develop integrative and practical skills (ELO #2). The ability to work effectively with others is a critical skill for today’s students because it fosters diversity and respect for differences (ELO #3). Working together not only stimulates interest in material but also nurtures interpersonal relationships and social responsibility as students are pushed outside their comfort zones (ELO #3). Working on an exhibition and catalogue helps students develop their writing and rhetorical skills by requiring multiple and various styles of writing (ELO #2), and projects such as this one invited community members to participate, which underscored the importance of civic engagement (ELO #3). Most importantly, this type of transdisciplinary project encourages deep learning and meets the objectives of integrative and applied learning, which asks students to synthesize the knowledge gained through both generalized and specialized study and to apply it to complex problems in new settings.

Theatre Events Theatre has historically served an important role in society by reflecting, enforcing, and challenging hegemonic values and contemplating difficult questions. As noted by Nancy Kindelan, theatre models “innovative ways of teaching and learning that provide undergraduates with not only job skills but also with insights into how one faces complex pluralistic issues, where answers are not clear-cut.”37 Theatre teaches, provokes, entertains, and reimagines, and it is the immediacy of a theatrical experience and the communal feeling that emerges from being in a shared space that often facilitates transformative moments for the audience. Regarding theatre as “the greatest of all art forms,” Thornton Wilder thought that it was “the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”38 Freed from the financial constraints of commercial theatre, educational theatres provide the ideal opportunity for both theatre students and the audience, mostly theatre non-majors, to engage with challenging social topics such as climate change, homelessness, and food insecurity and co-create meaning in spaces that celebrate compassion, mutual respect, and humanity. Ecocritical scholarship in theatre and performance has recently expanded and the emergent concepts of ecoscenography and ecodramaturgy deftly explored in Tanja Beer’s Ecoscenography: An Introduction to

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Ecological Design39 and Lisa Woynarski’s Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change,40 respectively, have offered new and exciting ways of studying and making theatre. Following this ecocritical turn, UCF’s School of Performing Arts contributed to this transdisciplinary project in several ways. Graduate students in the Theatre for Young Audiences MFA program under the direction of Assistant Professor of Theatre Elizabeth Brendel Horn staged a student-run touring production of the new musical Puddin’ and the Grumble (Fig. 3.2). A team composed of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and alumni performed a staged reading of The Grapes of Wrath at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts as part of UCF Celebrates the Arts (April 5–14, 2017), and Theatre at UCF mounted a production of Mice and Men that took place in the Black Box Theatre on the UCF campus in Fall 2018. Collaboratively designed and produced by a group of graduate theatre students and featuring undergraduate actors and musical theatre majors in its cast, Puddin’ and the Grumble, written by Nebraska-based playwright Becky Boesen and composer David von Kampen, served as a compelling

Fig. 3.2  Puddin’ and the Grumble, UCF Theatre for Young Audiences. (Photograph by Ground Up Pictures. Image courtesy of the authors)

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example of an artistic and educational initiative that closely involved the community. Presented in partnership with the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida to raise awareness about childhood hunger in the greater Orlando area, the production toured to local elementary schools and community centers, engaging the community in discussions of food insecurity (ELO #3) and providing the ideal opportunity for integrative and applied learning (ELO #4). Integrated into an MFA Theatre Tour Class, this project provided students the opportunity to explore the role of touring productions in the field of theatre for young audiences, consider various organizational models for creating and coordinating a touring production in the local region, engage with community partners, facilitate difficult conversations about social disparity, and develop educational programming. Delving into the themes of Puddin’ and the Grumble, a musical about a girl facing hunger, graduate and undergraduate students discussed how issues, including access, diversity, and inclusion, impact children in the United States. By bringing the show directly to young audiences in local schools, the production’s artistic team created space for elementary school students to identify with the main character’s struggles and encouraged school administrators and teachers to support Second Harvest’s efforts to stock local food banks for those in need. The themes of Puddin’ and the Grumble intersected with the theatrical interpretations of Steinbeck’s texts, which delved into issues of poverty, hunger, nature, and environmental ethics. Mark Brotherton, Associated Professor of Acting and Directing, directed both Steinbeck works (Fig.  3.3). Whereas Of Mice and Men is Steinbeck’s adaptation of the novel that premiered on Broadway in 1937, the existing play version of The Grapes of Wrath is a more recent adaptation by Frank Galati that he also directed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 1989. The production was hailed as an “epic achievement” that captured the novel’s mythical power on stage and masterfully wove Steinbeck’s narratives about “abject poverty, deaths, desertions, labor violence, [and] natural disasters” through an evocative ensemble work.41 Galati’s adaptation and staging in some ways preceded more recent conversations in theatre and performance studies about the importance of raising ecological awareness but also, more urgently, about the necessity of challenging hierarchies and structures of oppression embedded in the Plantationocene and seeking “new modes of connection between humans and non-humans.”42

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Fig. 3.3  Of Mice and Men, UCF Black Box Theatre. (Photograph by Tony Firriolo. Image Courtesy of the authors)

Through rehearsals and performances, the UCF productions of Steinbeck’s works embraced all four ELOs while specifically focusing on integrating intellectual and practical skills (ELO #2). This integration is at the core of most performance practices, but in this case in particular, text and context driven explorations powerfully underscored the creative process. During tablework and play analysis that continued throughout a brief rehearsal period, Brotherton led his cast to connect creative practice to critical questions about poverty, environment, and communal strength in the face of adversity. More so, this objective to integrate the critical with the practical in student learning guided his efforts to foster an inclusive and diverse artistic community. Specifically, for the staged reading of The Grapes of Wrath, he assembled a multigenerational cast that included undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, alumni, and community members, thus shifting away from a traditional casting model in an academic theatre to expand creative dialogue to a larger community. The inclusion of many voices and varied professional experiences led to a richer integrative learning experience for students but also involved a wide range

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of perspectives from cast members as well as the audience, which were shared during an engaged post-show talkback that explored the issues of class, labor, and nature raised in Steinbeck’s work (ELO #4). As some cast members recall, the director’s approach to staging the reading of The Grapes of Wrath was akin to conducting an orchestral composition, thus bringing another transdisciplinary layer to the process. Actors compared the experience to being in an orchestra, pointing to the specific arrangement of the chairs and music stands in the rehearsal space, the painstaking emphasis on the script’s tempo-rhythm and musicality, and the director’s role as a conductor—all of which resulted in an organic learning process during rehearsal and an evocative performance. The staged reading of The Grapes of Wrath afforded students and viewers the opportunity to experience Steinbeck’s text—albeit in adaptation–and provided the time and space to viscerally connect with the characters’ trials and tribulations and make further correlations between history, environmental science, and the arts. Placed within ecocritical discussions across the disciplines, the reading encouraged integrative and applied learning (ELO #4), fostering the co-creation of knowledge that can only happen in collaborative spaces where complex and innovative concepts may emerge, intersect, and travel between, within, and across varied fields of studies and creative practices. All the theatre students on the creative teams of Puddin’ and the Grumble, The Grapes of Wrath, and Mice and Men engaged with theatre making through the lens of ecocriticism and contributed to vigorous discussions with the audience about the relationship between class, poverty, and environmental crises.

Public Programs The art exhibition and theatre events were sponsored by the NEA Big Read, a program created in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts in response to a survey that found that less than half the adult population were regular readers and that the rate of literary reading in the United States had declined rapidly over the past thirty years among all groups, especially young adults. As the study summarized, “More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life.”43 The decline in civic engagement was documented by political scientist Robert D. Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of

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American Community, which found that Americans had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures.44 To help students increase their interest in literary reading and engage with the local community, we sponsored a variety of public and student facing transdisciplinary programs to complement the art exhibition and theatre events. Designed to attract diverse audiences, these programs included lectures by scientists, historians, artists, and farmworkers that addressed issues including poverty, food insecurity, migrant labor, immigration, and environmental concerns, such as deforestation, watershed pollution, and rising sea-levels, and aimed to illustrate the ways in which human, social, and environmental issues are interrelated. Attendees also were encouraged to conduct further research on related topics. One community partner, the Seminole County Public Libraries, hosted seven book clubs for adults, young adults, and students, as well as conducting programs on permaculture gardening targeted to children, where participants created backyard rain barrels and learned other home-based conservation strategies. The library also sponsored “Food for Thought Teen Book Clubs” that challenged teenagers to read a young adult fiction book with the themes of poverty, hunger, or homelessness, and the Friends of the Library donated funds to the Seminole County Public Schools Families in Need program. Graduate students working on their MFA degree in UCF’s School of Visual Arts and Design helped select speakers and organize events that happened on campus, both in the John C. Hitt Library and in the UCF Art Gallery. The invited speakers reflected on the themes of the exhibition from a variety of perspectives including biology, literature, history, and art, and students were encouraged to make connections across the curriculum and to experience the ways in which life’s big ­questions are approached by various groups and specialists (ELO #4). The programming included a variety of disciplinary practices and knowledges that “contributed differently, but complementarily”45 to the analysis or understanding of the ecological issues at stake but also prompted students to engage in transdisciplinary ways of thinking to explore and understand how “concepts … travel between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities” (ELO #4).46 An example of the kind of transdisciplinary exploration and deep learning encouraged by the programming is evident in a student response to a lecture by environmental scientist John Fauth that took place in the UCF Art Gallery. Kicking off the lecture series, Fauth, an associate professor of

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biology at UCF who also serves as an advisor to Save Orange County and is on the technical advisory committee for the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, spoke about environmental issues, including overdevelopment, wastewater management, and habitat encroachment, impacting the Econlockhatchee River and the Big and Little Econ watersheds (ELO #1). The Econlockhatchee River is the largest tributary and watershed of the St. Johns River, making it an important water source and home to numerous species of wildlife. Offering a lecture in the gallery allowed students to learn about ecological issues from a scientific perspective while surrounded by art (ELO #3). Pulling together the different threads of the show and demonstrating all four ELOs, a student wrote: The Dust Bowl, featured prominently in The Grapes of Wrath, was caused by a failure to understand and respect basic ecology … this same failure is being seen currently in Central Florida regarding industrial development and unsound water use. [Dr. Fauth] showed a great example of this through a study that took place over many years. This study showed that an area near UCF has changed drastically due to the urbanization of the area. He showed images from different points in the study that clarified just how much the area has changed from a sawgrass marsh to an area overrun with red cedar. He talked about the animals, such as salamanders, that this change has affected. It was interesting to see how he was able to take this idea brought up in The Grapes of Wrath and relate it to something local.

Presenting lectures from different fields of study reaches students with diverse interests, and hosting an environmental scientist in the gallery brought students and faculty from across the university together, as many in attendance noted that they had never visited the Visual Arts Building. The gallery also hosted University of Georgia professor of history Cindy Hahamovitch, who discussed immigration and labor history in the South. The author of The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 and No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor,47 Hahamovitch recounted that Florida was hit hard by the Great Depression. Its economic bubble burst in 1926; the Great Miami and Okeechobee hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 destroyed whole towns and killed thousands; and the introduction of the Mediterranean fruit fly in 1929 devastated the citrus industry, cutting production by 60 percent.

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Hahamovitch noted that as the Great Depression hit the rest of the country, millions of farmers were dislocated, many of whom came to Florida, joining the thousands of seasonal workers already recruited by South Florida’s large agricultural companies. Families from Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma traveled to Florida after foreclosures and lost leases pushed them off their land. By 1930, 26 percent of Florida’s residents were on some form of public relief. New Deal labor policies, however, excluded farmworkers and domestic servants, 60 percent of whom were Black, from support. As one student noted, “Hahamovitch teaches us a lesson about vulnerability. If any of the farmworkers complained about their living conditions or their pay, they were in danger of being deported for complaining. [This] beg[s] the question: are these people able to advocate for themselves?” Hahamovitch also compared historical migrant laborers to contemporary guestworkers, helping students make important connections between local and global issues, past and present (ELOs #1 and #3). Students reflected positively on the programming and referenced its transdisciplinary qualities, one noting, “The lecture being given in the gallery during the ‘In the Eyes of the Hungry’ exhibit really made it a unique experience. While Dr. Hahamovitch talked about migrant workers, the audience was surrounded by images and even videos of these workers.” The third program hosted in the gallery was a talk by author Dale Slongwhite accompanied by community members Linda Lee and Betty Devos. Their talk added personal narratives to the history that was recounted by Hahamovitch and Fauth. Slongwhite discussed her book, Fed Up: The High Costs of Cheap Food, a collection of oral histories of African American farmworkers, and Lee and Devos, who lived through the environmental disaster in Apopka, shared their experiences. A principal quiltmaker on the Apopka Farmworker Memorial quilts, Lee also discussed her experiences organizing that project. Whereas talks by a scientist and historian offered academic perspectives on Florida’s environmental crises, this event humanized abstract concepts and made manifest the struggles of the Plantationocene (ELO #3). Lee and Devos related how planes regularly dropped pesticides on them while they were working in the fields and that many of their peers later faced medical problems. Devos shared that all her children were born with learning disabilities because she was exposed to pesticides while she was pregnant. These stories impacted students, who noted:

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The lecture was a grim reminder that things like food, which we largely take for granted, must be procured by workers who live in harsh conditions … Slongwhite brought up that these farmer communities normally existed near power plants and garbage dumps, which are primarily located near minority and low-income areas. This disregard for the people who pick our food was outrageous and their experiences will follow me in life, as I should remind myself of the struggles that made this food possible.

Narratives such as those of Devos and Lee provide a personal view of history that helps students put a human face on big issues (ELO #3). Listening to and meeting community members are vital ways for students to cultivate empathy and civic responsibility, while writing reflective essays and conducting research foster intellectual and practical skills such as critical and creative thinking and written and oral communication (ELO #2). Because the art gallery is part of the School of Visual Arts and Design, it was important to also host artists who could share with students their processes and perspectives. Contributing artist Cesar Cornejo discussed his pieces Flag and Studs Farm, included in the exhibition, which engage with the racism faced by Latine farmworkers. He also talked about his artistic practice and his interest in community engaged projects that seek to create meaningful relationships with the public through artist-led transdisciplinary practices (ELO #4). Twenty percent of Orlando’s residents are immigrants, and UCF is a designated Hispanic-Serving and Minority-­ Serving Institution, making Cornejo’s talk specifically significant to the local community. As one student responded: One thing he did that really stuck out to me was … repair[ing] the homes of low-income people for free. Cornejo had gone to Havana, Cuba [...and] built three boat-like structures on a family’s home… [s]ymbolizing how the family once had three boats that had been taken from them. Cornejo mentioned how he was on a Cuban television show and had to reword the history of why he made the structure resemble boats so that the boat-like structures wouldn’t be taken down. It’s a similar instance to when my grandparents left Cuba back in the early 1960s. … [w]here they had property/belongings taken from them.

The student’s response gestures to the ways in which the exhibition and programming elicited deep learning and encouraged students to make connections between art and their lives. Cornejo is a transdisciplinary artist and activist, whose work deals with the relationship between art,

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architecture, and society, and his participation in the exhibition and presentation to students illustrated integrative and applied learning (ELO #4). In addition to scientists, historians, artists, writers, and community members, the art gallery hosted an opening reception featuring a talk by Susan Shillinglaw, then-director of the National Steinbeck Center. Now retired, Shillinglaw was a professor of English at San Jose State University for twenty-seven years and director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University for eighteen. Over the course of her career, she published widely on Steinbeck, with notable books including On Reading the Grapes of Wrath and A Journey into Steinbeck’s California.48 It was important to include a literary scholar who could delve deeply into the novel and bring the focus back to the project’s source material (ELO #1). Recognized as a scholar who underscores “Steinbeck’s preoccupation with ecology and humanity’s impact on the biosphere,” Shillinglaw situated her reading of the novel within ecological discourses of the past and present (ELO #4).49 Her talk outlined for students and other attendees the value of literary reading and its relevance to civic engagement (ELO #3). These talks, presented by scholars and artists representing a variety of disciplines, happened in the gallery and were open to the UCF community of students, faculty, and staff, as well as to the broader public. The presentation complemented the exhibition, the theatre events, the film screenings in the university library, and the associated programs at the public library. Transdisciplinarity is key to helping reach diverse audiences and meeting essential learning objectives, as engaged and deep learning experiences allow students to synthesize the knowledge and skills gained in their educational experiences and prepare them for life, work, and citizenship (ELO #4). Graduate students helped select the guest artists, and scholars (ELO #2) and undergraduate students enrolled in participating classes read The Grapes of Wrath, attended public programs, and submitted reflective essays (ELOs #1 and #4). Students were encouraged to think about the differences between nature and culture (ELO #1), practice written and oral communication (ELO #2), and engage with the community (ELO #3). Public programs created space for the interrogation of complex social issues such as the local effects of climate change and how environmental crises unequally impact people of color and those living in poverty (ELO #4).

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Conclusion Ecocriticism asks us to look at ourselves, our communities, and the world around us, pushing beyond disciplinary boundaries to see the interconnectedness of humans and nature. By participating in the conception, framing, and execution of this ecocritical and transdisciplinary project, as well as attending associated programs and writing reflective essays on their experiences, students engaged with the local community, practiced deep learning, and achieved Essential Learning Outcomes. Although this project looked to ecocriticism as its organizing methodology, the lessons of this initiative can be applied to other topics, as the following chapters show.

Notes 1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 2. Suzanne Boettger, “Within and Beyond the Art World: Environmentalist Criticism of Visual Art,” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed. Hubert Zapf (Berlin and Boston, De Gruyter, 2016), 664. 3. Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmsher, eds., A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); and Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Publishing, 2014). See also, Stephen Eisenman, The Cry of Nature  – Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion Books, 2003); Robin Kelsey, “Ecology, Sustainability, and Historical Interpretation,” American Art 28, no. 3 (2014): 8–13; and Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in the Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 4. Theresa J. May, “Greening the Theater: Taking Ecocriticism from Page to Stage,” Transdisciplinary Literary Studies 7, no. 1 (2005): 100. 5. Ibid., 95. 6. Ibid., 100. 7. Wendy Arons and Theresa J.  May, eds. Readings in Performance and Ecology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 8. Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 9. Theresa J. May et al., “Ecocriticism in Theatre and Performance Studies: A Working Critical Bibliography (1991–2014), January 27, 2015,” Theater Historiography-A Gathering Place for Theater Students and Scholars to Share

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Ideas and Tools, https://www.theater-­historiography.org/2015/02/05/ ecocriticism-­i n-­t heatre-­a nd-­p erformance-­s tudies-­a -­w orking-­c ritical-­ bibliography-­1991-­2014/ (accessed June 1, 2019). 10. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xix. 11. Rita Adrian et  al., Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 5. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Alan C. Braddock and Renée Ater, “Art in the Anthropocene,” American Art 28, no. 3 (2014): 2–8. 14. George L. Beckford, The George Beckford Papers, ed. Kari Levitt (Mona: Canoe Press, University of the West Indies, 2000); George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (1972; repr., Mona: Canoe Press University of West Indies, 1999); Janae Davis, Alex A.  Moulton, Levi Van Sant, and Brian Williams, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises,” Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019): 1–15; Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no.1 (2015): 159–165; and Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing,” Edge Effects (2019), https://edgeeffects.net/wp-­ content/uploads/2019/06/PlantationoceneReflections_Haraway_Tsing. pdf (accessed August 8, 2021). 15. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. 16. Edward W. Soja, “Thirdspace: Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” in Communicating in the Third Space, eds. Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 56. 17. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939). 18.  T.  J. Demos, “Ecology-as-Intrasectionality,” Bully Pulpit, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 1 (Spring 2019), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.1699 and Against the Anthropocene (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2017); and Haraway et  al., “Anthropologists Are Talking—About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81, no. 3 (2016): 540. 19. “Trending Topic: Essential Learning Outcomes,” Association of American Colleges and Universities, https://www.aacu.org/trending-­topics/ essential-­learning-­outcomes (accessed July 1, 2020).

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20.  Dimitra Kokotsaki, Victoria Menzies, and Andrew Wiggins, “Projectbased Learning: A Review of the Literature,” Improving Schools 19, no. 3 (2016): 267. 21. Anna Hammond et  al., “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (2006), 27. 22. Ibid., 26. 23. Keri Watson and Tim Reid, One More Dollar, film, 2017, https://vimeo. com/204955862/93d8019368 (accessed January 15, 2021). 24. Jeannie Economos, “Farming Relied on Lake Apopka Farmworkers,” in In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape, ed. Keri Watson (Orlando: University of Central Florida Art Gallery, 2017), 21. 25. Ibid., 24. 26. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Boston: South End Press, 2007), 3. 27. Quoted in John K. Mahon, “The Treaty of Moultrie Creek, 1823,” Florida Historical Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1962): 350. 28. “A Legacy of Migrant Neglect: Farm Workers’ Poor Living Conditions are Everyone’s Concern,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, February 9, 2015, https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/2015/02/10/a-­legacy-­ of-­migrant-­neglect/29297797007/ (accessed January 12, 2021). 29.  Jesse Scheckner, “Florida Has a ‘Rampant’ College Homelessness Problem—Now One Lawmaker Wants to Fix It,” Florida Politics, October 8. 2021, https://floridapolitics.com/archives/463010-­marie-­woodson-­ wants-­t o-­t ackle-­f loridas-­r ampant-­c ollege-­h omelessness-­p roblem/ (accessed August 18, 2022). 30.  Lisa Mills, “Hymns of Three Cities,” film, 2016, https://vimeo. com/161305317 (accessed June 10, 2017). 31.  Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 16. 32. Jenny Staletovich, “Miami-Dade Turns to Nature to Combat Sea-Level Rise,” Miami-Herald, April 1, 2016, http://www.miamiherald.com/ news/local/environment/article68861522.html (accessed January 10, 2021). 33. Seth Gershenson et  al., The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research 2021), 12. 34.  Susan Sontag, “On Style,” Against Interpretation (New York: Deli Publishing, 1969), 24. 35. Connie L.  Lester, “Florida Agriculture in the 1920s,” 12–19; Jeannie Economos, “Farming Relied on Lake Apopka Farmworkers,” 20–27; and Terry Ann Thaxton, “Trailer Full of Mattresses” and “Children Without Their Own Beds,” 28–29, in In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing

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Landscape, ed. Keri Watson (Orlando: University of Central Florida Art Gallery, 2017). 36. Benjamin Gallagher, “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Sponsored by the NEA and Inspired by John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath,” Artborne Magazine, March 25, 2017. https://artbornemagazine.com/in-­the-­eyes-­of-­the-­ hungry-­sponsored-­by-­the-­nea-­and-­inspired-­by-­john-­steinbecks-­grapes-­of-­ wrath/ (accessed July 10, 2019). 37. Nancy Kindelan, Artistic Literacy: Theatre Studies and a Contemporary Liberal Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xii. 38. Jackson R.  Bryer, ed., Conversations with Thornton Wilder (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 72. 39. Tanja Beer, Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 40. Lisa Woynarski, Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 41. Frank Rich, “New Era for ‘Grapes of Wrath’,” New York Times, March 23, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/23/theater/review-­theater-­ new-­era-­for-­grapes-­of-­wrath.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed September 15, 2021). 42.  Cara Berger, “Performance Practice and Ecofeminism: A Diffractive Approach for a Feminist Pedagogy,” in Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice, eds. Carol A. Taylor, Jasmine Ulmer, Christina Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2020) 94. 43. Tom Bradshaw, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (Washington D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004), vii. 44. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 45. Stella Sanford, qtd. in Berger, “Performance Practice and Ecofeminism,” 91. 46. Mieke Bal, qtd. in Berger, “Performance Practice and Ecofeminism,” 92. 47. Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 48. Susan Shillinglaw, On Reading the Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 2014) and A Journey into Steinbeck’s California (Chicago: Roaring Forties Press, 2006). 49. Kathleen Hicks, “It ain’t kin we? It’s will we?”: John Steinbeck’s Land Ethic in The Grapes of Wrath,” in The Grapes of Wrath: A Re-Consideration, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 397.

CHAPTER 4

Finding Home: Staging Refugee Stories and Creating Spaces for Social Engagement

Our current ecological epoch is marked by a crisis of displacement, a byproduct of global capitalism and its attendant social and environmental injustices.1 In the United Kingdom alone, fifty-five species were either displaced from their natural habitats or enabled to arrive for the first time because of climate change between 2008 and 2018, and in 2022, a hundred million people were forcibly displaced from their homes due to armed conflict, poverty, food insecurity, persecution, terrorism, human rights violations, climate change, or natural disasters.2 Human and non-­ human animals are impacted by rising temperatures and global conflicts, which has resulted in unprecedented transience and social and environmental disruption. Anna Tsing uses the term “contaminated diversity” to refer to the mass displacement of the Plantationocene, theorizing that this type of diversity “emerges as the detritus of environmental destruction, imperial conquest, profit making, racism, and authoritarian rule.”3 Responding to ongoing humanitarian and environmental crises, Donna Haraway adds, “Perhaps the outrage … is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for people and other critters.”4 The destruction of ecosystems, the genocides of species, and the increasing environmental degradation caused by the pollution and depletion of waterways, among myriad other things, impact human and non-human animals and challenge our understandings of migration, displacement, and national borders. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_4

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In 2017, Orange County, Florida attracted more than thirteen thousand international immigrants, with many coming from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.5 Orlando is an incredibly diverse city, with its fastest growing, international population coming from Eastern and Western Asia and Northern Africa, and the greatest number of international immigrants moving from the Philippines. One in every nine Orlando residents came to the city since 2010, with half of these immigrants originating in other countries.6 Displacement and its associated imagined geographies impact daily life in Orlando, making Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace heuristic, which focuses on individual lived experiences, a critical framework for organizing transdisciplinary projects and arts interventions. Reframing the “Firstspace—Secondspace duality” or the conflict between conceived and perceived space, Thirdspace provides a metaphor that allows spatiality to remain “radically open.”7 Acknowledging the urgency of displacement during the Plantationocene and its local manifestations in Orlando, as well as the necessity of bringing these issues to students, in 2018 we organized programming, including lectures, an art exhibition, and theatre productions, that addressed issues of exile and displacement. Inspired by Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008),8 a novel that follows the life of an Ethiopian refugee as he struggles to make his way in a gentrifying Washington, DC neighborhood, “Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis” (UCF Art Gallery January 8—February 2, 2018) presented work by fourteen international artists, many of whom were once refugees themselves. A fully mounted staging of Pentecost, a work by British playwright David Edgar written in 1994 in response to the decentralization of Europe and the redrawing of borders, transported the production’s creative team as well as the audience to the Balkan crisis of the 1990s to facilitate a discussion of migration, identity, home, and civic responsibility to reflect on the past, intervene in the present, and imagine a path toward a more hopeful future. A staged reading in the art gallery of The Refugee Plays—five contemporary short plays by emerging American playwrights—engaged students in compelling questions about xenophobia and anti-immigrant anxieties. Public presentations included author and artist talks, a poetry reading, and a scholarly lecture. The art exhibition, theatre production, staged reading, and accompanying public talks provided opportunities for student engagement and worked in dialogue with one another to construct artistic frames to communicate images of exilic bodies, raise questions about how to address global displacement through the arts, and

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create a Thirdspace of radical openness. This chapter extends the discussion of the Plantationocene to issues of displacement, exile, asylum seeking, immigration, and resettlement and employs Soja’s notion of Thirdspace to examine the limits and ethics of artistic representation. Providing an overview of the exhibition and programming and situating them within the wider landscapes of higher education, art, and the Plantationocene, this chapter illustrates how socially engaged initiatives help students familiarize themselves with the issues surrounding the study of migration, multiculturalism, and globalization while practicing deep learning and achieving the Essential Learning Outcomes articulated by the American Association of Universities and Colleges (AAC&U): to ask big questions (ELO #1); practice intellectual skills (ELO #2); engage with real-world and diverse issues (ELO #3); and apply their knowledge to new environments (ELO #4).

The Art Exhibition Building on Soja’s conception of Thirdspace as “a fully lived space, a simultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual locus of structured individuality and collective experience and agency”9 and postcolonial, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s notion that “‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination,”10 “Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis” included sculptures, videos, paintings, photographs, textiles, and installations that invited students and viewers to reconceptualize the notion of home in relation to displacement and exile. “Home is some-­ where; it is indeed else-where,” as Ahmed reminds us, “but [it] is also where the subject is going. [It] becomes the impossibility and the necessity.”11 Each of the participating artists shared visual stories of their search for “home,” of journeys often fraught with violence, destruction, and humiliation. As the work on display engaged with questions of borderlines, both geographic and symbolic, margins and liminal spaces began to emerge. Rooted in the belief that art can operate as an effective instigator of social change, the exhibition focused on raising student awareness of displacement through myriad refugee stories told through diverse artistic mediums that modeled multiple visual languages (ELO #2) and fostering students’ development of personal and social responsibility (ELO #3) as they worked as curators, critics, and consumers of visual culture (ELO #4). Thinking through the complicated relationship between ethics, power, and representation, applied theatre scholar and practitioner Alison Jeffers

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cautions against “the need for the ‘right’ kind of refugee story in which complexities are smoothed out,”12 and the art exhibition fully embraced the approach of creating a multi-layered narrative that offered viewers a unique perspective of being surrounded by many personal stories of loss and trauma (ELO #1). The artists were selected through an open call with students acting as assistant curators who helped craft the call for participation and identify the participating artists (ELO #2). Considerations included gender, geography, and ethnicity of the artists, as well as subject, style, and medium of their work, and student-curators were asked to apply their knowledge of art and history to the staging of a socially engaged exhibition (ELO #4). The art exhibition and accompanying catalogue opted for a pared down aesthetic that encouraged a direct and unmediated experience with the objects on display.13 Ample white space was left between the works of art and the labels were not didactic; instead, they simply identified the artist, title, and date of each piece with a select labels conveying personal statements by artists. This mode of presentation stressed the artists’ points of view and encouraged visitors to feel an embodied sense of displacement as they progressed through the gallery space. Whose story is being told, when, and by whom motivated artist Vukasin Nedeljkovic to create the Asylum Archive, part of which was selected by students for inclusion in “Finding Home.” Nedeljkovic was a teenager living in Belgrade when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate into ethnic and religious conflict and civil war after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After publicly criticizing Aleksandar Vučić, an influential politician who has been President of Serbia since 2017, and participating in protests against Slobodan Milošević, Nedeljkovic sought political asylum in Ireland. He was housed in four different Direct Provision Centres outside Dublin between April 2007 and November 2009 while he awaited asylum. The inclusion of Nedeljkovic’s work introduced student curators and gallery visitors to the contemporary controversy surrounding direct provision. Whereas the Irish government insists that detainees are housed and cared for in accordance with international law—which includes providing detainees with free housing and healthcare, plus a small allowance— Nedeljkovic argues that direct provision centers are “disciplinary and exclusionary forms of spatial and social closure that separate and conceal asylum seekers from mainstream society and ultimately prevent their long term integration or inclusion.”14 During his confinement, Nedeljkovic took photographs, interviewed fellow asylum seekers, and created the

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Asylum Archive, an online, interactive project that operates as a “repository of asylum experiences and artefacts.”15 Nedeljkovic’s haunting photographs, devoid of humans or action, force viewers to examine the physical spaces of confinement while also constructing a theoretical framework for the interrogation of issues of power, authority, detention, and surveillance. Combined with the numerous stories of trauma and displacement contributed by his fellow detainees, the archive confronts the physical and psychological abuses, miscommunications, and misrepresentations that mark refugee and detainee experiences. What is the power of art to open up “imaginative possibilities for empathy, solidarity, and political action,”16 and how do transdisciplinary projects facilitate student growth beyond the classroom and build what Aimee Carrillo Rowe calls “affective ties” with unfamiliar communities?17 How can we disrupt the notion of “stranger” that, as Ahmed defines it, is “the one that is different from ‘us’” and therefore “associated with a danger to the purified space of the community?”18 These questions underscored the curatorial methodology of the exhibition, which sought to activate the gallery space as a laboratory for exploring how people experience life and culture visually and investigating the relationship between art and displacement (Fig. 4.1). To activate “the call-and-response” process in order to connect students viscerally with refugee experiences, “Finding Home” included work by Hiwa K, a Kurdistani musician and visual artist who combines photography, video, and installation to investigate notions of home, displacement, memory, and communication in a shifting political landscape. Hiwa K’s film Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) retraces the path that he took when he fled Iraqi Kurdistan and reached Europe by foot in the 1990s. In the film, he walks from Turkey to Athens to Rome on a path that takes him through fields, wastelands, and estates decorated with the idealized white marble statues of classical art. Framed by the icons of western civilization so often taught in art history classrooms, Hiwa K walks slowly through the landscape, guided by small rearview mirrors that he balances from long poles attached to his chin and head. As they refract the rocky ground into multiple angles that imperfectly guide his unsure footing, a meditative voice-over, operating somewhere between memory and history, describes his journey—the hunger, fear, and disorientation that accompanied his voyage, the drowning of his cousin when they crossed the river between Turkey and Greece, the news that his father had died—and the instances of miscommunication and misunderstanding that marked his refugee experience. In one instance, the voice-over says,

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Fig. 4.1  Dinaw Mengestu author talk in the UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Jean-Claude Rasch. Image courtesy of the authors)

“Everyone I encounter along my journey asks: ‘Where are you based?’ ‘On my feet,’ I answer. ‘Where are your feet based then?’ ‘Feet are never based,’ I say.” This semantic investigation captures the complexities of the diasporic experience, the human/nature dis/connection, the nuance that is often lost in translation, and the iterative power of the refugee’s speech acts as performed by the narrator. Created for documenta 14 Athens in 2017, the film is a performative recreation of a journey taken by the artist some twenty years ago, but it is also a symbolically loaded, visual, and aural call-and-response that complicates notions of home, history, memory, place, language, and clashing cultures, and encourages students to ask big questions (ELO #1) and engage with real-world issues empathetically (ELO #3). As one student noted, “The work in the exhibition spans a wide variety of media from traditional oil painting to large-scale multimedia installation and sculpture created by a diverse set of artists from across the globe … curated to add a stark visual representation of the refugee resettlement crisis.”

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The university art gallery provides visitors with a place for education and exploration, and “Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis” further engaged students in the process of disrupting existing hegemonic stereotypes about refugees as strangers, as not belonging, as being out of place (ELO #3). Steeped in the “discourse of stranger danger,” Ahmed argues, this “recognition of those who are out of place allows both the demarcation and enforcement of the boundaries of this ‘place.’”19 Included in the exhibition, another film by Hiwa K, View from Above (2017), visualizes the absurdity of the immigration process, presenting a non-western perspective about the journey that refugees are forced to take across borders. As the film investigates notions of the self and Other, past and present, center and periphery, and real and imaginary boundaries, it offers a voiceover scenario that recreates a conversation between Hiwa K and another refugee. The asylum seeker solicits counsel from his friend who offers advice on how to gain asylum. In the performed interview that follows, the immigration official asks for small details about the applicant’s home city and compares the answers to geographic features found on an aerial topographic map. The interviewee has difficulty proving that he comes from the unsafe zone because his answers only demonstrate knowledge of his hometown as experienced from the ground. Rich with historical and geographical details but also filled with heartfelt stories of precarious encounters, the film takes viewers on an imagined journey into deterritorialized space and toward generating an empathetic response, creating “affective ties” with others, and building collective sites of political action (ELO #3). As one student replied upon experiencing the work, “[it] was an awakening experience for the viewer that draws empathy for the individuals that inspired this exhibit” (ELO #3). Elaborating on the way seeing artworks in the gallery evokes “a deeper sense of empathy than the digital images we see on the news,” another student commented, “the refugees do not seem as strangers anymore but humans who endure a great deal of suffering that could happen to anyone” (ELO #3). Through the work of fourteen international artists, the exhibition asked students and viewers to consider how art responds to experiences of displacement (ELO #2) and how it fosters a collective dialogue about the ethics of representation vis-à-vis migrant bodies and mediatized images of violence and destruction (ELO #3). Sculptor Binod Shrestha’s Memoriam combines salt, charcoal, yarn, and resin into an installation that evokes both a human body and a house and opens a dialogue on the meanings of home, place, ritual, and personal identity. Shrestha, a former foot soldier

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in the People’s Movement who left Nepal in 1996 on an arduous journey that led him to the United States, creates multimedia house/body hybrids, pieces that offer portable homes to a man who lives without a passport and at the sanctioning of government officials. The imagined and real spaces of the refugee experience are ones that most Americans never encounter. Instead, displacement is mediated by the 24-hour news cycle. The kind of hyperreality encountered on social media was directly confronted by Raft 2, in which painter Lance Winn reconceptualized and defamiliarized an overused photograph to counter the ways in which displacement is constructed from a distance. As one student responded, “The faceless refugees also allow for the viewer to imagine [themselves] to be one of the refugees … The artist overcomes the former distance between the news watcher and the refugees and instead brings them closer to the audience” (ELO #3). Winn’s painting challenges the western hegemonic view of the refugee as Other and confronts the desensitization caused by overused photographs. As Susan Sontag noted, “War was and still is the most irresistible—and picturesque—news.”20 The exhibition introduced students and viewers to diverse experiences of displacement but also encouraged them to explore the notion of precarity as it relates to non-human species and the natural world. Mixed-media artist Alex Calder’s large-scale installation of small cut-out charcoal drawings of deer affixed to the gallery wall with stick pins, Where We Are From and Where We Are Going, which adapts its name from a famous painting by Paul Gauguin, visualizes animal migrations and mutations induced by climate change. Engaging with mythical and residual forms of coloniality, Calder’s work encourages viewers to think about their relationship to the earth, to animals, and to one another (ELO #1). Similarly, the hive-like relief sculpture Enclave by Eun-Kyung Suh functions as a physical and symbolic representation of the culturally distinct neighborhoods established by and for refugees—both within and apart, surrounded by a larger territory and dominant culture, but separated and confined. Borrowing from the architecture of honeybees, who live in complex interconnected colonies, the sculpture, a large-scale three-part piece created out of interlocking cardboard hexagons tied together with delicate threads, draws attention to the duality and interdependency that result from displacement and exilic experiences. As one student noted, “It showed that even though these constructed spaces preserve a cultural heritage and act as a safe haven, they restrict interaction with the host country and hinder assimilation” (ELO #3).

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Tsing’s notion of “contaminated diversity” permeates the collages of Armenian American artist Adrienne Der Marderosian, whose Tattoo Trails II features ghostly silhouettes hovering over mimeographed maps, some of which are upside down and labeled in multiple languages. The absent bodies intermingle with the collaged photographs as they trespass national boundaries, which are highlighted by brightly colored, yet delicate, hand-­ stitched threads. The stitches operate as both lines of demarcation and borders on the verge of unraveling under economic and political pressures. A testament to the strength of physical geography to impact personal memory and identity, Tattoo Trails II is a richly textured, layered, and obfuscated piece that conjures time, place, presence, and absence and initiates a dialogue on collective trauma and national identity. Echoing the ways in which layered histories are embodied in physical landscapes, Reem Bassous’s painting The Leaver’s Dance portrays a cityscape composed of both abstracted skyscrapers and rubble. A lone human figure, without arms and experiencing the effects of post-traumatic stress, occupies the foreground and acts as both the personification of a generation and as Bassous’s home city Beirut. Visualizing “the metaphorical rubble ecologies of immigrant gardens … [and] refugee camps,”21 the piece blurs distinctions between the natural and built environment and captures the ways in which political crisis is internalized both physically and psychologically. The Leaver’s Dance operates metonymically, using “rubble ecology” to stand in for political conflicts across the world. As one student reflected, “Reem Bassous’s The Leavers Dance was a touching and very personal display of the internal havoc something like fleeing your home in fear to journey to some unknown place can have on a person. Her painting was done on unstretched canvas showing the need for mobility and the need to pick up everything and go at any time … [It] shows how horrified and how sorrowful her city feels over the current events unfolding in her country.” As students and viewers were introduced to various forms of artistic expressions of exilic narratives (ELO #2), they also were invited to contemplate the ethics and limits of representing trauma and death (ELO #3). Sculptor Pam Cooper visualized the dilemma of ethically representing the dead and missing in her installation Invisible, which symbolizes the 125,000 minors separated from their families and detained at the Mexico-US border between 2011 and 2014. Rather than using photographs of the children, which, as Sontag notes, are particularly susceptible to the “exploitation of sentiment,”22 Cooper cast individual shoes out of

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delicate hand-made abaca paper to metonymically represent the children’s absent bodies. As a student responded, “The exhibition allows viewers who most likely have not been affected by this issue a new perspective and understanding of what it means to be a refugee. Pieces like Invisible force viewers to place themselves in a situation that they otherwise never would have found themselves.” Absence was similarly evoked by George Lorio’s sculpture Missing, which depicts a capsized boat constructed from found materials protruding from a wall adjacent to a flat silhouette of a body on the floor. As Lorio says, “The Rio Grande forms the southern mote for the lower forty-eight states and is maintained in its present channel by treaty, but it is more than a divider of countries. It bisects cultures, families, and landscapes, and takes the lives of many who try to cross it.”23 The themes of the exhibition were embodied in Hiwa K’s film This Lemon Tastes of Apple (17 April 2011), which investigates notions of collaboration, physical space, memory, and power. Filmed from within the crowd that gathered in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, on April 17, 2011, in the last public demonstration of the Iraqi Spring, the video is part performance, part protest. Throughout the film, the marchers pass around lemons, the juice of which relieves the burning sensation caused by breathing the tear gas that was sprayed on them. Hiwa K and musician Daroon Othman participate in the march while playing Ennio Morricone’s score from Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone’s 1968 Spaghetti Western in which a mysterious harmonica-playing stranger joins forces with a notorious outlaw to protect a beautiful woman from an assassin. Despite the tear gas and bullets being fired into the crowd, Hiwa K and Othman continue to sing, play the harmonica and guitar, and support the marchers as they seek to protect their country from Saddam Hussein. As a performance and protest, This Lemon Tastes of Apple simultaneously documents the demonstration and alludes to Saddam Hussein’s 1988 genocidal campaign against the Kurds during which he bombed the city with suffocating gas that smelled of apples. The taste of the lemons and smell of the apples connoted in the film connect the two ends of a twenty-threeyear-long history of trauma and investigate notions of displacement, memory, and chemical and psychological warfare in a shifting political landscape. Filmed from within the crowd, This Lemon Tastes of Apple depends on collaboration between the protesters and artist, but gallery viewers similarly felt invited to participate, to join in, and to witness the scene from a vantage point not often offered by western news outlets. As one student commented on the way the film activated their participatory response,

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“stark imagery is used to great effect in the multimedia work of Hiwa K. This Lemon Tastes Like Apple … puts not only a face on part of the world refugee population, but also gives an eyewitness account [of] the chaos and fear that goes along with being a part of the refugee population in Iraq.” The exhibition was curated to inspire deep learning and address the four ELOs articulated by the AAC&U. It expanded student knowledge about other cultures and experiences (ELO #1) and the works on display exhibited the skillful manipulation of a variety of artistic media (ELO #2). Students’ sense of civic responsibility was strengthened through engagement with diverse communities (ELO #3) and their involvement in the curation process fostered integrative and applied learning (ELO #4). To further empower students in developing their own skills in artmaking and critical thinking, exhibiting artists visited the university and gave demonstrations and lectures, and students wrote critical reviews of the exhibition, which included artwork that invoked participatory practices and stimulated active engagement (ELO #4). The twenty-first-century university art gallery is a space of provocation, or as Pamela Franks, director of the Williams College Museum of Art, contends, “The college or university museum exists in an atmosphere of learning and teaching. In a university context, this is what people are doing much of the time, studying, learning, teaching.”24 Tapping into that criticality, university art galleries are not just places for the passive consumption and contemplation of art. Instead, they are maker spaces where students and visitors participate in the co-creation of transdisciplinary research, learn practical skills in artmaking and curation, and work with others to challenge preconceived ideas and present their questions to the wider community.

Theatre Events To help students synthesize their learning experiences and promote a thoughtful and socially responsible dialogue between different art forms, the transdisciplinary programming included theatre events that enriched and expanded the conversation about trauma and displacement. Theatre scholar Janelle Reinelt reminds us, “In periods of crisis or flux, theatre is especially well-suited to influence as well as to reflect the course of history by providing imaginative mimesis, transformative models, and observant critique.”25 In recent years, theatre in the United States and Europe has become an invaluable part of creative programs that include refugees and

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facilitate cross-cultural dialogue between local communities and newcomers. Many of these artistic interventions seek to enhance language acquisition, mitigate the process of cultural settlement, and infuse learning with creative engagements. In framing an artistic practice with and about refugees, applied theatre scholar and practitioner Michael Balfour urges theatre practitioners to intentionally disrupt “complacency in how the arts represent the refugee ‘other’” and focus on “providing balance of empathy and understanding in audiences and the wider refugee discourse.”26 Jeffers, in turn, echoing Sontag, cautions theatre makers that “in representing human pain, [they] may fall into traps of voyeurism, pity, and aestheticization of suffering.”27 Philosopher Judith Butler also urges practitioners to contemplate the ethics and politics of representing precarity.28 Cognizant of these pitfalls, educators seeking to include visual and performing arts events as part of their transdisciplinary programming concerning exilic narratives may consider engaging in the following three practices: disrupt representational stereotypes of the Other, generate both understanding and affect in audiences, and avoid the aestheticization of trauma. Placed in dialogue with the art exhibition, the production of David Edgar’s Pentecost by Theatre UCF (January 24–February 4, 2018) and the staged reading of Refugee Plays both in the art gallery (January 26, 2018) and at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts during the annual UCF Celebrates the Arts festival (April 6–14, 2018) provided students with further opportunities to engage with multiple cultural perspectives (ELO #1), recognize the diverse perspectives of immigrants and asylum seekers (ELO #3), learn about migratory geographies (ELO #1), and reflect on the power of art to capture the precariousness of the human condition in the Plantationocene (ELO #2). Set in an unidentified southeastern European country during the late twentieth century, Edgar’s Pentecost (Fig. 4.2) interweaves the past with the present and offers a historical lens through which to consider the persistence of colonialism and cultural hegemony. Recalling the classical art included in Hiwa K’s Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), the first part of the play interrogates the origin of a recently rediscovered church fresco that had been buried beneath a socialist realist mural painting and post-­Soviet graffiti. The local art historian proposes that this fresco, which employs linear perspective and may have been painted by a traveling Arab artist, predates Giotto’s murals for the Scrovegni Chapel. Her theory,

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Fig. 4.2  Pentecost, Theatre UCF, School of Performing Arts. (Photograph by Tony Firriolo. Image courtesy of the authors)

which—if proven—would question the genesis of the Renaissance, challenge the western art historical canon, and debunk the primacy of European culture, is disputed in turn by the British and American art historians who have been invited to visit the old church and confirm the fresco’s authenticity. As the “grand heroic revolutionary picture on the wall,”29 a powerful reminder of Soviet power, is gradually removed during the first act, parts of the fresco are revealed, initiating heated debates about cultural privilege, past and present colonizing perspectives on history, and misconstrued artistic influences. Students who viewed the art exhibition and watched the performance of Pentecost encountered many thematic intersections that trouble western hegemonic narratives of the refugee Other that are often amplified by linguistic miscommunication and cultural misinterpretation (ELO #3). In Pentecost, a group of armed refugees from various geographic regions bordering Central Europe storm the abandoned church, demand

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asylum, and take hostage a small assembly of art historians and local religious leaders who are disputing the cultural identity of the anonymous fresco artist. This moment of transgression instigated by the refugees seeking sanctuary precipitates a series of misunderstandings that result in violent acts, but it also disrupts a victim–assailant binary, complicates a discussion of power and subjugation, and urges audiences to contemplate a non-violent paths toward conflict resolution through dialogic engagements. The refugees, mistaken for terrorists by the authorities who have surrounded the church, speak in their native languages—Azeri, Russian, Turkish, Bosnian, Sinhalese, and Arabic, among others—sharing their experiences of fleeing violence and persecution and creating a multivocal soundscape of both devastation and hope where many cultures and languages merge in a communal narrative about “finding home” among destruction and chaos. Reinelt suggests, “as the play turns to the various stories of the refugees, shared storytelling in multiple languages, mime and gestures culminate in what might be considered the ‘Pentecost scene.”’30 The student actors performing refugee characters in the production not only confronted the challenge of representing the Other by intentionally resisting US-centric hegemonic perspectives but also learned to speak in the native languages of their characters—a complicated and deeply rewarding learning process facilitated by faculty member Kate Ingram, who invited native speakers—university professors and community members—to coach student performers and share their cultural backgrounds and memories of their homelands (ELOs #2 and 4). This process further fostered the dialogic methodology of our transdisciplinary practice, allowed for authenticity, diversity, and inclusion, and created a model for a socially engaged artistic and educational experience committed to decolonizing spaces of intervention and promoting collective understanding (ELO #3). Scheduling the production of Pentecost to coincide with the run of the art exhibition placed the programs in dialogue with one another and fostered transdisciplinary collaborative practices, generated multiple perspectives and meanings, and modeled diverse and inclusive educational practices (ELO #3). Theatre and visual art draw upon distinct and unique modes of representation, but when offered together, new ideas emerge, making space for nuanced readings of complicated situations (ELO #4). Although Edgar’s 1994 idealistic proposition for a borderless world where

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people, despite their linguistic and cultural barriers, understand each other and forge a universal collective has been replaced by a devastating dystopian landscape of migrant caravans, policed borders, detention centers, and displaced families, pairing Pentecost with contemporary plays and visual artworks encouraged the thoughtful reconsideration of what many may perceive as a worn historical narrative (ELO #3). As noted by Christopher Niess, the director of Pentecost, “we may find the pathway to more effective communication and the ability to live in a world that can support the diversity of civilization”31 by embracing multilingual and multivocal practices. Student viewers positively responded to the kind of multilingual and multivocal practice that foregrounded the production of Pentecost and generated an affective connection to the Other. One student commented, “What I found most impactful is that in the end, they did not need to understand the verbal language of the Other in order to empathize with them.” Another student wrote, “I was also pleasantly surprised that they included languages other than English into the play. It provided a more authentic experience and made you feel more immersed in the overall story of the play.” The planning and staging of Pentecost involved student designers, actors, stage managers, a dramaturg, and an assistant director who worked with faculty mentors to address questions concerning the efficacy of theatre to represent precarious bodies (ELO #4). Through the richly collaborative process, students were prompted to consider questions such as what are the appropriate theatrical frames to consider when seeking to capture the fragility and precariousness of human life to affect audience’s responses (ELO #2)? What are the ethical ways to portray the suffering of Others and the emotional intensity of their loss and devastation? And how does the liveness of the performer complicate these negotiations (ELO #3)? These questions guided the process of staging Pentecost and resulted in specific artistic choices that were collectively negotiated by faculty and students (ELO #4). The relationship between location, perception, and memory was central to the artistic vision of the production’s creative team. The stage directions called for the set to represent an ambiguous location that had once been a Romanesque church but that was now a warehouse for storing potatoes. The set was designed by a guest artist who collaborated closely with student designers on the creative team to ensure that the design of a physical environment on stage communicated the space’s tumultuous

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history and its numerous religious and political associations. The audience was to understand that the setting had once been a place of worship for Catholics, then Orthodox Slavs, and then Muslims; then a stable for Napoleon’s army, a prison during the Second World War, and a museum of atheism during the Communist era. The space in Edgar’s play gestures toward Soja’s imagined Thirdspace of multiplicity, possibility, and openness, and the theatrical set in the production operated as a symbol of diversity and hybridity. The small southeastern European border town was at once Turkish, Hungarian, Saxon, and Soviet, and as the layers of history were revealed gradually to the audience, the set functioned as a performance space, a transforming landscape, a place for political interventions. The eventual destruction of the set and the gaping void that replaced both the Soviet mural and the Renaissance fresco in the play’s finale symbolize the transformation of a specific physical locale, once a possibility for radical openness and hybridity, into a metaphorical space of displacement and collective trauma. The student designers used a variety of techniques, including an assemblage of various stage environments and symbolic objects, both recognizable and unfamiliar, to evoke the instability of meanings and belonging caused by shifting power dynamics. The complicated relationship between physical space and its imposed political meanings invited the creative team and the audience to consider questions about the indeterminacy of what we remember and how our location, personal memories, cultural backgrounds, and traumatic experiences shape the way we identify and collaborate with spaces and narratives, both in life and in theatrical performances (ELO #3). Just as in the artworks presented in “Finding Home,” the narrative of Pentecost is both metaphorical and real—a political parable and an emotionally gripping story placed in an ambiguous post-Soviet bloc country where national boundaries shift, languages overlap, and identities are shaped by the state’s politics or religious authorities. The production’s design reflected an amalgamation of conflicting and overlapping visual signs—a vandalized sanctuary with graffitied walls and heaps of trash suddenly transforms into a refugee camp where the silhouettes of displaced and entrapped bodies, torn up clothes, rolled up blankets, scattered packages of food, and a campfire in place of an altar communicated images of violation, transgression, abandonment, and lost homelands. The production’s creative team grappled with the question of how to remain intentional and ethically engaged in production choices when the play asks for

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Fig. 4.3  Pentecost, Theatre UCF, School of Performing Arts. (Photograph by Tony Firriolo. Image courtesy of the authors)

staging a massive explosion that reduces the old church to a pile of debris and results in the dismemberment and death of the characters (ELO #3). As the creative team contemplated ways to avoid the representational staging of dead bodies and sought to communicate mutilation and destruction abstractly (ELO #4), the plastic bags suggested by the playwright were replaced with impersonal evidence markers—red folded paper tags carefully placed on the ground with prominently displayed numbers to identify the victims (Fig. 4.3). As in the artworks on view in “Finding Home,” the absent bodies and devastated landscape became powerful symbols for the displacement and devaluation of human lives during the Plantationocene. And while dead bodies were not represented onstage, an empty stroller with a spray-painted swastika on its side served as a final image of the production and compelled the audience to ponder death, destruction, and “the disorientation of grief” (ELO #3).32 Student actors cast in the production had first-hand experience encountering different cultures as they learned foreign languages during dialect

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work. They were challenged to integrate and apply their knowledge to the production process as they contemplated the importance of intentionality when representing precarity onstage (ELO #4). Whereas staging theatrical productions encourages deep learning and meets many of the Essential Learning Outcomes for theatre majors, non-theatre majors who came to see Pentecost were impacted as well. These students commented that this production made them think about “the lack of understanding for others … [and] the inability to feel empathy for people who are different from them” (ELO #3). One student noted the impact of the production’s multilingual aspect on modeling compassion and solidarity: “Even though the characters don’t fully understand each other, they become closer and empathetic toward each other regardless, showing the significance of human interaction despite not knowing the exact phrase a person is speaking.” Students who viewed both “Finding Home” and Pentecost responded positively to the transdisciplinary dialogue they fostered, noting that exhibition and play increased their interest in learning how similar ideas are expressed by different disciplines and how the arts complement each other and work together to create compelling narratives that impact them both intellectually and emotionally (ELOs #2 and 3). Some students from the School of Visual Arts and Design confessed that they had never been to a theatre production at UCF, while some theatre students similarly admitted that they had never been to the UCF Art Gallery. Both groups noted that the theatre performance and exhibition enacted themes explored in Mengestu’s novel, thereby increasing their empathetic response and engagement with the issues of the Plantationocene, including displacement and exile (ELO #3). As one art student commented on their experiences of seeing Pentecost and making transdisciplinary connections: “emotional, gut-wrenching, the play ends with so many questions unanswered. However, the story of this ambiguous place and time can be applied to our very real and very specific place and time. This story will leave you wondering ‘what if,’ and will inspire discussions of art restoration/conservation, immigration, nationality, and humanity.” To further activate an intertextual dialogue between and among various artistic media, heighten the fluidity and instability of meanings, and facilitate the creation of a multivocal nonlinear narrative—viscerally shocking, raw, and disruptive—the programming included a staged reading of The

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Refugee Plays by undergraduate and graduate theatre students. A collection of distinct but interconnected plays written by contemporary playwrights Carlos Castro, Penny Jackson, Charles Gershman, Sean E. Cunningham, and Callie Kimball, The Refugee Plays questions what it means to be a refugee in the United States in the twenty-first century. The student actors who participated in the staged reading and those who came to see the production in the art gallery were introduced to heartbreaking testimonies of characters who recently crossed the US border to seek political asylum and are now living in a state of fear, despair, and confusion as they encounter harsh US immigration policies and racist, xenophobic attitudes toward migrants. The countries these people fled and the compelling stories that they tell differ considerably, but their profound humanity and hope for a safer, brighter future is what unifies both the characters and this collection of five short dramatic narratives. A young woman from an unnamed South American country takes refuge in a Catholic church only to discover that the priest has reported her to the immigration authorities. A homeless man from Syria offers sex in exchange for a place to stay the night. A domestic worker explodes in anger and discovers her voice as she is ridiculed by her US employers and their affluent friends. Some characters do not speak English and their Otherness is made more pronounced and vulnerable as those around them fail to express empathy or understanding. Asja, whose recent trauma haunts her, finds herself in an aid camp where an American volunteer is unable to relate to her fears of being violated. Refugee M, who is treated with spite and suspicion because of his Middle Eastern origin and limited knowledge of English, collapses in convulsions but is attended to by a stranger who sees him as someone other than a terrorist. The Refugee Plays, conceived just prior to the 2016 presidential election and first presented at New  York City’s FRIGID Festival in winter 2017, voices the experiences of the displaced and wounded, whose strength and vulnerability are captured with compassion and thoughtfulness (ELOs #3 and 4). The stories, however, are told from the subject position of young American playwrights. The major significance of The Refugee Plays is in celebrating Otherness and raising difficult questions about US policies toward migrants and refugees, but what made this staged reading a particularly enriching cultural and educational experience was the positioning of this predominantly US perspective alongside

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the voices of international visual artists whose work concerning border crossing, displacement, and identity offered a global engagement with issues of migration, exile, and identity loss (ELO #3). Students responded positively to the reading, with one of them stating, “I really enjoyed these plays, due to the powerful stories that were told. The actors made the characters relatable and really highlighted the need for a way to help refugees find solace in this country.” Absence, a powerful tool in artistic collaborations, was used strategically to involve audience members in the narrative of The Refugee Plays. By performing the staged reading in the gallery, we further stimulated the students’ participatory responses to the collection of plays and its relationship to the artworks on display (ELO #3). The art worked with and against the narratives of The Refugee Plays to challenge xenophobic attitudes toward refugees and upturn preconceived notions of the Other. The imagined spaces evoked by the reading co-mingled with the inhabited space of the gallery where the reading took place (Fig. 4.4). The students and community members who attended the reading were surrounded by work

Fig. 4.4  The Refugee Plays, UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Keri Watson. Image courtesy of the authors)

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made by artists who visually communicated their experiences of displacement and loss, and as the real locations in The Refugee Plays were imagined in the staged reading, the audience was taken on a journey through real spaces that invoked painful memories of the characters’ humiliations and feelings of hope and despair (ELO #3). An upscale apartment in New York City, a confessional booth inside a Catholic church near Times Square, an intake room at a refugee processing center, a small six-­floor walk-up apartment, a dilapidated bar in the middle of America—these places transformed in the memories and dreams of both the characters and audience members. They became imagined spaces of home and religious devotion but also of psychological trauma and physical violence. They also revealed painful instances of racial prejudice, cultural insensitivity, colonialism, sexual violence, and domestic abuse. The gradual disrobing of sixteen-yearold Asja in the refugee processing center becomes a powerful metaphor for the collective stripping of identity and silencing of those whose bodies are violated, voices silenced, families displaced, and homes obliterated. The image of being robbed of one’s identity in a refugee shelter or direct provision center also exists in ironic juxtaposition to the contested view of America as an imagined Thirdspace—a sanctuary of freedom and equality. Some students commented on their feeling of discomfort while watching the staged reading. As one said, “The plays were written to make you feel uncomfortable so that these issues are in your face and cannot be danced around, and as hard as it is to sit through the [reading], it was well worth the experience”.

Public Programs University art galleries host diverse public programs to engage the community. “When your stated focus revolves around ideas, then the world of objects opens. It’s not only those designated as art or history, but any object. And it also opens the idea of who can speak in the museum. It’s not only the specialist or the art historian or the art patron or the connoisseur who then speaks in a museum of ideas, but a physicist, or an economist, or a mother, or a five-year-old, or an art professional,” Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, reminds us.33 To highlight the complex relationship between aesthetics, on the one hand, and the politics of disruption, resistance, and transformation on the other, and to enhance deep learning and the attainment of Essential Learning Outcomes, the gallery

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hosted a series of transdisciplinary scholarly lectures as well as guest artist and curatorial talks to complement the art exhibition, theatre production, and staged reading. Engaging scholars from English, political science, art, theatre, and art history, these events offered students the opportunity to hear from and converse with researchers who spoke about diasporic literature, political violence, and structures of hegemonic power. Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears encouraged the conception and coordination of our transdisciplinary programming, and to help students increase their interest in literary reading, we invited Mengestu to discuss his book. Telling the story of Sepha Stephanos, who immigrated to the United States after fleeing the Ethiopian Revolution, the novel illuminates the trauma of loss, isolation, and exile and focuses on the character’s search for acceptance, identity, and “home.” Blending autobiographical details with literary and cultural references, such as Dante’s Inferno and the idea of the American Dream, the story raises moral and existential questions about survival and perseverance and is filled with both pain and hope. As students contemplated the impact of meeting the writer, one student noted that, “When [Mengestu] spoke about his life and the hardships that he and his family went through, it touched me in a way that was different than I expected. I thought that I would bear with the lecture of an author who thought his work genius, instead I found a person who experienced life in an unimaginable way. He mentioned the ghosts that he could not talk about…. [t]he ghosts [of] his deceased family that no one could bear to discuss” (ELO #3). To reach audiences outside the arts and ground exilic narratives in the present, Güneş Murat Tezcür, Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at UCF, presented a lecture entitled “The ‘Orient’ of the ‘West’ and Beyond: Reflections on Contemporary Refugee Politics.” Focusing on political identity, violence, and ethno-religious politics in the Middle East, his talk provided students with the theoretical and conceptual framing needed to historically contextualize the artwork on display in the gallery (ELO #2). Students commented that Tezcür, “a Turkish immigrant [himself],” illuminated for them the way economic disparity has contributed to the global refugee crisis. “It’s about seeking out better resources,” one student wrote. “The number of refugees in Turkey has reached over 3.7 million, making Turkey the country with the highest number of refugees. Ninety-­ four percent of their refugees are Syrian. For those on the western borders, the six-mile gap of sea between the lands is the difference between life and

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death.” Tezcür’s presentation began with a discussion of the famous news photograph of Alan Kurdi, the two-year Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, and included statistics that profoundly resonated with the images and experiences created by the artists in “Finding Home,” particularly Hiwa K, whose film Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) recounts the drowning of his own cousin in the river between Greece and Turkey (ELO #1). In addition to generating a dialogue between contemporary politics and the works on display, Tezcür’s lecture garnered attention from students in the College of Sciences who had never visited the art gallery and who, for the first time, were introduced to the kinds of artistic and transdisciplinary experiences that the programming facilitated for students and other viewers (ELO #3). The public programs also included a poetry reading by Nigerian-born poet, journalist, and literary critic Obi Nwakanma. Poetry, like visual art, is an iterative process that requires multiple interactions to appreciate its nuances. A poem is meant to be read more than once so that its audience can uncover how its deliberate word choices and structure convey meaning. Because of the inherent “slowing down” it requires, poetry can help students recognize form, appreciate complexity, and make connections across time and place. Nwakanma’s poetry takes the reader on lyrical journeys and explores topics including the war in Biafra and life in exile. Echoing the themes of Pentecost, Nwakanma’s poems are not restricted by language, and he began the presentation by inviting the audience to join him in a traditional African song. By asking the audience to collectively perform the song in his native language, Nwakanma fostered the deconstruction of what Ahmed calls “stranger fetishism” and dismantled the separation of “aliens from humans” (ELO #3).34 “Even though I was not able to understand most of what he was saying,” one student noted, “I enjoy[ed] the rhythmic passions of his readings,” whereas another confessed this was the first poetry reading they had ever attended. Studies show that appreciating the formal qualities of poetry, including rhyme, alliteration, symbolism, metonymy, personification, and imagery, is foundational to enhancing reading comprehension and visual literacy, so exposing students from across the disciplines to poetry enhances deep learning and aids them in the attainment of Essential Learning Outcomes. Employing vivid imagery and referencing nature and folklore, Nwakanma’s poems are transdisciplinary, exploring subjects ranging from science and religion to racial violence (ELO #1). “Nwakanma is a storyteller,” a student noted, “He reads his own words as a performance, giving life and movement to

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the arbitrary squiggled lines we call letters. Each poem has a completely different feeling than the next and he read each with a different voice.” Nwakanma’s poems are aural in nature, and students benefited from the performativity of his reading. “The richness of his voice booms with emotion as he recites the words in a rhythmic pattern,” and his work is rich with “sensory language,” an audience member suggested. As another added, “Overall, the experience of hearing Obi Nwakanma read his work was beautiful, emotional, and enriching. He has an energy about him that seeps into his work illustrating a colorful mixture of themes, making the listening experience not easily forgotten” (ELO #3). Programming also included an artist talk by Hiwa K, an internationally renowned artist with three films featured in “Finding Home.” Referencing his work presented in the gallery, Hiwa K engaged students in a conversation about art’s mission and its ability to challenge neoliberal totalitarianism, embrace the margins, and destabilize the center (ELO #3). Drawing on the concepts of the “decentered eye” and “walking but never arriving,” Hiwa K addressed his interest in making spaces that blend art and politics and that are inspired by both personal experiences and social awareness. Students who attended multiple events responded to the richness of the transdisciplinary perspectives offered, which encouraged them to synthesize knowledge, make connections across domains, and contemplate their role in effecting change (ELO #3). As one student reflected after viewing “Finding Home,” and seeing a performance of Pentecost, and attending a lecture, “I think it’s really interesting how so many different art forms were combined in these events in order to bring to light the issues at hand.” As part of public programming, artists’ talkbacks provide a fruitful space for students to meet the artists, hear about the complexities of the creative process, and ask questions about works of art and literature. Similarly, post-show talkbacks offer the audience the opportunity to meet the artistic team, ask questions about the conception and execution of a production, and hear diverse viewpoints on the same topic from directors, dramaturgs, actors, designers, and stage managers. In a transdisciplinary educational setting, it is imperative to invite faculty from different departments to participate in post-show talkbacks to stimulate a richer conversation about the production from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and inclusion of an art historian in a Pentecost talkback fostered a thought-­ provoking discussion on the interconnections between history, art, and politics and deepened the audience’s understanding of the play and project. Public programming brings invaluable perspectives to arts events in

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higher education and offers fruitful opportunities to cultivate dialogues between and across disciplines to ask challenging questions, stimulate deep learning, and inspire creativity.

Conclusion The visual and performing arts are powerful sites for translating and performing displacement, and by carefully attending to the repetition of themes in the staging of Pentecost and The Refugee Plays, in the public programs, and in the curation of “Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis,” this project helped students engage with issues surrounding migration, displacement, and national borders from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (ELO #4). Hiwa K’s View from Above echoed the set design of Pentecost and This Lemon Tastes of Apple (17 April 2011) worked in dialogue with Nwakanma’s poetry reading; The Refugee Plays was read against a backdrop of Eun-­Kyung Suh’s Enclave; and the empty stroller in Pentecost evoked Cooper’s hand-made children’s shoes. Participating faculty encouraged students to attend the exhibition, theatrical productions, and public programs and to tease out the ways in which each artistic form, speaking in its own formal language and operating in its own space, intersected and played against one another in the construction and communication of meaning. Making connections across disciplines is key to student growth and deep learning. The arts are affective, and this project generated feelings of discomfort that helped students recognize their vulnerabilities and triggered empathetic responses (ELO #3). Furthermore, by underscoring the significance of intentionality and context in communicating the voices of the silenced and marginalized, the programming made students aware of the ethical tensions that often emerge from allowing or enabling the unwanted gaze. “On the one hand, [images] are referential,” Butler reminds us, “[but] on the other hand, they change their meaning depending on the context in which they are shown and the purpose for which they are invoked.”35 Drawing on the importance of context and purpose and investigating issues such as “contaminated diversity” and “rubble ecologies,” this collaboration provided an effective platform for exploring the ability of transdisciplinary research to contribute to political discourse, promote public awareness, and engage students in co-creating meanings and contexts (ELO #3). Jan Cohen-Cruz, an applied theatre artist and director of the national initiative Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life,

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asks, if a “cultural experience” can effectively function as “an active agent of change,” become “a form for communal reflection,” and transform into “a space in which to imagine a better way of living together?”36 These questions remain on a continuum of socially engaged art, but, as Reinelt notes, “[art] cannot change the world by itself, but it can contribute its unique form of embodied and imagined knowledge to express and sustain the social imagination.”37 This is perhaps the best we can hope for as we attempt to work with students to re-imagine history and facilitate mutually dependent turns between aesthetics and politics.

Notes 1. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-­3615934. 2. Nathalie Pettorelli et  al., “Anticipating Arrival: Tackling the National Challenges Associated with the Redistribution of Biodiversity Driven by Climate Change,” Journal of Applied Ecology 56, no. 10 (2019): 2298. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-­2664.13465. 3. Anna Tsing, “Contaminated Diversity in ‘Slow Disturbance’: Potential Collaborators for a Liveable Earth,” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 9 (2012): 95. 4. Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160. 5. Moutasm Badawi, “Orlando’s Population Growth Fueled by International Migration,” Orlando Economic Partnership, June 26, 2019, https://news. orlando.org/blog/orlando-­p opulation-­g rowth-­f ueled-­b y-­i nternational-­ migration/ (accessed August 15, 2022). 6. Badawi, “Orlando’s Population Growth,” np. 7. Edward W.  Soja, “Thirdspace: Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” in Communicating in the Third Space, eds. Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 50. 8. Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (New York: Penguin, 2007). 9. Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), 11. 10. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 89. 11. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 78. 12. Alison Jeffers, Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 46.

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13. Keri Watson and Shannon Lindsey, Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis (Orlando: University of Central Florida Art Gallery, 2018). 14. Vukasin Nedeljkovic, “Asylum Archive,” http://www.asylumarchive.com/ (accessed August 15, 2018). 15. Vukasin Nedeljkovic, “Reiterating Asylum Archive: Documenting direct provision in Ireland,” Research in Drama Education (RIDE): The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23, no. 2 (2018): 292. 16. Jeffers, Refugees, Theatre and Crisis, 43. 17. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 27. 18. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 37. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 39. 21. Tsing, “Contaminated Diversity,” 95. 22. Qtd. in Butler, Precarious Life, 63. 23. George Lorio, Personal correspondence with authors, 2017. 24. Anna Hammond et  al., “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (2006), 26. 25. Janelle Reinelt, “Performing Europe: Identity Formation for a New Europe,” Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 366. 26. Michael Balfour et  al. Applied Theatre: Resettlement: Drama, Refugees and Resilience (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 45–46. 27. Jeffers, Refugees, Theatre and Crisis, 72. 28. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 29. David Edgar, Pentecost (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995), 3. 30. Reinelt, “Performing Europe,” 379. 31. Christopher Niess, “Director’s Notes,” Playbill for Pentecost (Orlando: Theatre at UCF, 2018), 3. 32. Butler, Precarious Life, 30. 33. Hammond et al., “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” 25. 34. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 1. 35. Butler, Frames of War, 80. 36. Jan Cohen-Cruz, Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 81. 37. Reinelt, “Performing Europe,” 366.

CHAPTER 5

Challenging the Narrative of Decline: An Intergenerational Creative Community of Care

This project has deep personal meaning for us. As we write this chapter, Julia’s mother struggles with dementia. An accomplished musician and educator—she was a music professor and taught conducting and vocal techniques for four decades—she has been gradually losing her grasp of reality for the past four years. Music, however, continues to play a significant role in her life: she plays piano every day and sings Soviet songs she learned while growing up during the Second World War. This artistic outlet calms her and brings back pleasant memories of a time when she was a young woman, an accomplished musician, and a revered teacher surrounded by adoring students. Even though the presence of music certainly improves the quality of her life, there is a growing realization on the part of her family that interactive activity is also essential to improving her care. It has been amazing to see how the process of co-creating—co-creating music (by playing an instrument or singing together) or co-creating memories by simply looking at old, yellowed photographs in a family album—brings her joy and excitement. She regains her assertive character and feels appreciated and needed during these fleeting collaborative moments.

Aging and disability are often stigmatized and characterized as tragic, with popular narratives framing people with disabilities as sick, broken, lost, or doomed. Rather than viewing aging and disability as deficits, however, scholars of age studies, including Margaret Morganroth Gullette,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_5

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Elinor Fuchs, Richard Gough, and Nanako Nakajima, theorize aging as a “changing and transformative variable,” a new stage in life.1 This is similar to the work of disability studies scholars who, despite the seemingly biological nature of physical, cognitive, and psychological impairments, position disability as socially constructed and historically contingent.2 Challenging the societal stigmatization of aging and disability, this chapter illustrates how the arts can replace tragedy discourses with practices that support “the reclamation of citizenship” for aging persons and those with disabilities, including dementia.3 A growing body of literature supports the role of the arts in improving health and well-being. In 2006 the Center on Aging, Health, and Humanities at George Washington University found that those involved in weekly participatory arts programs reported: “(A) better health, fewer doctor visits, and less medication usage; (B) more positive responses on the mental health measures; [and] (C) more involvement in overall activities.”4 The programs under study were not designed by therapists or biomedical researchers, but instead were provided by “professional artists involved in visual and literary arts, music, and other cultural domains” and relied on self-assessment through reflective surveys rather than the collection of biometric data by medical professionals.5 Following the publication of this study, in 2019 we utilized an NEA Big Read grant and an Arts and Wellness Innovation Award from the Pabst Steinmetz Foundation to stage a transdisciplinary community arts project in Central Florida. The programming, which was integrated into a graduate-level theatre course titled “Health and Wellness for the Performing Artist,” and designed by students and faculty in theatre, visual arts, and medicine, drew its themes from Emily St. John Mandel’s 2015 post-apocalyptic dystopian novel Station Eleven, which follows the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic group of actors and musicians as they endeavor to stay alive after a global pandemic kills 99 percent of the population. In addition to class meetings on campus, students led a weekly series of arts-based activities—including staged readings, body movement, guided meditation, visualization, and music—for caregivers and their care partners at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach and developed curriculum for art therapists working at Woodland Towers, an assisted living facility in Deland, Florida. According to the Urban Institute, the number of Americans aged sixty-­ five and older will more than double over the next forty years, reaching eighty million by 2040, and the number of people with dementia (currently approximately fifty million people worldwide) is projected to triple

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by 2050. More than five million people in Florida, the equivalent of 26 percent of the state’s population, are over the age of sixty, and nearly 500,000 of these seniors have some sort of dementia. At the same time, 25 percent of Florida’s population is between the ages of fifteen and thirty-­ four, and approximately 800,000 people are enrolled in one of the state’s colleges and universities. The confluence of these statistics makes Florida an ideal testing ground for the efficacy of intergenerational arts programs, which foster relationships and create awareness of the “values associated with another generation.”6 By bringing together younger and older people of diverse backgrounds, new connections and interpersonal relationships are established. These relationships can help dismantle bias and prejudice and enhance the learning potential of the whole community, or, as noted by Susan Whiteland, “service learning within the context of a socially relevant area such as age integration holds the potential for societal reconstruction.”7 Transdisciplinarity can take a variety of forms, but research shows that projects that integrate various domains of knowledge to address community needs are especially empowering for students who want to see the difference they are making locally. The elderly comprises a significant demographic in Florida, where one in five people is over the age of sixty-­ five, and fifty-three of Florida’s sixty-seven counties have an above-average number of people who identify as Baby Boomers or as members of the Great and Silent generation. The University of Central Florida, with its 80,000 students and 13,500 faculty and staff, is one of the largest and most diverse public universities in the United States. Its students and faculty comprise members from Generation X and Z, as well as Millennials and Baby Boomers. Moreover, UCF is home to the Learning Institute for Elders (LIFE). Founded in 1991, LIFE has nearly eight hundred members over the age of fifty who “enjoy stimulating, non-credit, lifelong learning experiences on the UCF campus and occasionally in the local community.”8 Despite the number of older people living in Florida and the vitality of programs such as LIFE at UCF, aging is still viewed negatively in many contexts and the loss of cognitive functions experienced by many older people is stigmatized by society.9 Even as today’s seniors expect to live more active and civically engaged lives, they can also anticipate experiencing memory loss or finding themselves in the position of caregiver for a loved one. Moreover, “healthcare literature, public discourse, and policy documents continue to represent persons with dementia as ‘doomed’ and

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‘socially dead’ [and] this tragedy meta-narrative produces and reproduces misunderstandings about dementia and causes stigma, oppression, and discrimination for persons living with dementia.”10 These narratives are exacerbated by some studies conducted by doctors, social scientists, and art therapists that situate people with dementia and other disabilities as patients in need of treatment. This is reflective of the larger divide within the field of age studies between biomedical researchers who emphasize “cure over care” and artists and educators who use a social model of aging and view physical and cognitive impairments, as well as atypical neurology, as not only part of an individual’s unique identity but also as part of the variation of human experience that comprises community. Whereas biomedical researchers often focus on gathering quantitative data on the person with dementia (e.g., patient age, diagnoses, and vital signs before and after a therapeutic intervention), artists tend to gather qualitative data on the community (e.g., holistic descriptions of arts projects, observations and reflections, and anecdotes collected while working with facilitators and participants). The differences in aim and language are often caused by the funding models and methods used in different disciplines, but the result is a siloing of traditional scientific research from creative activity. Inspired by the power of transdisciplinary research to bring together people from different fields to work on social problems, and cognizant of the importance of intergenerational projects to building healthy communities and helping students, we developed a project to complement the Theatre UCF curriculum and the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Creative Caregiving Program. As Nancy Kindelan notes, theatre, with its emphasis on problem-solving and collaboration, offers excellent opportunities for creativity, engagement, and service-learning.11 Our primary community partner for the project, the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA), is a nonprofit, artists’ community and arts education organization in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. With several facilities, including the historic Harris House, the art gallery Arts on Douglas, and a large bay-side campus for artist residencies, ACA supports contemporary artists as well as community programs. Its Creative Caregiving Program provides outreach to caregivers and their care partners at its own properties and at assisted living facilities in the surrounding area including Woodland Towers in neighboring Deland. Although ACA’s Creative Caregiving Program has historically been led by art therapists, our project was rooted in an arts-based collaborative methodology that drew upon gerontologist and theatre scholar

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Anne Basting’s Creative Community of Care (CCC) model.12 As theorized by Basting, CCC projects have six key components13: . They are inclusive and engage multiple stakeholders as equals 1 2. They are adaptable and accessible to people with physical and cognitive challenges 3. They are not comprised of discrete activities but are immersive 4. They identify and build on existing assets and rituals 5. They develop slowly over time 6. They are high quality and rigorous In addition to employing Basting’s CCC model and following best practices in transdisciplinary research, this project, like the others discussed in this book, was designed to encourage deep learning and address the Essential Learning Outcomes articulated by the American Association of Universities and Colleges (AAC&U): to ask big questions (ELO #1); practice intellectual skills (ELO #2); engage with real-world and diverse issues (ELO #3); and apply their knowledge to new environments (ELO #4).14 Recognizing the value of transdisciplinary research to a liberal arts education, the project helped students achieve key learning objectives including the ability to work well with others, communicate effectively, engage in rigorous research, make informed decisions, think creatively, self-motivate, and develop mindfulness and life-long learning skills.15 Drawing upon Ronald J.  Manheimer’s assertion that intergenerational programs “enable members of different generations to exchange knowledge and experience, and to benefit from different perspectives,” and the CCC model, which offers a blueprint for arts-based projects for elders with dementia, this chapter reflects on the effectiveness of our project and situates it within the wider landscapes of transdisciplinary higher education, disability and age studies, and community-engaged artistic practice.16

Inclusive In Basting’s framework, effective projects are complex and open systems that include and engage multiple stakeholders as equals.17 As Basting describes it, “In the language of theatre, the partners become part of an ‘ensemble’ in which all contribute to the articulation of the goals and the successful completion of the project.”18 Inclusivity is a key skill for students as they need to learn teamwork and “the flexibility to appreciate

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multiple perceptions when confronting issues” in order to succeed in the twenty-first-century knowledge-based economy (ELO #3).19 Recognizing its necessity, our project strove for inclusivity in a number of ways such as engaging multiple stakeholders and including faculty and students from a variety of disciplines and ranks. While conceiving the project, we held numerous brainstorming meetings. We met with ACA’s Executive Director and Community Outreach Director to outline shared goals and objectives and to determine the ways in which we could support one another as we formulated the project. We met with colleagues in the College of Medicine and another in the theatre department who teaches Health and Wellness for the Performing Artist. We also met with a graduate student who was writing her thesis on community-based theatre projects. Once we were awarded the grant, we recruited two pre-med students who were enrolled in a medical humanities class and ten theatre graduate students, and we met with Margie Pabst Steinmetz, the grant funder and an active supporter of community arts and wellness initiatives. During the execution of the project, we met with caregivers and clients of ACA’s Creative Caregiving Program and an art therapist employed by ACA. Working with diverse stakeholders presents its own set of challenges. A significant issue in the execution of our project involved logistics as we were limited by student and faculty teaching schedules, as well as the existing framework of ACA’s Creative Caregiving Program. ACA’s program typically meets for one hour on Monday mornings and employs a licensed art therapist who leads caregivers and their care partners through an art activity, such as poetry, painting, crafts, or music, “to encourage mental stimulation and socialization.”20 ACA’s Harris House, one of the locations where their Creative Caregiving Program takes place, is located in New Smyrna Beach, about an hour and twenty minutes from UCF’s main campus, whereas Woodland Towers, a second location in Deland, is about an hour from campus. Due to the distance from school and the students’ schedules, Saturday afternoon was the only day and time during which we could all meet. We decided to hold meetings at the Harris House in New Smyrna Beach, whereas ACA’s art therapist implemented our curriculum at Woodland Towers on Monday evenings. ACA’s patrons were more accustomed to meeting during the work week and in the morning, so the cohort was rather small, but the intimate size allowed for the adaptation of the curriculum to suit the individual needs of all the participants. Each week’s meetings at the Harris House consisted of two to three people with

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dementia, four to five caregivers, the ACA Outreach Director, two to three faculty, two to three graduate students, and one to two undergraduate students. Weekly meetings at Woodland Towers included one licensed art therapist and five to ten elderly people with dementia and their care partners. The stakeholders and participants represented a wide cross-section of the university and community population from across generations. They included university faculty members from a variety of disciplines, who represented both Baby Boomers and Generation X, undergraduate and graduate students from different majors, who represented Millennials and Generation Z, community members (Baby Boomers and Silent Generation members), directors of a local arts agency (Generation X and Baby Boomer), an art therapist (Baby Boomer), and a philanthropist (Silent Generation). All four faculty participants have been caregivers; two for parents with dementia. Some of the participants were based in Orlando, others in Winter Park, Oviedo, Deland, and New Smyrna Beach (cities in the larger Orlando-area that encompass Orange, Seminole, and Volusia counties). One faculty participant was raised in the Soviet Union, another in Brazil, another in Chicago, and another in Nebraska. Graduate students hailed from across the United States and included students who had completed their undergraduate work at various educational institutions such as big state schools, small private Christian universities, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Each participant brought with them their own cultural backgrounds, experiences, and expectations of aging, disability, higher education, and the arts. The UCF faculty team included a theatre artist-scholar, a directing/ acting faculty member, an art historian, and a doctor-philosopher. Artists, scholars, and doctors do not speak the same disciplinary languages, nor do they have the same research goals and expectations of their scholarly and creative practices. Although arts and wellness programs generate opportunities for a variety of critical discoveries about the ways in which the arts can lead to individual wellness and, therefore, healthier communities, it can be problematic to find a common vocabulary, or even shared objectives. One issue that arose during the brainstorming sessions was how we could reconcile the conflicting goals of ACA and UCF. Whereas we were interested in a social model of creative care that emphasized collaboration, reciprocity, and shared storytelling and that was more conducive to qualitative research, it was essential to ACA that UCF collect quantitative data that they felt they needed for future grant applications. In response to

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their request, we invited a faculty colleague from the College of Medicine who specializes in applied ethics and public health to develop a number of instruments, including a Relationship Flourishing Scale Survey, which was distributed on the first and last meetings, and a Perceived Wellness Survey, which was completed at the beginning and end of each session.21 We also had to create trust in order to explore unfamiliar disciplinary territory and to allow others into our domains of expertise. Additionally, the art therapist expressed some initial resistance to using a curriculum developed by theatre students. At play were several layers of power dynamics including age (Baby Boomer vs. Millennials and Generation Zs), status (professionals vs. students), discipline (licensed music therapist vs. theatre student practitioners), and institution (ACA/Woodland Towers vs. UCF). Despite challenges, the benefits of navigating logistical and disciplinary tensions outweighed immediate disagreements or frustrations within the team. There were sparkling moments of shared vocabulary that transcended the rigidity of disciplinary objectives; students learned to co-­ create across the disciplines as they observed different stakeholders working through issues and overcoming obstacles (ELO #4). Overall, the transdisciplinary nature of the project offered everyone involved the opportunity to develop a strong intercollegiate, intergenerational, and interinstitutional community of practice.

Adaptable and Accessible The second criterion of Basting’s model is that projects be adaptable and accessible to all audiences and participants, including people with physical and cognitive impairments. As Basting notes, “Working on a common, meaningful, long-term and professional quality project that insisted that all participants could engage as equals created a space that was dementia normal—in which dementia did not in any way limit one’s ability to make beauty and meaning.”22 Accessibility is a key component of education as faculty strive to meet our students’ diverse needs. This metric also supports the attainment of essential skills for students, who need to know and understand their audiences (ELO #3) and be able to communicate clearly to diverse groups of people with various skill levels (ELOs #2 and 4). In a project of this type, it is important to include appropriate scaffolding to support participant learning, and the process of creating the curriculum was chunked into several defined steps. For the first week’s activities, faculty wrote the curriculum, which provided a model for the

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student-authored curriculum used in weeks two through five. Following feminist philosopher Clare Hemmings’ theory of affective solidarity, we encouraged students to design exercises that modeled new “modes of engagement,” moved “beyond empathy,” and acknowledged ways in which dissonance contributes to collaborative relationality.23 As age studies scholar Amanda Grenier notes, “Recognizing precarity and the inherent risks of late life could form the basis for reconfiguring understandings and care practices towards frailty and dementia.”24 After discussing readings informed by disability and age studies (ELO #1), as well as learning strategies for their own mental and physical well-being as theatre performers (ELO #2), students worked in teams of two to develop exercises that integrated the themes of Station Eleven (ELO #3) and generated co-­ creativity among the participants (ELO #4). As the students engaged in devising their activities for ACA, they read and discussed the first few sections of Station Eleven, which begins with the young protagonist Kirsten on stage in Toronto playing Cordelia in a production of King Lear during which the lead actor dies on stage while performing the titular role. Following his death, we find an older Kirsten playing the role of Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as performed by the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of performers in the novel who move from one community to another to perform Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s profound knowledge of human nature, persistent search for truth, and mastery in expressing the complexity of human emotion make his work accessible and appealing to a wide range of students, and his all-­embracing themes of love, despair, courage, and endurance resonate with readers across cultures, languages, and time periods. Shakespeare’s references are woven into the themes of the novel, as readers encounter illuminating parallels between the story and Shakespeare’s plays that provide fruitful opportunities to explore the application of Shakespeare’s themes to contemporary issues. King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular, offer compelling metaphors for living with memory loss and confusion. While developing their curriculum for ACA, the students discussed the significance of engaging with Shakespeare’s themes in the novel and worked together to answer the following questions: How has the author used these plays to set the tone for the novel? How is imagery used to develop character? What is the relationship between young Kirsten/childversion of Cordelia and older Kirsten/Titania? How do these Shakespearean characters help us understand Kirsten or ourselves better? And how do the struggles of the characters and the themes of the texts relate to you and your community?

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Art and music are important tropes in Station Eleven; they help the characters survive in the post-apocalyptic world. The value of music and art to cultivating feelings of well-being has long been documented, and in the subsequent weeks, the students developed activities that further incorporated both art and music into the novel’s literary themes to foster a stronger sense of ensemble and encourage participants to contribute their imagination, sensibility, and personal experiences to collective storytelling. While reading an excerpt from the novel about the Traveling Symphony’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the students projected images of famous paintings inspired by the play such as Henry Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom (1790) and Joseph Noel Patton’s The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847) to visualize the narrative. Following the tradition of tableaux vivants, participants then physicalized various aspects of each painting and imagined themselves as characters in these artworks. As demonstrated by art historian Ellery E. Foutch, tableaux vivants offer participants the opportunity “to look closely, to research works of art, to think critically, to interpret and create, and to engage in metacognitive and embodied experiences.”25 To make explicit the connection between art and literature, between looking, feeling, and embodying space, participants were asked: What would it be like to be in a Shakespeare play? What would it feel like to be part of a work of art or a part of the Traveling Symphony? How does Shakespeare celebrate the power of the imagination and delve into the inexplicable workings of the human mind? And how does this relate to the experiences of people with dementia and their caregivers? Working together to visualize scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream created a strong sense of community, trust, and interdependence where everyone, regardless of age or ability, could participate and contribute. In another session, participants drew images on pieces of paper then passed them to another person who added a new element to the received image. This pattern continued until everyone had contributed to every drawing. The drawings were then returned to their original artists, who were invited to share stories inspired by the image. Each story was cleverly adapted to include new ideas that may have strayed significantly from the initial artistic vision but that were embraced as part of a new collaborative whole. As Whiteland notes, “Visual arts activities can be socially transforming by creating a context for building empathy and understanding among age groups.”26 In addition to the value of creating embodied experiences inspired by visual art, music is an important catalyst for health, with numerous studies

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finding that music not only slows the behavioral changes, depression, and cognitive decline associated with aging but also may repair and regenerate cerebral nerves.27 Neurologist Oliver Sacks observed the effects of music on patients with various neurological disorders and found that music affects the brain and enhances memory and imagination.28 Inspired by the transformative power and accessibility of music, the students played selections from Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music, Op. 61, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842) as participants read an excerpt from Station Eleven. While listening to the music, questions were posed to the group: How does music help us connect to the characters? How does a particular melody or tempo-rhythm inform our responses to the characters’ actions and emotions? How does musical harmony inspire us to create our own vision of the characters’ and the Traveling Symphony’s journey? In another session, the students played music from different historical periods and invited participants to build their own Museum of Civilization, a concept adapted from Station Eleven. Participants moved their bodies to the different tempi and tones of the music as songs including Mozart’s Symphony 40 in G Minor (1788), Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog (1956), and Michael Bublé’s Everything (2007) played. Following each music selection, participants reflected on how music made them feel, move, and engage spatially. They considered which songs still resonated with them in the current world and which ones they would want to preserve for future generations in their own Museum of Civilization. As a participant noted, “Seeing the joy the activities brought [made me] relaxed, calm, and happy.” As these examples demonstrate, the project integrated the themes of the novel, including death, memory, community, and art, without requiring too much time or cognitive effort. It was not necessary for participants to read the book to feel connected to the story and the meditation of illness, memory, and survival that it offers. The students learned the importance of flexibility as they continued to adapt their activities to build on previous ones and, each week, they also strove to offer a new lens through which to see aging and disability that would both inspire co-creativity and participation (ELO #4). Furthermore, for many students, disability and age studies were new areas of research (ELO #1), and the framework of the creative practice they were generating differed from the professional training they were receiving as MFA acting candidates (ELO #2). This shift from the demands of professional training to the parameters of artsbased community programming challenged them but also provided vital skills for adapting to different learning and creative environments (ELOs #3 and 4).

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Immersive The third objective in the CCC model is to create projects that are immersive. As Basting says, “A CCC project does not bracket arts programming solely into ‘activity’ time. Instead, the project is infused into daily relationships and the very air of the place.”29 Basting developed and enacted the CCC model during the Penelope Project, a two-year initiative that transformed a residential retirement community in Wisconsin into an interactive venue for live theatre. Seeking to retell Homer’s Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope—who waited at home for Odysseus to return from war—the project enlisted the Sojourn Theatre, a professional theatre company, students and faculty from the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, and residents, family members, and staff of the Luther Manor Senior Living Center in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Participants collaborated “to create an original, professionally produced play … staged site-specifically in the care home for an outside, paying audience.”30 Despite the intensity of the undertaking in terms of time and resources, Basting found, “the cultural community-building approach has significant promise for destigmatizing and improving the lived experience for people with dementia and their families.”31 In fact, a 2017 report by age studies scholars Nancy Z. Henkin and Robyn I. Stone noted that “there is a growing interest among senior housing providers in intergenerational programming as a vehicle for connecting residents to the broader community, enhancing well-being for both youth and older adults, reducing ageism, and preparing an aging workforce.”32 For several reasons, we were not able to model the format of the Penelope Project, but our project was immersive for our students and participants in other ways. Following the tenets of immersive theatre as theorized by performance studies scholar Josephine Machon and building on the importance of immediacy and interaction in contemporary immersive performances, we engaged with the principles of immersive theatre and socially engaged artistic practices to blur the lines between performer and audience member and subvert traditional hierarchical arrangements. As Machon notes, in immersive theatre, “all elements … are in the mix, establishing a multidimensional medium in which the participant is submerged, blurring spaces and roles.”33 To model the qualities of immersive theatre, everyone participated equally in the co-creation of narratives and meaning making. By employing various combinations of creative movement activity and music-guided sense-memory recall each week

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(ELO #2), we strove to foster an immersive community environment (ELO #3). One particularly immersive activity involved students performing a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then leading the group, which included faculty, students, the ACA Community Outreach Director, and caregivers and their care partners, through a series of exercises inspired by the scene. While thinking about the forest setting of the play, participants moved their arms, elbows, and shoulders to imitate the motion of the wind in the trees’ branches and engaged their hips, legs, and feet to imagine walking through fallen leaves. While doing head rotations, they imagined their heads floating above their bodies; while going from a sitting to a standing position, they visualized escaping into a magical forest; while tapping their feet, they were encouraged to picture their bodies crossing a threshold into another world; and while lifting one foot, they were asked to imagine they were flying like fairies. Guided meditation questions included: Are the branches on the trees, laden with Spanish moss, attracted to the leafy, grass covered floor? Are the butterflies and fairies repelled by one another like magnets with opposing energies? In these ways, participants were led through a physical exploration of space that recreated the mood of the novel and immersed them in the themes of the play. As theatre historian Thomas H.  Gressler notes, theatre is the “most effective and integrative of all the liberal arts,” and this activity illustrated how theatre can be integrated into daily life.34 The group worked as an ensemble, feeling each other’s energy, evoking the visceral power of the forest, and creating a shared space where everyone was an equal co-creator in the storytelling process. Another activity invited participants to pass a ball of yarn across the group while sitting in a circle (Fig. 5.1). Each person held onto a handful of yarn, then passed or threw the ball to the next person. Upon receiving the yarn, each participant shared one word that described how they felt in that moment. Although the words were not necessarily narratively related, there were some associative images that emerged, and at the end, as everyone held a part of the yarn, they were connected to one another and the verbal text they had created together. In this way, the yarn became a visual embodiment of collaborative practice and shared storytelling. As one student remarked, “I enjoyed seeing the participants creating hope for themselves” and “sharing [this] hope with others.” The immersive exercises the students designed were rooted in both co-­ creativity and socially engaged artistic practices. They explored how to

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Fig. 5.1  UCF students facilitate community of care model at the Harris House, Atlantic Center for the Arts. (Photograph by Keri Watson. Image courtesy of the authors)

integrate the principles of collaboration, co-creativity, and social engagement into their art, and challenged assumptions about the perceived hierarchy that exists in the world of professional and applied arts practices. Their attention shifted from focusing on aesthetic qualities of their individual work (ELO #2) to facilitating immersive experiences that create a social impact (ELO #3). As noted by Christopher Niess, the faculty facilitator who taught Health and Wellness for the Performing Artist, “The take-away of the arts and aging collaborative activity for the UCF community, in addition to being a valuable service-learning pursuit, lies in the experience gained in communication in the moment. There are times when contexts can be taken for granted in performance, assuming that performer and audience have similar perspectives. The workshops at the Atlantic Center for the Arts contribute to a keen focusing on communication in the present and truly help create community in that present.” As

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students reflected on the learning outcomes of the project, they, too, stressed the importance of mindfulness to community-building and recognized the psychological benefits of being immersed in an intergenerational community. Mindfulness and reflection are particularly important parts of theatre and transdisciplinarity; they encourage students to assess selfgrowth, to be present in the moment, and to make connections between their courses, majors, and lives (ELO #3). The project was an integral part of the students’ coursework, degree program, and major requirements, and the immersive experiences they designed and facilitated prompted a reevaluation of perceived barriers between different generations and social roles (ELO #4).

Building on Existing Assets and Rituals The fourth criteria of Basting’s CCC model is that successful projects “identify and build on existing assets and rituals” and “look for existing strengths in people, places and systems.”35 In this case, it was essential to look to the strengths and values of both the ACA and UCF. ACA’s programs typically run for five weeks; we maintained this duration and we relied on the ACA to provide us with foundational knowledge about their Creative Caregiving Program and its needs and norms. This is a key element of both asset-based community development strategies, which look to the wisdom of the community when creating programs, and transdisciplinary projects, which stress co-design and co-production of research, goals, and action. Each session followed the Creative Caregiving Program’s existing schedule. It began with a shared meal, followed by a reading, creative activity, and reflection. Recognizing the importance of building on existing assets for student buy-in as well, we integrated the program into a regularly offered class and built upon its learning outcomes. Meal sharing is an integral part of the ACA program, and each meeting of our project began with lunch. The catering was supplied by the ACA, which was a wonderful treat for all the participants, although there were a few hiccups along the way. The first day, students were asked to serve the meal, which, as some students noted, took away from their engagement with the caregivers and their care partners and made the experience “feel like work.” We shared this concern with the ACA director and on the second Saturday the food was offered as a buffet so that everyone could serve themselves. We asked the students to sit with the caregivers and their care partners to encourage intergenerational socialization and foster the

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development of interpersonal relationships. Meal sharing is an important communal ritual that breaks down barriers and inculcates trust. Students, faculty, caregivers, and their care partners sat together, ate together, and enjoyed a relaxed and intimate atmosphere. Participants recalled later that having the opportunity to interact with the caregivers and their care partners over a meal in a casual manner contributed to building a sense of community and a shared understanding of the project. Specifically, the students pointed out that the conversations during meals offered them a new perspective on the physical and psychological challenges faced by people with memory loss and their families (ELO #3). Caregivers and their care partners in turn had the opportunity to get a glimpse into the students’ lives. These unscripted moments were critical to establishing trust and helping to create a sense of community. Sharing meals eased the tensions of all the participants and facilitated an environment conducive to co-creativity (ELO #4). Taking the wellness survey at the beginning and end of each session also became part of the established ritual, but this activity, which was necessitated by the ACA request to provide quantitative data, was sometimes stressful. There did not seem to be a good time to complete the survey, and our attempts to fit it in revealed the contradictions inherent in trying to accommodate both the biomedical and social models of aging. In order to create parity and eliminate the suggestion that the care partners were patients or test subjects, everyone took the surveys, which became an important measure of intergenerational values and was quite revealing as we saw the impact of the co-creativity experiences on the students and faculty (primarily Generation X, Z, and Millennials), who overwhelmingly indicated an improved mood and outlook after the sessions. A strategy we developed to further alleviate the stress of the surveys was to follow it with a grounding activity. One such activity involved sitting in a circle and gently passing a tennis ball from person to person. Participants were encouraged to pay attention to the weight, shape, and size of the ball, and to contemplate questions such as: Is it easy or difficult to pass? Is it fragile or durable? Once the first ball was passed around the circle, the graduate student facilitator asked the participants to imagine passing around a series of invisible balls—first a tennis ball of the same size as the real one, then a heavy bowling ball, then a delicate crystal ball. After each imaginary ball was passed around the circle, participants were asked to think about how they engaged their bodies differently to manipulate the heavy and fragile objects. Questions included: What are some clever ways you could pass a bowling ball off to the person next to you? How do you

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handle a delicate crystal ball differently than a heavy, cumbersome bowling ball? How do these balls move through space differently? This warm-up activity was repeated each week to strengthen the communal dynamic in the room, inspire imagination, and foster mindfulness. As Basting notes, “Infusing creativity into the very fabric of the community itself enabled people to see themselves and each other differently—as having potential for meaningfulness.”36 As educators, we want students to synthesize big ideas and make connections between their coursework and lives (ELO #4), but we understand that students need predictability and repetition to learn new skills and gain confidence. We encouraged students to create a curriculum that integrated the best practices they had learned from theatre, age studies, and community art. The project inspired students to foster relationships with the community but also contributed to developing their ability to synthesize their knowledge and practical experiences (ELO #4). While their research on age studies informed their creative methodology, their practical experience of collaborating with the community of caregivers and care partners offered them a new perspective on the importance of dialogic interaction in various learning and creative environments (ELO #4).

Developmental The fifth component of a CCC project is that it develops slowly over time. Given the parameters of both the ACA’s Creative Caregiving Program and the grants, this was not feasible, but creative communities of care can take a variety of forms. In terms of duration, our project was more closely aligned with the “With All” project—a series of workshops held over four weeks at the Wellcome Hub in London in 2018, “With All” invited people living with dementia and their partners, along with artists and researchers, to create and communicate together through dance, music, and personal histories. As Hannah Zeilig, an expert in culture, language, and dementia, notes, “With All” focused on co-creativity, which “promotes a relational approach to creativity which nurtures inclusion and participation.”37 We also employed co-creativity to build collaborative participatory experiences and cultivate “shared process, the absence of a single author or outcome (and instead the idea of shared ownership), inclusivity, reciprocity and relationality.”38 Like “With All,” our project utilized co-creativity to encourage those with memory inhibitions to reconnect to their individual agency and feel recognized as relevant and significant members of the community. The project also empowered students by providing them the

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opportunity to work together to design curriculum and develop a community-­based artistic practice (ELO #4). Co-creative theatre practices are a valuable part of creative communities of care because they are effective sites of criticality, reflection, and social interaction. Co-creativity, as educational researcher Alexander Schmoelz defines it, “involves individual, collaborative and communal thinking and acting that stand counter to market-driven creativity, and forefronts a dialogic generation of ideas, compassion, and reference to shared values.”39 Rooted in a collaborative, participatory, and dialogic approach to community-­building, co-creativity inspires shared storytelling and stimulates playful interaction in a learning environment. Similarly, co-creativity is at the heart of building connections between the liberal arts curriculum and arts-based community programming—a symbiotic relationship between education and artistic practice significant for engaging students in activism, social mindfulness, and civic dialogue (ELO #3). Our project sought to create a co-creative community of care that would help participants engage in deep learning, develop their artistic selves, and foster intergenerational discovery (ELO #4). Although our project was conducted over one semester to coincide with a specific class in the theatre curriculum, the project is on-going as students write theses on the topic, the ACA continues to offer programs and symposia, and we plan for subsequent iterations. The notion of the project as open and on-going also supports life-long learning (ELO #3). We see this as crucial as the students are encouraged to explore “the potential to reuse” the skills learned during the project throughout their lives with their families and communities, which is also a goal of transdisciplinarity (ELO #4). On a personal level, the skills that we learned during the project continue to help us find deeper meanings when faced with the challenges of caregiving. As Julia’s mother continues to face cognitive decline as her symptoms of dementia worsen, Julia builds on the activities developed during the ACA project and intentionally brings art and music into her mom’s life to support their relationship and help her rediscover a sense of purpose through moments of co-creativity.

Rigorous Finally, Basting argues that creative communities of care are high quality and rigorous. As she notes, “By insisting on high expectations and a rigorous process for the project, we were investing in the cultural capital of all participants.”40 Although we did not create a professionally staged

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production with the caregivers and their care partners, the students and faculty worked collaboratively to produce curriculum, conference papers, professional and classroom presentations, and scholarly articles (ELO #4). Rigor is particularly crucial in academia, where we seek out opportunities to develop inquiry skills or “the ability to think abstractly, analytically, and critically.”41 A graduate research assistant in the theatre MFA program worked with students to maintain consistency throughout the project and coordinated the implementation of the curriculum at the Harris House and Woodland Towers, and graduate student interns who participated in the project also assisted with an undergraduate section of Health and Wellness for the Performing Artist, a course taught on campus during the week. The undergraduate course included discussions about nutrition, exercise (specifically the Alexander Technique), and other components of a healthy life, and graduate students provided individual feedback to the undergraduates and shared the knowledge they gained during their Saturday sessions at the Harris House. The learning objectives of the undergraduate and graduate course sections were aligned and the interactive component between graduate and undergraduate students proved valuable for synthesizing “information and imagination” and enhancing the rigor of the course.42 Rooted in experiential and integrative learning and focusing on the importance of maintaining the health of performing artists, this class is a vital component of theatre and music undergraduate and graduate curricula (ELO #4). The project also laid the foundation for other academic and high impact practices. The pre-med students completed a research project and received service-learning credit for their participation. They presented posters at two professional conferences and their participation in the project contributed considerably to the enhancement of the pre-med curriculum and further integration of the arts and medicine, an initiative being led by Luciana Garbayo (MD, PhD), an assistant professor of philosophy and medical education and the director of the ethics and medical humanities longitudinal curriculum at UCF. Other team members shared their research with local, national, and international communities of artists, educators, health care practitioners, donors, and curriculum committees. This project informed the direction of an MFA thesis and led to a peer-­ reviewed journal article collaboratively conceived and co-written by two faculty members and a graduate student.43 Upon completion of the five-week project, the graduate students participated in a symposium (Fig. 5.2), which was hosted by the ACA on their

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Fig. 5.2  Kate Kilpatrick and theatre graduate students present research at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. (Photograph by Keri Watson. Image courtesy of the authors)

main campus and brought together students, faculty, participants, administrators, philanthropists, and community members to socialize and share their research (ELO #4). This exchange was vital to the students’ professionalization; it illustrated the ways in which their curriculum could be adopted, adapted, and implemented by art therapists, and complemented the knowledge they gained through their first-hand experiences (ELO #2). The symposium also reaffirmed the importance of intentionally building communities of learners, which as Kindelan observes, “promote[s]

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experiential learning, encourage[s] students to work collaboratively on solving problems, and require[s] that they develop analytical thinking and communication skills that last beyond the classroom” (ELO #4).44 Community engagement and transdisciplinary research are essential to deep learning and to developing citizenship. Our project inspired several theatre students to participate in other community-based arts projects. One student volunteered for and was ultimately hired by the Arnold Palmer Children’s Hospital, while another extended the experience with an internship at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts where she worked with Advent Health to implement a similar program. She also created an intergenerational community project for a middle school and a retirement community. Reflecting on her experiences in these projects, she noted her interest in and desire to “create a safe space and establish a sense of trust and collaboration.”45 Working on these projects illustrated to students the importance of inclusivity, accessibility, and rigor when creating collaborative arts programs.

Conclusion Creative Communities of Care reduce stress, increase empathy, and slow the onset of dementia, and intergenerational projects encourage meaningful relationship building and inclusion across age groups. Our project was rooted in a desire to provide participants with dementia, their caregivers, and our students with agency and counter “the entrenched belief that the progress of dementia leaves people largely incapable of intentional, meaningful action.”46 We found that this initiative supported the Essential Learning Outcomes of a liberal arts education as articulated by the AAC&U and contributed to the reduction of generational biases, including challenging the narrative of decline. Our work in this context contributes to our belief that socially engaged transdisciplinary artistic practices encourage critical discourse and can be employed to improve individual wellness and create healthier communities. The project illustrated the ways in which research and creative practice can be integrated and it offered students the opportunity to witness theory in action and co-create agency with other participants (ELO #4). A limited number of arts and cultural organizations offer intergenerational programming for those with cognitive impairments, and the scholarly research on the effects of intergenerational projects is equally limited. Providing a space for caregivers to create and experience art alongside

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their care partners and students as equals fostered an environment of support, collaboration, and understanding. Together, participants were able to appreciate the importance of celebrating everyone as artists and creators, activating imaginations, and honoring each person’s individual creative choices. Co-creativity is an empowering process that allows those with memory loss to reactivate their agency and personhood and encourages caregivers and students to create together as a symbiotic community. Working with people with dementia propelled us to rethink and complicate the concept of collaboration as it relates to the ethics of representability, the aesthetics of care, and creative agency in non-traditional spaces and with participants who are often marginalized, displaced, or invisible, topics explored further in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Against ‘Aging’  – How to Talk about Growing Older,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 7–8 (2018): 252. 2. Douglas C.  Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K.  Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New  York University Press, 2001), 33. 3. Sherry L.  Dupuis et  al., “Re-claiming Citizenship Through the Arts,” Dementia 15, no. 3 (2016): 358. 4. Gene D.  Cohen, “The Creativity and Aging Study: The Impact of Professionally Conducted Cultural Programs on Older Adults,” Final Report (2016), https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-­ Creativity-­and-­Aging-­Cohen-­study.pdf (accessed January 15, 2019). 5. Ibid., 2–3. 6. Susan Whiteland, “Picture Pals: An Intergenerational Service-Learning Art Project,” Art Education 66, no. 6 (2013): 20. 7. Ibid., 20. 8. “About LIFE at UCF,” https://life.ucf.edu/about/history/ (accessed March 12, 2020). 9. Richard Gough and Nanako Nakajima, “On Ageing (& Beyond),” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 24, no. 3 (2019): 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1655324. 10. Dupuis, “Re-claiming Citizenship Through the Arts,” 358. 11. Nancy Kindelan, Artistic Literacy: Theatre Studies and a Contemporary Liberal Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2. 12. Anne Basting, “Building Creative Communities of Care: Arts, Dementia, and Hope in the United States,” Dementia 17, no. 6 (2018): 748.

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13. Ibid., 748. 14. “Trending Topics: Essential Learning Outcomes,” AAC&U, https:// www.aacu.org/trending-­topics/essential-­learning-­outcomes (accessed October 1, 2022). 15. Kindelan, Artistic Literacy, 2–3. 16. Ronald J.  Manheimer, “Generations Learning Together,” Journal of Gerontological Social Work 28, no. 1–2 (1997): 80. 17. Basting, “Building Creative Communities,” 748. 18. Ibid. 19. Kindelan, Artistic Literacy, 77. 20. “Atlantic Center for the Arts,” https://atlanticcenterforthearts.org/community/arts-­and-­wellness/ (accessed October 4, 2017). 21. The survey was adapted from Blaine J.  Flowers et  al., “Enhancing Relationship Quality Measurement: The Development of the Relationship Flourishing Scale,” Journal of Family Psychology 30, no. 8 (2016): 997–1007. 22. Basting, “Creative Communities of Care,” 749. 23. Clare Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation,” Feminist Theory 13 (2012): 147. 24. Amanda Grenier, Liz Lloyd, and Chris Phillipson, “Precarity in Late Life: Rethinking Dementia as a ‘Frailed’ Old Age,” in Ageing, Dementia, and the Social Mind, eds. Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2017), 149. 25. Ellery E.  Foutch, “Bringing Students into the Picture: Teaching with Tableaux Vivants,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 2, no. 2 (2017): 1. 26. Whiteland, “Picture Pals,” 19. 27. Celia Moreno-Morales et  al., “Music Therapy in the Treatment of Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Frontiers in Medicine (2020), 1; and Shantala Hegde, “Music-Based Cognitive Remediation Therapy for Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury,” Frontiers in Neurology 5, no. 34 (2014): 1–7, https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2014.00034. 28. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). 29. Basting, “Building Creative Communities,” 750. 30. Ibid., 747. 31. Ibid., 753. 32. Nancy Z.  Henkin et  al., Intergenerational Programming in Senior Housing: From Promise to Practice (Boston: Leading Age and Generations United, 2017), www.ltsscenter.org/resource-­library/Intergenerational_ Programming_in_Senior_Housing_Full_Report.pdf (accessed March 12, 2017). 33. Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 27.

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34. Thomas H. Gressler, Theatre as the Essential Liberal Art in the American University (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2002), 11. 35. Basting, “Building Creative Communities,” 750. 36. Ibid., 751. 37. Hannah Zeilig et  al., “Co-Creativity, Well-Being and Agency: A Case Study Analysis of a Co-Creative Arts Group for People with Dementia,” Journal of Aging Studies 49 (2019): 16. 38. Hannah Zeilig et al., “Co-creativity: Possibilities for Using the Arts with People with a Dementia,” Quality in Ageing and Older Adults 19, no. 2 (2018): 135. 39. Alexander Schmoelz, “On Co-Creativity in Playful Classroom Activities,” Creativity: Theories, Research, Application 4, no. 1 (2017): 31. https:// doi.org/10.1515/ctra-­2017-­0002. 40. Basting, “Building Creative Communities,” 752. 41. Kindelan, Artistic Literacy, 77. 42. Ibid., xv. 43. Kate Kilpatrick, “The Art of Applying Reflection: A Personal Account of Reflexive Teaching Artistry and Personal Praxis,” MFA Thesis (University of Central Florida, 2020); and Julia Listengarten, Keri Watson, and Kate Kilpatrick, “Building Affective Solidarity and Creating Healthier Communities through the Arts: Interactions, Elaborations, and Interventions in Multiple Contexts,” International Journal of Arts Education 14, no. 4 (2019): 1–14. 44. Kindelan, Artistic Literacy, 68. 45. Kilpatrick, “The Art of Applying Reflection,” 66. 46. Zeilig, “Co-Creativity, Well-Being and Agency,” 17.

CHAPTER 6

Our Carceral Landscape: Imagining a Thirdspace of Social Justice

Mass incarceration is among the most crucial issues of our time. Although the United States comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses more than 25 percent of its prisoners, and since 1978, the US prison population has increased more than 400 percent.1 In contemporary American society, incarceration and felony status are often stigmatized, with people who are system impacted framed as dangerous, broken, or mentally ill.2 Many view crime as an individual, rational choice, and see deterrence, punishment, and retribution as the primary goals of the modern justice system.3 Public perceptions of criminality inform racial and economic stereotyping as well, with racial profiling, harsh drug laws, over criminalization, classism, and institutionalized discrimination contributing to high incarceration rates.4 People of color and those who live below the poverty line or have disabilities are overrepresented in prisons, and incarceration produces detrimental physical and psychological effects on those imprisoned.5 Certainly, people in prison represent some of the most marginalized, minoritized, and underserved people in the nation, though these statistics are often far removed from the minds of university students. Here in Florida, we have the third largest prison system in the United States, with nearly one hundred thousand people behind bars, and Orlando has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. Each year nearly thirty thousand people are released from Florida prisons and a quarter of these returning citizens are rearrested within three years.6 This makes mass © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_6

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incarceration a particularly salient issue for our local community and one that those in higher education can address. A study conducted by the Rand Corporation found that prison education reduces recidivism,7 and according to the National Endowment for the Arts, prison-based arts programs help participants develop better mental outlooks, reduce violence within prisons, and decrease the likelihood of rearrest.8 As Paul Clements notes, “The arts are one of the agents that can naturally encourage spontaneous and participatory learning, enabling a more liberating and self-­ directed rehabilitative process.”9 Involving non-incarcerated students in arts-based prison programming also assists them in achieving key learning outcomes, including cultivating empathy and becoming socially engaged citizens. Responding to a local need and advocating for a Thirdspace of restorative justice, we facilitated a series of arts-based programs for incarcerated and non-incarcerated students and community members in Central Florida between 2018 and 2022. Challenging the societal stigmatization of incarceration, prison-based arts education sees collaboration as necessary and vital and constructs space as fluid and contested. It also considers artmaking a therapeutic practice that offers an effective way “for those imprisoned to relabel themselves as something other than ‘inmate’” or “felon.”10 This chapter illustrates how models of deterrence and retribution can be replaced with ones of rehabilitation and restoration and demonstrates how students, both incarcerated and non-incarcerated, can experience deep learning and meet the four key Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) articulated by the American Association of Universities and Colleges (AAC&U). We argue that the arts are an essential component of transformative justice, that creativity fosters new ways of thinking, and that the visual and performing arts function as effective sites of critical and artistic engagement that disrupt physical and psychological spaces of power.

Prison-Based Arts Classes: Theatre, Visual Arts, and Creative Writing In 2017 we founded the Florida Prison Education Project (FPEP), an initiative that brings high quality educational opportunities to people incarcerated in Central Florida. Classes in theatre, visual arts, and creative writing allow participating faculty, visiting artists, and non-incarcerated students to collaborate with incarcerated students and experience deep

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learning. Incarcerated students in our program have explored visual art through drawing and painting (ELO #2), engaged with literary fiction as a prompt for poetry and memoir writing (ELO #2), and written and performed adaptations of Shakespeare (ELO #4). Despite critiques by scholars, including the criminologist Leonidas K. Cheliotis, who argue that “prison arts programming cannot realistically address obvious and proven precursors of offending such as unemployment and lack of housing,” we contend that transdisciplinary projects that approach social issues from a variety of perspectives, employ various methodologies and theoretical frameworks, and incorporate multiple value systems can impact lives and contribute to systemic change. Iterative and collaborative, arts-based prison education is generative and impactful. Our curriculum stresses the importance of relationality and interdependency and gives voice to the feelings of entrapment experienced by incarcerated students.11 These are positive first steps in the decolonization of incarcerated spaces. Classes offer incarcerated students an important creative outlet (ELO #2) and provide non-incarcerated students a chance to participate in engaged emancipatory education, which, as theorized by educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, sees learning and critical reflection as transformative experiences (ELO #3).12 As feminist author and activist bell hooks argues, “decolonization requires radical interventions” that support “the idea of education as the practice of freedom.”13 Touching on themes including stigmatization, disability, discipline, and power, the classes we have offered draw on the affective role of the arts to foster transformative experiences (ELO #4). Prison-based arts classes and socially engaged artistic interventions must be undertaken with an attendant eye to the positionality of power, however, a topic that inspired a non-incarcerated student’s senior thesis (ELO #4). Theatre Classes In a 2014 study, theatre practitioner Larry Brewster found that students who participated in theatre-based prison arts programs demonstrated improved emotional control, self-confidence, time management, social competence, and the ability to work collaboratively with others.14 In his study, after five years of arts programming, 83 percent of students reported experiencing less stress and feeling happier, 75 percent said they made better choices, and 58 percent credited arts programs with allowing them to connect or reconnect with family.15 There is a rich history of theatre

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behind bars, including the foundational production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at San Quentin State Prison in 1957, The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women founded in California in 1989, the nation-wide Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) initiative that was launched in 1995, and more recent projects and organizations working with juvenile detention centers across the nation, such as the Storycatchers Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) in Purchase, New  York, and the Actors’ Shakespeare Project: Incarcerated Youth at Play in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Theatre in prison programs help participants create a sense of agency and develop strategies to manage their emotions and deal with feelings such as anger, aggression, and reactions related to trauma. The vision of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program, for instance, is to “offer participants the ability to hope and the courage to act despite their fear and the odds against them … [and to] … effectively change our world for the better by influencing one person at a time, awakening … [them] to the power and the passion of the goodness that lives within all of us.”16 Building on these programs, existing research, and previous discussions of arts-based interventions in the US prison context such as those discussed in the work of applied theatre scholars James Thompson in Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices, Michael Balfour in Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, and Jonathan Shailor in Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre, we offered a class to six men at a medium-­ security prison in Orlando in 2019.17 Over a period of six weeks, we, along with an undergraduate student researcher, collaborated with incarcerated men to write and perform adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and explore creative body movement as a response to literary texts. Drawing on the guiding principles of the Shakespeare Behind Bars project, which encourages incarcerated participants to “relate the universal human themes contained in Shakespeare’s works to themselves including their past experiences and choices, their present situation, and their future possibility … [as well as] to the lives of other human beings and to society at-large,”18 classroom conversations revolved around questions of privilege, punishment, and justice, as well as the disruption of authoritarian control in Shakespearean tragedy—topics with which students could easily engage (ELO #1). An initial discussion of key themes in King Lear, such as the complicated relationship between power and individual freedom and the ways in which choices can result in unforeseen consequences, created a shared space that both built consensus and acknowledged

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differences (ELO #3). Although students were initially hesitant to study Shakespeare, feeling he was too high brow or erudite, once Elizabethan theatre was contextualized, specifically its appeal to late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century working class audiences, they became more at ease. As one student noted, “I’ll admit at first I was a little uneasy about translating and reading Shakespeare but after I got into it, it was actually my favorite part.” Through their adaptations of Shakespeare into the vernacular—a tradition common in non-English speaking countries and becoming a current practice in American film and theatre productions— students were empowered to interpret and adapt language (ELO #2), engage in a dialogue about power and agency (ELO #3), and discover their own relationship to both the text and its characters (ELO #4). As suggested by media scholar Renée Desjardins, “focusing on the role and agency of the translator as subject, as well as the social effects translation can and does have in real world situations,” enables students to see their agency, even under the disenfranchising circumstances of incarceration (ELO #4).19 As one student remarked, “While attending [class], I found inspiration and hope. I found them in such quantities as to be nearly unbelievable.” After adapting selected scenes from both King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream into everyday contemporary English (ELO #2), the students worked together to develop their roles and find their characters’ voices (ELO #4). The opportunity to imagine oneself in the circumstances of another, whether it be the mad King Lear or the blind Gloucester, offers an important empathetic experience (ELO #3), but it also presents a chance to acknowledge and appreciate difference—a key principle at the core of Shakespeare Behind Bars that stresses the importance of “[d]evelop[ing] empathy, compassion, and trust, [and] [n]urtur[ing] a desire to help others” (ELO #3).20 As one student noted, “I’ve learned to try to relate myself with situations or even sometimes characters. How do I see myself in their shoes?” Through role-play, theatre allows an actor to become someone else, but it also teaches responsibility, discipline, interdependency, and trust (ELO #3). As Thompson observes about his work with incarcerated students, “What is important is to watch and listen closely to what one’s fellow actors are doing, and thus to be able to help them to achieve their objectives, while trusting that they will reciprocate … The actors must encourage and work for one another, rather than simply focus on themselves.”21 While navigating the multitude of contexts in King Lear, contemporizing Shakespearean language (ELO #1),

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rehearsing lines (ELO #2), and playing characters (ELO #4), the students built solidarity and created a sense of community (ELO #3), which ultimately “increase[d] [their] self-esteem and develop[ed] a positive self-­ image.”22 This community was “not based in a shared identity or on a presumption about how the other feels, but [in] transformation out of the experience of discomfort, and against the odds,” as Clare Hemmings argues in her discussion of affective solidarity.23 Or as one student noted, “At the start, we were all a little hesitant seeing as how we’ve never actually spoken to one another in a normal setting, but we were soon laughing, trading jokes, and having a great time. I never thought I would have enjoyed the company of my classmates and I’m grateful to the [class] for uniting us.” After working through King Lear, and, following Freire’s theory of emancipatory education, which seeks to overcome the power dynamics inherent in traditional education settings and foster relationality and interdependency, a non-incarcerated student-intern was invited to visit the prison and share a creative body movement curriculum that she designed based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ELO #4).24 Mobilizing the body, as opposed to just focusing on the mind, is a long-standing feature of dance movement therapy, drama therapy, and music therapy.25 The intern had never been in a prison before, but she had extensive experience teaching dance and was working on an independent research project that centered on how theatre and dance could be used in a prison environment to address trauma, build solidarity, and support understanding (ELO #3). For this project, she incorporated therapeutic dance approaches developed by choreographers Pat Graney and Suchi Branfman and followed the assertion of sociologists Amy Sheppard and Rose Ricciardelli that dance-­ based prison programs “facilitate emotional awareness and expression, encourage new ways of thinking and help participants discover a new emerging sense of self.”26 The intern devised a creative movement class that presented incarcerated students with an expressive, integrative, and applied learning activity (ELO #4) and introduced the class to the ways dance can help express, release, and deal with emotions related to the experience of incarceration. After a series of warm-up exercises, including a moving sculpture activity in which each participant freezes in a dance posture that builds on the previous person’s position, the intern asked the incarcerated students to choreograph their adaptation of the Mechanicals scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ELO #4). In this play-within-­a-­ play, the characters assume other identities and create a sense of playful

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provocation in a manner similar to the Rabelaisian carnivalesque. This inversion of power dynamics is a central theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream making it a particularly appropriate text for study in a prison context (ELO #1). As noted by applied theatre scholar Caoimhe McAvinchey, “Thinking about theatre and prison provokes an inquiry into the relationship between the individual and the state, forcing us to consider how prisons perform within the economy of punishment, and compelling us to question narratives of crime, punishment and justice.”27 By choreographing this scene, students physically enacted the inversion of power dynamics and co-created agency and dependency (ELO #3). The intern’s intervention and the students’ performances of King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream demonstrated the value of trust, collaboration, and relationality, both inside and outside the prison walls, and students were particularly responsive to those aspects of the class that facilitated the practice of “tolerance and peaceful resolution of conflict”28 and fostered decision making and agency (ELOs #3 and 4). We were reminded of theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s work with incarcerated populations. As he said, “Now the oppressed people are liberated themselves and, once more, are making the theater their own. The walls have been torn down.”29 Feeling the power of the experience, one student remarked, “We definitely need more programs like this one, because there are a lot of people looking to better themselves, but just need a chance, and programs like this provide us with that chance to be better, more educated men.” The intern was equally impacted by the experience. She went on to earn an MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and she is now working on her Ph.D. in dance studies at Texas Woman’s University. She specializes in inclusive progressive ballet pedagogy. Visual Arts and Creative Writing Classes In addition to courses in performing arts, FPEP offers classes in visual arts, poetry, and memoir writing. The visual arts classes include both a fundamentals of art class and an elements and principles of two-dimensional design course. All materials, including pencils, graphite, charcoal, pastels, paper, paints, and other artmaking supplies, are provided by the program and technical sessions are augmented by brief lectures on art history (ELO #1), as well as discussions and demonstrations by visiting artists (ELO #2). These courses seek to address the underlying trauma that informs the carceral experience of many students and help them apply aesthetic theory to

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practical situations (ELO #4). As noted by artist and prison educator Mia Ruyter, art, as “a therapeutic practice that allows for catharsis and facilitates self-reflection and insight into one’s own traumas,” also allows incarcerated people to speak for themselves (ELO #4).30 A national study found that 56 percent of incarcerated men reported experiencing childhood physical trauma and some studies note rates of trauma histories as high as 98 percent for incarcerated women.31 One in five people in prison has a serious psychiatric disability and the effects of trauma and institutionalization contribute to cycles of violence and victimization.32 As researchers have shown, “early life trauma leads not only to long-term mental health problems well into adulthood, such as depression and suicidal thoughts, but also diseases including cancer and diabetes,” but art “enhances biological, psychological, social, and spiritual health”33 and “through the exploration of the physical properties of art media, art therapy can target the underlying components of trauma in a way that language cannot.”34 Our art classes are taught by a professional artist who was formerly incarcerated and who shares his own experiences of trauma and mental health with students. After his release from prison, he continued his education at Valencia College and then UCF. After earning both a BA and BFA from UCF in emerging media and photography, in 2020 he completed his MFA. His thesis, “Compulsory: Art, Memory, and the Stigma of Mass Incarceration,” explores his relationship to the carceral state through photography, drawing, and sculptural installation.35 Having used art to deal with his own personal traumas and address his professional goals, he brings a unique perspective to his classes. As noted by Ruyter, “Teaching poets, visual artists, authors, and musicians should not be quiet about their experiences, but should use the art-making process and their work in prisons to reflect and deepen their self-knowledge and communicate their own lived experiences teaching incarcerated persons.”36 Modeled after this advice, classes are designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the principles and materials that can be used to create art and address trauma (ELO #4). Research by neuroscientists demonstrates that “actions such as drawing or sculpting in the face of difficult issues can express the voluntary function of the somatic nervous system and provide clients with the opportunity to participate in pleasurable kinesthetic experiences.”37 Our incarcerated students are encouraged to find pleasure in the process of artmaking and to consider big questions such as what it means to be human (ELO #1). Classes provide opportunities for students to apply and practice critical and creative thinking (ELO #2) and to reflect

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on their choices and life goals (ELO #3). Students examine the formal elements used to convey human expression in visual language (ELO #2), and they create sketches and drawings that demonstrate their ability to speak visually about their feelings (ELO #4). Stressing co-creation and process rather than the finished product is a tenet of emancipatory education, and the visual arts courses encourage students to establish meaningful non-hierarchical relationships with the faculty and with one another. In this way, a Thirdspace of social justice is enacted. “The art class is something I look forward to every week,” one student reflected, “it offers me the chance in a place of darkness, to create, and gives me a sense of serenity. The tools of the trade supplied by the art teacher and class are a plus, but the time and environment allow me to receive instruction in real time is priceless. The two hours spent in class make me feel like I’m not in prison.” In addition to visual art, FPEP offers creative writing and literature courses, including “What’s Your Story,” a workshop that introduces students to memoir writing. The course starts from the premise that every life holds many stories. Instead of covering the entire lifespan of a writer, it focuses on a specific aspect or event—large or small—and works to make sense of how that moment shaped the writer’s life. Students read a variety of memoirs and personal essays (ELO #1), discuss what makes some memoirs more successful than others (ELO #2), explore formal elements of writing such as metaphor, symbolism, structure, setting, character, and plot (ELO #2), reflect and brainstorm (ELO #3), and write their own stories (ELO #4). Students learn how to revise their work and how to seek publication opportunities, if desired. The course stresses to students that memoir writing doesn’t just explore the “big” events in a person’s life. Instead, even small circumstances shape a person’s experiences. Writers mine their backgrounds, select moments they wish to explore, and employ various creative writing elements that combine the storytelling aspects of fiction with the literary devices of memoir (ELO #4). In “Introduction to Poetry,” students read and study classic and contemporary poetry while learning how to craft their own poems (ELO #2) and apply poetic techniques to other prose forms (ELO #4). By the end of this course, students have written a series of poems and learned how to submit them for publication. Reflecting on the experience of facilitating these courses, the professor commented, “They read everything I give them, and they ask for more. And they write and they write … and every Friday they give up their rec time to sit in a small room next to other men—many who are strangers

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to them at first—and share their words with a fearlessness that leaves me breathless. I am humbled by their courage and their talent.”38 The work product of the art and poetry classes was published in a chapbook, Don’t Be Afraid to Stand By My Side, which provided a publication opportunity for the incarcerated students. It is distributed at public events to students and community members to raise awareness about mass incarceration and the transformative power of art (ELOs #1 and 3). To quote the writing professor again: “I thank my students for their generosity in letting me share this work. And it is my hope that when you read their words, a door will open and lead us all into a place of greater understanding and compassion.”39 These classes are valuable platforms for further exploration of the potential of transdisciplinary programs to create a Thirdspace, promote public awareness (ELO #1), contribute to political discourse (ELO #3), and engage participants in co-creating meanings and contexts (ELO #4).

Art Exhibition “Contemporary curating is marked by a turn to education,”40 and university art galleries are important sites of critical inquiry within higher education. Visiting the gallery offers students the opportunity to describe, analyze, and interpret art, to evaluate the relationship between form and content, to recognize key theoretical debates of contemporary art practice, and to engage with big ideas. Among these debates is the role of arts in society. Should artworks exist as aesthetic objects designed to elicit quiet contemplation, or should they engage with social issues? The preference for the latter is evident in the recent “discursive turn,” in which artists “seek not the masterful production of expertise and the authoritative pronouncement of truth but rather the coproduction of question, ambiguity and enquiry.”41 This turn was evident in the curation of the National Endowment for the Arts-funded exhibition “Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape” (UCF Art Gallery, August 27  – October 1, 2020 and Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, April 5–16, 2022). The exhibition included work by twenty-five system-impacted contemporary artists working in sculpture and installation, drawing and painting, video and photography, and printmaking and book arts, as well as artwork made by incarcerated students enrolled in FPEP classes (ELO #1). The exhibition raised awareness of mass incarceration (ELO #1), provided opportunities for the imagining of spatial justice (ELO #3), and brought the experiences of incarceration to students and community members

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(ELOs #1 and 3). Calling upon personal stories to draw attention to the structural inequalities that undergird the US criminal justice system, it demonstrated the ways in which we are all complicit in building America’s system of mass incarceration and maintaining the nation’s carceral landscape (ELO #3) (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). The exhibition’s title, “Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape,” was intended to capture the multifold nature of incarceration and its literal and metaphorical place in the physical and cultural landscape of the United States. Prisons, which are often constructed in rural areas, are out-of-view and away from the daily lives of the non-incarcerated— and this physical marginalization allows society to ignore mass incarceration even as it amplifies psychological, social, and cultural divides—increasing the distance between White and Black, rich and poor, and abled and disabled. Emphasizing the ways in which the periphery defines the center, prisons are, as noted by post-structuralist theorist Michel Foucault, “heterotopias of deviation”42 or parallel spaces that make utopian spaces possible by removing and containing undesirable bodies. America’s Fig. 6.1  Installation view of “Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape,” UCF Art Gallery. (Photograph by Hannah Estes. Image courtesy of the authors)

Fig. 6.2  Installation view of “Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape,” Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. (Photograph by Jason Fronczek. Image courtesy of the authors)

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prison-industrial complex (and society at large) is built on this separation, with its architecture dividing and isolating those inside its walls and masking their presence from those living outside them. The exhibition sought to visualize incarceration but also to illuminate to students and community members the ways in which we all live in and support the carceral landscape. By engaging with the issues surrounding mass incarceration in the United States, the art exhibition provided non-incarcerated students an opportunity to learn about the social implications of the American carceral landscape (ELO #1), view professional artwork made in a variety of media (ELO #2), and cultivate their civic knowledge (ELO #3). Upon entering the galleries, they encountered multi-media artist Paul Rucker’s haunting video installation, Proliferation, which presented historian Rose Heyer’s maps of the US Prison system animated and set to original music composed by Rucker. Engaging with history, geography, visual art, and music, Proliferation is a transdisciplinary piece that models socially engaged artistic practices for students (ELO #3). As time progresses in the film, dots appear in rapid succession and in geographic clusters visualizing the concentration of prisons in specific places and time periods across American history. The video visualizes the proliferation of prisons in the South during Reconstruction as hundreds of prisons were built to accommodate the thousands of African Americans who were arrested under vagrancy laws and Black Codes that criminalized “mischief,” “loitering,” and “curfew breaking” after emancipation.43 Similarly, the building of prisons again exploded in the wake of the civil rights movement as the wars on drugs and poverty increased the national prison population by some 400 percent (in Florida it increased 1000 percent over the same period).44 As one student noted, “One by one lights are popping up across the screen, eventually you come to see the rough shape of the United States [and] each light is a prison. The strum and pluck of instruments in the background add a growing emotional feeling as the map lights up more and more. It literally shines a light on the places they want [to remain] invisible.” Shifting the focus to a specific prison and helping students and gallery visitors put a human face on the conceptual dots visualized in Proliferation, the photographs of Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun expose the continuation of enslaved labor at the nation’s largest prison. Working in collaboration with those incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, McCormick and Calhoun have created photographs that help students see the ways that “prison reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that

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operate in clandestine ways,” practice ethical reasoning (ELO #3), and develop social responsibility (ELO #3).45 The Louisiana State Penitentiary (known alternately as the Alcatraz of the South, the Farm, and Angola) began as an 8000-acre family plantation named Angola after the country of origin of many enslaved Africans and African Americans. Calhoun’s Who’s That Man on That Horse, I Don’t Know His Name but They Call Him Boss (1980)—eerily reminiscent of nineteenth-century paintings and photographs of plantation overseers—shows a White prison guard lording over a group of predominantly African American men while they labor in a field, and McCormick’s Daddy’O (2004) presents viewers with a moving portrait of a Black man who was then the oldest living incarcerated person in Louisiana. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, today an 18,000-acre prison farm, men continue to work in sugar cane fields, just as enslaved laborers did two hundred years ago. As noted by scholars of the Plantationocene, the plantation is the “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system integral to capitalism. Legacies “of slavery and the labor of the unfree,” as cultural geographer Katherine McKittrick notes, “both shape and are part of the environment we presently inhabit.”46 Inclusion of McCormick and Calhoun’s photographs of Angola illustrated to students and viewers how “the plantation system during and after transatlantic slavery permeated black life by contributing to the interlocking workings of dispossession and resistance.”47 The legacy of the plantation economy continues in the US prison system, as well as in the marginalization and impoverishment of communities such as those along Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants that runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge (ELO #3).48 Angola, 135  miles upriver from New Orleans, was and is central to the plantation economy. Once owned by Isaac Franklin (who co-founded the largest slave trading firm in the United States, owned ten thousand acres of land in Louisiana, and enslaved more than six hundred people), Angola was bought by the state in 1901 and converted into the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Today, 76 percent of those incarcerated at Angola are Black and 93 percent are serving life sentences. As McCormick and Calhoun note, “for too many, slavery never ended at Angola,” or as a student reflected, “I came from a close-minded perspective that [prisons are for] people [who] broke the rules … I didn’t realize how many prisons there are, or the people hidden away, or the faces of these real people.” Work that draws attention to the reality of incarceration in the Plantationocene helps students visualize systems of power and engage with big ideas (ELO #1).

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The performative nature of several pieces included in the exhibition invited a participatory response and further enhanced student engagement with the themes of the project (ELO #3). The process of replying, of actively engaging with the pieces on display, involves extending, revising, amplifying, challenging, looking back and reaching forward, and, as was the case with “In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape,” the artworks in “Illuminating the Darkness” sought to generate moments of empathy and affective solidarity (ELO #3). Shaun Leonardo’s performance video Eulogy offered visitors a “Second Line on the High Line” for the thousands of unnamed victims who have been lynched by White supremacists or murdered at the hands of police officers over the last four hundred years. His video illustrated to students the ways in which the US system of mass incarceration is, as the civil rights activist Michelle Alexander argues, a comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.49 To memorialize those brutalized by this system, during the performance Leonardo reads from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man while young Black male percussionists of the Berean Community Drumline (an ensemble drawn from Brooklyn’s predominantly Black Weeksville and Crown Heights neighborhoods) interrupt and punctuate his monologue with choreographed moments of disorder, chaos, and confusion. This work is especially transdisciplinary, calling upon literature, poetry, history, sociology, film, music, and performance, which helps engage the entire university community. Just as Leonardo says the name of a victim of lynching or police brutality, a cymbal is clashed or a drumbeat is heard, disrupting the audience’s ability to know or comprehend the trauma of systemic racism. The combination is iterative, mimicking the ubiquity of racialized violence, while also resisting and challenging it. Geographical space is crucial to this performance. The Second Line is a funeral tradition that developed in New Orleans among Black Americans in which community members follow along behind members of benevolent societies (these groups, which continue today, were formed during Reconstruction because White-­ owned insurance companies refused to cover free people of color and those who were formerly enslaved). Second Lining, which is based in West African ring dances and Congo Squares, is an important cultural tradition. Leonardo’s contemporary and conceptual performance of the Second Line took place on the High Line, an elevated public park and platform for contemporary art in New York City. Eulogy translated a southern, communal practice of bereavement with roots in Africa to Manhattan, a

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reminder that by the 1720s, half the ships in New York Harbor were either arriving from or disembarking for the Caribbean, bringing sugar and enslaved people and exporting flour, meat, and other supplies as part of the Triangle Slave Trade. As a student responded, “The exhibition, while highly informative and providing a safe space, created the conversation to look at the bigger picture. This is how we make a change; this is how we illuminate the darkness.” Institutions of discipline and punishment are built on separation, and the architecture of prisons divides and isolates those inside its walls, while also masking their presence from those living outside them. Helping students and visitors visualize and relate to that which is at a remove is an important function of art, and Hank Willis Thomas and Baz Dreisinger’s The Writing on the Wall, an installation of essays and poems written by incarcerated people from around the world and pasted to the walls of the gallery to simulate the inside of a prison cell, exposes the unseen spaces of incarceration and gives voice to those who live inside them. Similarly, Maria Gaspar’s video documentation of a collective art project created at the Cook County Jail and projected on its exterior walls shares the stories of those incarcerated in Chicago’s largest facility and illustrates the power of art to change lives. Prisons spatially and geographically marginalize people—separating them from one another, from their families, friends, and communities, but these artists bring their stories to the fore, illuminate the dark spaces of the prison-industrial complex, and break down our conceptions of what constitutes inside and outside. The types of integrative, transdisciplinary artworks included in the exhibition don’t just educate students on the issues of mass incarceration and history of systemic racism, they also provide students with models of effective socially engaged work (ELO #4). Inviting students to challenge their conception of the American carceral landscape (ELO #1), the exhibition included artists who have contributed work informed by their personal experience of incarceration. The People’s Paper Co-op, a women-led, women-focused, women-powered art and advocacy project comprised of women in the reentry system, made prints on handmade paper created from their shredded criminal records. Purvis Young, Al Black, and Jason Fronczek all spent time in Florida prisons, and Young’s paintings of angels provide an ethereal view of the afterlife, whereas Black’s Florida landscapes (some of which are painted on the walls of the Florida prison where we teach) remind us of life—and the chance of redemption—here on earth. As Fronczek says, “Having lost my

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liberty, social standing, and freedom, I am thankful for what remains—my unique perception of this journey.” His monochrome portraits of local community members Marquis McKenzie, Ruben Saldaña, and Gale Buswell, each of whom were formerly incarcerated and now advocate for others through their work with No Place for a Child, Community Outreach Enterprise, Ru Camp Champs, and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, offer a look at life after prison and provide students insights into the power of restorative justice. Giving visitors a view of life in solitary confinement, Jhafis Quintero creates films and sculptures that convey the monotony and loneliness of imprisonment. Research shows that solitary confinement causes changes in the brain that lead to depression and mood disorders, yet it is still used as punishment in prisons around the world. On any given day in Florida, some 10,000 people, twice the number in other states, are held in solitary confinement. Bringing these works to the gallery invited students to consider the costs of imprisonment and awakened interest in the ethics of forced confinement (ELO #3). Thirty-two percent of people in prison have a physical or cognitive disability, the median annual income of people prior to their incarceration is $19,185, and nearly half (46 percent) of people incarcerated in state prisons in 2015 were convicted of nonviolent drug, property, or public order crimes.50 Students and community members who visited the exhibition learned, through viewing artwork and reading the discursive wall text and catalogue essays, that prisons offer little in the way of meaningful social, health, or educational services, and in Florida only a few facilities offer college classes or arts programming.51 This was represented in the work of conceptual artist Danny McCarthy Clifford, who drew upon his experience of incarceration to blend archival research, sculpture, photography, and installation to challenge systems of discipline and social control. Similarly, Omari Booker, who honed his art skills while incarcerated in Tennessee, paints because it allows him to confront the world. Booker’s painting Rebel appropriates a historical photographic portrait of Pompey Factor (who was born enslaved in Arkansas in 1849), rings it in red razor wire, and centers it on a Confederate flag to draw attention to the ways in which slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining institutionalized racism and dispossessed African Americans of wealth and property. One in three Black men can expect to serve time in prison as opposed to one in seventeen White men, and nearly 40 percent of people in prison are Black. Faced with these statistics, Christopher Etienne’s work

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issues a call to action. As a second-generation Haitian immigrant, Etienne experienced extreme poverty before being convicted of possession and distribution of drugs. Today he works to help other formerly incarcerated people earn a degree and break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. Finally, but crucially, the exhibition included work made by currently incarcerated students enrolled in an FPEP visual art class taught by Fronczek. As noted by Ruyter, “Reforming the justice system requires that the voices of those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration be heard first and foremost—and loudest.”52 Many of these students had never taken an art class but were excited to spend a few hours each week thinking about art instead of incarceration. Art plays an important role in education, activism, and community-building, providing a transformative language that gives voice to minoritized individuals and marginalized communities. It is also accessible to people across social boundaries. As a student visitor to the exhibition noted, “The exhibit ends with a collection of assorted art from various art students from the Florida Prison Education Project … Like the rest of this exhibit, it is intended to humanize a significant part of this country that is so often demonized without any pushback or questioning.” In order to share the exhibition with our incarcerated students, as well as the prison’s security and education officers, exhibition catalogues were published and distributed throughout the prison and several artists who contributed to the show visited the prison and met with the incarcerated student-artists. Exhibiting student work next to the work of famous contemporary artists in a professional art space was an empowering experience and illustrated that art is not just aesthetically pleasing or therapeutic but a viable profession and discursive tool (ELO #2). Non-incarcerated students enrolled in an American art history course attended the exhibition and wrote exhibition reviews (ELO #3). This assignment raised awareness among students of the themes of the exhibition and cultivated their knowledge of human cultures (ELO #1), honed their critical thinking and written and oral communication skills (ELO #2), and cultivated civic engagement and ethical reasoning (ELO #3). As one student reflected in their review, “All of the works seen here are meant to show a light on the consequences we often ignore of how we treat those we lock away and how many we lock away thoughtlessly. It is a very inspirational exhibition that challenges the audience to think more about the country we live in and whether or not we’re comfortable with it.” Another student was so inspired by the exhibition that she presented a project on

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prison-based arts education at the UCF Showcase of Undergraduate Research (ELO #4). As curator Katerina Gregos argued in a TEDxGhent talk, “In today’s complex world, I believe that art for art’s sake is insufficient. It is the importance of socially and politically engaged art [that] matters.”53 Certainly for the artists who contributed work to “Illuminating the Darkness,” as well as to those who are incarcerated, this is true. Contemporary art plays a significant, if underrecognized, role in society. Artists, including Hank Willis Thomas, Shaun Leonardo, Paul Rucker, and others, are stimulating conversations about injustice, racism, and systems of oppression. Bringing these artists and their work to the university art gallery challenges students from across disciplines to reinterpret social and political events, question biases, and reconsider dominant narratives propagated by those in power.

Public Programs In addition to offering prison-based arts classes in theatre, visual arts, and creative writing, publishing a chapbook, and mounting art exhibitions, we reached a broad audience through public programs including a film screening, panel discussions, public lectures, artists’ talks, a town hall, and a virtual staged reading. In association with the UCF Center for Law and Policy and the local PBS affiliate, we hosted a screening and discussion of College Behind Bars, a documentary film series by Lynn Novick and Ken Burns. Panelists included Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World (2016), and FPEP instructor and program coordinator Jason Fronczek. Dreisinger also gave a guest lecture to an FPEP class at the prison. We hosted contributing visual artist Omari Booker who presented an artist’s talk to BFA students in Amer Kobaslija’s advanced painting class. He also visited the prison where he met with incarcerated students enrolled in a foundations of visual art class. In association with the department of history, we co-sponsored “Slavery: The Prison Industrial Complex,” a presentation by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick as part of the James Weldon Johnson Lecture Series. Their talk shed light on the ironies of the criminal justice system and restored visibility and humanity to a population often forgotten by the public at large. Calhoun and McCormick also attended mid-term critiques with MFA students in the School of Visual Arts and Design and gave a guest lecture to FPEP’s incarcerated students. We hosted a “For Freedoms

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Town Hall” in conjunction with the UCF Art Gallery and the Rollins Museum of Art. Created in 2016 by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman as a platform and artist collective that fosters civic engagement and discourse and encourages non-partisan political participation through art, “For Freedoms” sponsors billboards, exhibitions, and town halls across the country. Each town hall addresses one of the Four Freedoms— freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want—articulated by Franklin D.  Roosevelt in his 1941 wartime address and creates spaces where art and discourse can urge communities into greater action and participation. Art is an important vehicle for civic participation, and our town hall initiated a dialogue on art and mass incarceration between formerly incarcerated artist Omari Booker, Gisela Carbonell, a curator at the Rollins Museum of Art, and the broader public. The town hall was held via Zoom and broadcast on the university’s YouTube channel. We also hosted a virtual panel discussion with formerly incarcerated artists and community activists. Representatives from the Vera Institute of Justice, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, and FICGN (the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network) joined artists and activists to discuss mass incarceration, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the Black Lives Matter movement, and police violence. Theatre UCF planned a production of Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root (2017), a powerful investigation of systemic racism in the United States. Based on the 2006 arrest of six Black teenagers who were charged as adults and convicted of the aggravated battery of a White student in Jena, Louisiana, the play offers an interrogation of school segregation and uneven policing. Set one hundred miles northeast of Angola Prison, Blood at the Root takes its title from Billie Holiday’s 1939 song, “Strange Fruit,” and evokes images of lynching, enslavement, and the plantation economy. After three nooses were found hanging from an oak tree at the center of the school’s grounds, violence erupted. The inclusion of the play in the UCF season offered the opportunity for theatre students and viewers to learn about the school-to-prison pipeline (youth funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal legal systems) and the systemic racism embedded in the criminal justice system. As students analyzed the play and discussed the ways the song’s poetic imagery highlights the symbolic meaning of the tree within the world of Blood at the Root, they also considered how anti-Black racism is rooted in American history. As one of the play’s central characters reminds us: “It all got roots. Way somebody choose not to sit next to somebody in the

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lunchroom—got roots. Way somebody got problems with the flag somebody else wears on their T-shirt—got roots. Way some people talk the way they talk, or hang out with who they hang out with, or love who they love, or hate who they hate—all got roots.”54 In a recent interview about the power of language, particularly vernacular speech, to magnify, illuminate, and empower, playwright Dominique Morisseau explained, “In all the things I write I feel the weight of words. Language can be a tool of empowerment and a tool of oppression. Our great unifier is not only in our actions, but our language and how we use it with each other.”55 The use of vernacular speech resonated powerfully with student actors who, through their rigorous play analysis, encountered the devastating effects of oppression on the characters they embodied. This creative process was akin to the experiences of incarcerated students in a prison-based theatre class who explored Shakespearean themes through the lens of their own vernacular translation of King Lear. As in the multilingual landscape of Pentecost (examined in Chap. 2), language became a powerful means of expression and effective affirmation of cultural and racial identities. Reckoning with the roots of American racism is a key tenet of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the opening of the exhibition and play coincided with both the renewed activism of the movement following the murders of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor and the beginning of the global pandemic. On March 11, 2020, prisons, colleges, and universities around the world canceled in person events, shut down dormitories, and moved courses and events online. Many schools and businesses did not return to “normal” operations until fall 2022, and with the rise of more contagious variants, cycles of closures and quarantines quickly became the new normal. Employing carceral language, the “lockdowns” and “quarantines” brought new realities to the arts, to exhibitions and performances, and to prison-based education. As audiences were made physically unable to attend live events, artists, galleries, and theatres were forced to venture into the less charted waters of the cyberworld and relocate the traditional places and spaces of exhibitions and performances. For those in prison, of course, many of these restrictions were always already a part of their daily lives. The creative production process of Blood at the Root, like the town hall and exhibition, was interrupted by the pandemic. After a few preliminary design meetings that considered staging ideas for the production, the pandemic forced the artistic team to pivot to a virtual reading. Student designers continued to research the history and location of the play but were

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required to conduct these meetings virtually. As they actively engaged in discussions of the history of civil rights activism and explored the significance of the Black students gathering around the tree in Blood at the Root, similar protests were erupting across the United States. The symbolic meaning of space as embodied in the play was mirrored in lived experiences, as the contemporary American landscape shifted under the weight of the pandemic and its attendant health and economic crises. The tree and roots of the play, as well as the landscape of COVID-19, underscored and embodied the way racism is rooted in the cultural, political, and socio-­ economic foundations of the United States. As Soja argues, the process of changing unjust geographies and spaces begins with developing a new spatial consciousness that recognizes the historical layers of racist practices and spatial inequalities and then contemplates a third, imagined space of justice, a “space of radical openness” and “hybridity.”56 To encourage students to build both their spatial consciousness and criticality and contemplate the creation of a Thirdspace, plans had been made to visit a class at the prison to foster visceral engagement with the prison heterotopia and include the voices of incarcerated people in the production of Morisseau’s play. This objective could not be accomplished as prison visits were suspended in March 2020 due to the pandemic. Instead, student designers had the opportunity to collaborate with Omari Booker, who created compelling background images for the virtual production that invoked both the real spaces of injustice and offered the possibility for their re-imaginings. Although not able to take the student designers to the prison, the virtual performance and play were shared with incarcerated students. Teaching the play to incarcerated students and engaging non-incarcerated theatre students in the process of analyzing the script and applying it to their artistic practice achieved various objectives: it made the work accessible across social boundaries, disrupted the inside/outside binary, and provided historical context for discussions of the “school to prison pipeline.” As noted by Clements, “applied theatre allows the space to practise new roles” and is a key component in Freire’s notion of emancipatory or liberatory education,57 which fosters: “critical reflexivity, creativity, artistic expression, personal development and therapy, conscientisation, dialectical thinking, consciousness raising, philosophical analysis, [and] religious conversion.”58 Through applied theatre techniques such as image making and active reflection, incarcerated students gained some of these transformative skills; through play analysis and creative practice, non-incarcerated

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students examined issues related to mass incarceration and racial injustice (ELO #1) and developed their analytical and creative thinking skills (ELOs #2 and 4). During the talkback following the virtual performance, student designers and actors were asked to name the most impactful takeaway from their creative journey, and they all mentioned that the process encouraged them to cultivate greater social awareness and civic responsibility (ELO #3). The students also reflected on how the sense of isolation and confinement they experienced during the COVID-19 lockdowns reverberated with the experiences of incarcerated individuals (ELO #3). Addressing the urgency to engage with this kind of material, a student who worked on the production commented: “As a dramaturg, I feel that producing thematically challenging plays that uplift Black voices is part of the regenerative process to regrow our roots as a theatre community and as a country.”

Conclusion The classes, exhibition, and public programs worked together to offer a model for transdisciplinary collaborations in higher education and reasserted the notion that the arts play a key role in education, activism, and community-building. They provided a transformative language that gives voice to minoritized individuals and marginalized communities and effectively demonstrates that the arts are capable of visualizing issues that otherwise go unseen. The exhibition, public programs, and virtual production included artists, actors, designers, dramaturgs, and stage managers, many of whom are students, who were united in their mission to raise awareness about the prison-industrial complex and its historical underpinnings, to visualize the contemporary carceral landscape, and to demonstrate the relationship between the physical and social environments. To quote the student dramaturg again: “We’ve partnered with the UCF Art Gallery’s presentation of the work of visual artists such as Omari Booker. Booker began painting while incarcerated in Tennessee and his work is on display alongside other impactful artists in the exhibition … This kind of programming, which sheds light on issues of structural racism such as mass incarceration and racial violence, is especially necessary in this historic moment.” Transdisciplinary research is an essential component of transformative justice that challenges the societal stigmatization of incarceration. Though traditionally the domain of criminal justice, legal studies, and social work,

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the study of mass incarceration is enhanced by engagement with the arts. Creating artistic and educational opportunities for students, both incarcerated and non-incarcerated, heightens the urgency to renegotiate borderlines and margins and encourages a greater understanding of oppression. Addressing the need to re-envision and remap the spaces where we live and practice, the programming discussed in this chapter embraced Soja’s definition of spatial justice and moved beyond destabilizing hegemonies and toward cultivating radical empathy with viewers and audiences. Although we faced numerous obstacles along the way, the project invited student artists to re-imagine live and virtual spaces of production and encouraged all participants—incarcerated students, non-incarcerated students, faculty, staff, and community members—to engage with the relationships between discrimination and the built and natural environments. More than two million people are incarcerated in the United States, yet the prison system remains largely invisible to most Americans. Our visual art, theatre, and writing classes, as well as the art exhibitions and the virtual production of the play, worked together to expose the structural and physical inequalities that undergird the US criminal justice system, visualize underexplored heterotopias, demonstrate the ways in which we are all complicit in building and maintaining America’s carceral landscape, and encourage the imagining of a transformative Thirdspace. By presenting the work of twenty-five artists whose practices are informed by their experiences with the criminal justice system as well as work by currently incarcerated people, the exhibition illuminated the ways in which entrenched forms of discrimination shape the geography and built environment of the United States, whereas the production of Blood at the Root operated as a palimpsest, excavating and performing the layers of systemic racism that entrench segregation in the physical landscape of schools, prisons, and communities. Bringing this programming to the campus engaged non-­ incarcerated students and members of the broader community in the discussion of mass incarceration and addressed Essential Learning Outcomes such as building an understanding of human cultures (ELO #1), developing intellectual and practical skills (ELO #2), cultivating personal and social responsibility (ELO #3), and applying knowledge across disciplinary borders (ELO #4). Illustrating how models of deterrence and retribution can be replaced with rehabilitation and restoration encourages students to disrupt physical and psychological spaces of power and re-imagine and re-­ envision the American carceral landscape.

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Notes 1. “Criminal Justice Facts,” The Sentencing Project, https://www. sentencingproject.org/criminal-­justice-­facts/ (accessed October 1, 2022). 2. Katie Rose Quandt and Alexi Jones, “Research Roundup: Incarceration Can Cause Lasting Damage to Mental Health,” Prison Policy Initiative, May 13, 2021, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/05/13/mentalhealthimpacts/ (accessed October 1, 2022). 3. Daniel S.  Nagin, “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century,” Crime and Justice 42, no. 1 (2013): 199–200. 4. Dennis Schrantz and Jerry McElroy, Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System: A Manual for Practitioners and Policymakers (Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2000 [2008]), 34. https:// www.sentencingproject.org/wp-­content/uploads/2016/01/Reducing-­ Racial-­D isparity-­i n-­t he-­C riminal-­J ustice-­S ystem-­A -­M anual-­f or-­ Practitioners-­and-­Policymakers.pdf (accessed July 1, 2022). 5. Schrantz and McElroy, Reducing Racial Disparity, 2 and 7. 6. Mark S. Inch, Florida Prison Recidivism Report: Releases from 2008 to 2019 (Tallahassee: Florida Department of Corrections Office of Strategic Initiatives, 2021), 3–5. 7. Lois M. Davis, Higher Education Programs in Prison: What We Know Now and What We Should Focus On Going Forward (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), 4, https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/ PE342.html (accessed June 20, 2020). 8. Amanda Gardner, Lori L. Hager, and Grady Hillman, Prison Arts Resource Project: An Annotated Bibliography (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2014), 7, https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/ files/Research-­Art-­Works-­Oregon-­rev.pdf (accessed January 25, 2019). 9. Paul Clements, “The Rehabilitative Role of Arts Education in Prison: Accommodation or Enlightenment?” JADE 23, no. 2 (2004): 169. 10. David Gussak, “Drawing Time Revisited: The Benefits of Art Therapy in Prison,” International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy 1, no. 1 (2019): 46. 11. Leonidas K.  Cheliotis, “Theatre States: Probing the Politics of Arts-in-­ Prisons Programmes,” Criminal Justice Matters 89, no. 1 (2012): 32. 12. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970; New York: Continuum, 2005), 81. 13. bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 35. 14. Larry Brewster, “The Impact of Prison Arts Programs on Inmate Attitudes and Behavior: A Quantitative Evaluation,” Justice Policy Journal 11 (2014): 1–28. 15. Brewster, “The Impact of Prison Arts Programs,” 6.

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16. “Mission and Vision,” Shakespeare Behind Bars, https:// shakespearebehindbars.org/about/mission/ (accessed March 15, 2021). 17. James Thompson, ed., Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998); Michael Balfour, ed., Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice (Portland: Intellect, 2004); Jonathan Shailor, ed., Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010). 18. “Mission and Vision,” Shakespeare Behind Bars. 19. Renée Desjardins, “Inter-Semiotic Translation and Cultural Representation within the Space of the Multi-Modal Text,” TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies 1 (2008): 48. 20. “Mission and Vision,” Shakespeare Behind Bars. 21. Thompson, Prison Theatre, 156. 22. Mission and Vision,” Shakespeare Behind Bars. 23. Clare Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation,” Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2012): 158. 24. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2005 [1970]). 25. Helen Wilson and Mark Pearson, Using Expressive Arts to Work with Mind, Body and Emotions (New York and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). 26. Amy Sheppard and Rose Ricciardelli, “Let’s Dance: Exploring Dance Programs in Prisons in the Context of Reentry,” Journal of Community Corrections 25 (2016): 9. 27. Caoimhe McAvinchey, Theatre and Prison (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3. 28. Mission and Vision,” Shakespeare Behind Bars. 29. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 119. 30. Mia Ruyter, “Ethical Tensions in Prison Art Education,” Teaching Artist Journal 15, no. 3–4 (2017): 137. 31. Nancy Wolff and Jing Shi, “Childhood and Adult Trauma Experiences of Incarcerated Persons and Their Relationship to Adult Behavioral Health Problems and Treatment,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 9 (2012): 1908. 32. Rebecca Vallas, “Disabled Behind Bars: The Mass Incarceration of People With Disabilities in America’s Jails and Prisons,” American Progress, July 18, 2016, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/disabled-­behind-­ bars/ (accessed July 12, 2020). 33. Juliet L.  King, Art Therapy, Trauma, and Neuroscience: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (London and New  York: Routledge, 2016), 158 and 1.

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34. Christopher M.  Belkofer and Emily Nolan, “Practical Applications of Neuroscience in Art Therapy: A Holistic Approach to Treating Trauma in Children,” Art Therapy, Trauma, and Neuroscience: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, ed. Juliet L. King (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 157. 35. Jason Fronczek, “Compulsory: Art, Memory, and the Stigma of Mass Incarceration,” MFA Thesis (University of Central Florida, 2020). 36. Ruyter, “Ethical Tensions in Prison Art Education,” 137. 37. Noah Hass-Cohen and Richard Carr, eds., Art Therapy and Clinical Neuroscience (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008), 24, 38. Don’t Be Afraid to Stand By My Side: Voices From the Florida Prison Education Project (Orlando: University of Central Florida, 2020), np. 39. Ibid. 40. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating and the Educational Turn (London: Open Editions/de Appel, 2010), 12. 41. O’Neill and Wilson, Curating and the Educational Turn, 14. 42. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité (October 1984 [1967]): 5. 43. Douglas A.  Blockman, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 326. 44. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 310; and Lauren Galik, “The High Cost of Incarceration in Florida: Recommendations for Reform,” Reason Foundation Policy Study No. 444 (2015): 1. 45. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 25. 46. Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe: Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (2013): 2. 47. McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 3. 48. Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F.  Gómez, and Gregg Mitman, “Plantation Legacies,” Edge Effects, January 22, 2019 (updated May 15, 2021), https://edgeeffects.net/plantation-­legacies-­ plantationocene/ (accessed July 1, 2021). 49. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 5. 50. Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf, “Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the Pre-incarceration Incomes of the Imprisoned,” Prison Policy Initiative, July 9, 2015, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html (accessed August 12, 2018).

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51. Gardner et al., Prison Arts Resource Project, 25–26. 52. Mia Ruyter, “Ethical Tensions in Prison Art Education,” Teaching Artist Journal 15, no. 3–4 (2017): 136. 53. Katerina Gregos, “Why Art Is Important,” TEDxGhent, September 2, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPk56BR1Cmk (accessed October 16, 2022). 54. Dominique Morisseau. Blood at the Root (New York, NY: Samuel French, 2017), 37. 55. Jose Solis, “Interview: ‘Blood at the Root’ Playwright Dominique Morisseau on the Power of Art, Language, and How Music Unites Us,” StageBuddy: The Insider’s Guide to Theater, May 10, 2016, https://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater-­feature/interview-­blood-­r oot-­playwright-­ dominique-­morisseau-­power-­art-­language-­music-­unites-­us (accessed March 5, 2019). 56. Edward W. Soja, “Thirdspace: Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” in Communicating in the Third Space, eds. Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (New York: Routledge, 2009), 56–58. See also, Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 57. Clements, “The Rehabilitative Role of Arts Education in Prison,” 173. 58. Ibid., 176.

CHAPTER 7

Concluding Thoughts

In the transdisciplinary projects discussed in the previous chapters, we endeavored to create opportunities for researchers to come together to advance knowledge on issues significant to our local community. We offered students enrolled in a variety of classes across departments the opportunity to work on creative projects, engage in transdisciplinary research, and connect their learning to their daily lives. We also looked to local stakeholders—from artists, actors, and musicians to historians, doctors, and scientists—and to institutions including museums, history centers, libraries, and nonprofit agencies to inform our plans. By collaborating with the community, organizing projects thematically, and looking to what Donna Haraway terms “systemic urgencies,” we worked to facilitate creative responses to big issues including climate change, displacement, disability, and incarceration. These projects, of course, involved failures as well as successes, as well as numerous opportunities for reflection. Our experiences led us to contemplate how we could better align assignments across classes in various disciplines, work with colleagues to institutionalize the Essential Learning Outcomes as articulated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and create transdisciplinary assignments and rubrics that would evaluate students’ ability to see connections across disciplines, generate transdisciplinary concepts, and assess self-growth. Whereas participating faculty integrated the projects into their courses, we didn’t prescribe assessments. Instead, we stressed © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0_7

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the importance of self-assessment, asking, what are we trying to teach students by engaging them in transdisciplinary experiences? How do we integrate the rich diversity of student backgrounds into transdisciplinary projects? How do we invest students in projects that transcend the bounds of an individual class? And what are the ways for us to better gauge learning? Self-guided learning is integral to Piaget’s notion of transdisciplinarity, but measurable outcomes remain important in the twenty-first-­century metrics-driven university. Asking students to develop portfolios or capstone projects related to projects may be a viable option to pursue in the future, as this type of assessment is both self-guided and measurable. Rubric criteria we might adapt for evaluation of portfolios includes measuring students’ ability to: explore complex issues from multiple disciplinary perspectives; transfer and apply knowledge to a new set of circumstances; engage with and learn from diverse communities and cultures; and develop a deeper sense of civic identity and commitment.1 We also suspect that the learning gains achieved through participation in these types of projects and the impacts on individual growth may be something that isn’t realized immediately. For this reason, we plan to reach out to past students to assess the long-term impacts of these initiatives. As we contemplated strategies to facilitate deep learning and inspire students to explore big ideas, we focused on learning rather than grading, stressed inductive reasoning by guiding students from the specific to the general, tried to carve out space for students to take responsibility for their own learning, and fostered active engagement with social issues. Still, we realize that there were missed opportunities. UCF has a procedure for designating courses “high impact” and providing faculty with opportunities for team teaching. We could design a transdisciplinary course that would be taught by a team of researchers from multiple disciplines. At a large public research university, however, this can present challenges, such as finding a home department for course credit, negotiating faculty course loads, and making sure major requirements allow students room for such explorations. In future iterations, we might propose a transdisciplinary course within UCF’s Burnett Honors College, although equity could still be an issue and none of these options addresses collaborations with faculty colleagues and students from other institutions. Researchers who promote transdisciplinary education often stress that it “is key to solving complex social problems,”2 but we have found that the greatest value of this kind of transdisciplinary work lies in the process itself rather than in the product. Impacts are not immediate or visible, and

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projects do not always necessarily yield measurable results. While transdisciplinary collaborative projects aim at instigating systemic changes and impacting public policy in the long term, their goals in the short term include fostering a shared vocabulary across the disciplines, inspiring a meaningful dialogue, and promoting innovative thinking. In our transdisciplinary work, bringing together researchers and practitioners from different fields, industries, and disciplines to work together facilitated deep learning, stimulated transformative experiences for students, and modeled an educational and creative practice rooted in collaboration, mutual respect, and civic commitment. These projects also demonstrated the compelling power of art to engage students in difficult topics and inspire them to rethink, reconnect, reimagine, and recreate. At the end of the day, large public research universities are hierarchical institutions with ingrained systems of power that are beholden to the partisan politics of state legislatures. In Florida, this means remaining mindful of new laws such as House Bill-7, which “provides that subjecting individuals to specified concepts under certain circumstances constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”3 As governor DeSantis said after signing the bill, “No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race. In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.”4 This law makes planning programming that engages with divisive issues and systemic urgencies, such as discrimination against the LGBTQIA community, genocide, antisemitism, hate crimes, gender discrimination, sexual violence, reproductive rights, and the #MeToo movement, particularly fraught. Art is affective and often evokes difficult realizations. Facilitating meaningful conversations on contentious topics while navigating legislation that restricts academic freedom can be difficult, and it exposes the inherent tensions that contemporary artists often negotiate when attempting to critique systems of power from within. Still, as we consider developing future projects, possible topics include poverty and the housing crisis, the opioid epidemic, economic disparity and the shrinking middle class, human trafficking, healthcare, disability, and hate crimes. We are also working to increase our commitment to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion by casting a wider net, finding new colleagues with whom to collaborate, and making sure we are reaching a cross-section of the student body. We might consider adding an advisory board, increasing the audience of our calls for participation, exploring additional funding sources, and seeking out new community partners.

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In addition to the challenges of creating meaningful socially engaged work within institutions and the limitations posed by restrictive legislation, academic budgets are tight, with public funding for higher education across the United States decreasing over the past decade.5 This necessitates external funding, but researching, writing, and executing grants are time consuming. Moreover, the initiatives and objectives of both public and private granting agencies can be limiting and not all issues or institutions are equally funded. The NEA Big Read provided us with much-needed resources and allowed us to work with a variety of communities, but it required that we develop themes based on books from their list, which did not always include works that engaged with the systemic issues most urgent to our local community. NEA Big Read funding is competitive, and in our seventh year, just as we had shored up community- and university-­wide support and selected a book about immigration and anti-­ Latinx discrimination that spoke to the specific needs and interests of our faculty and students, our application was not funded. This, coupled with the global pandemic, put much of our work on hold. This pause, however, also inspired reflection for us, as we are sure it did for many, as the lockdowns of the pandemic prompted us to reevaluate our priorities. As performance scholar Bojana Kunst reminds us, “Doing less could also be understood as a new radical gesture that opens up speculation about the value of artistic life and, rather than working toward perfection of work, starts working autonomously for life itself.”6 Questioning the emphasis on productivity and successful outcomes in creative work,7 we continue to explore the relationship between artistic practices and capitalist modes of production and are mindful of the precarity embedded in transdisciplinary collaborative work. Failures and successes are interwoven into the creative process, and we are cognizant of the ways in which late capitalism values productivity and sees failure as something to be either avoided or used to facilitate improvement. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s thinking about failure as an integral part of any effort —“Ever we tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,”8—artists and researchers Cameron Cartiere and Anthony Schrag ask, “Where does failure fit into the creative process and must projects always succeed?”9 Relationships are sometimes built through failures, and collaborations can be fraught with misunderstandings and frictions. Transdisciplinary projects are iterative and generative, often raising as many questions as they answer. Reflection is not only key for students, but for faculty researchers and facilitators as well, and the act of writing this book has been an important part of our collaborative process

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as we reflect on our past experiences and look to the development of future projects. We continue to strive for increased mindfulness and intentionality as we approach victories and defeats, and we recognize that disrupting the failure/success binary is a necessary element of the creative process. Our hope is that these projects might inspire future transdisciplinary work and reignite the appreciation for the significant role the arts play in higher education.



Notes

1. Association of American Colleges and Universities, Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2009), https://www. aacu.org/initiatives/value (accessed September 20, 2017). 2. Silvia Tobias, Maarit F. Ströbele, and Tobias Buser, “How Transdisciplinary Projects Influence Participants’ Ways of Thinking: A Case Study on Future Landscape Development,” Sustainability Science 14 (2019): 405. 3. “CS/HB 7: Individual Freedom,” The Florida Senate, July 1, 2022, MyFloridaHouse.gov. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/ Bill/2022/7#:~:text=Individual%20Freedom%3B%20Provides%20 that%20subjecting,to%20prepare%20and%20offer%20certain (accessed October 6, 2022). 4. “News Release: Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Legislation to Protect Floridians from Discrimination and Woke Indoctrination,” April 22, 2022, https://www.flgov.com/2022/04/22/governor-­r on-­d esantis-­s igns-­ legislation-­t o-­p rotect-­f loridians-­f rom-­d iscrimination-­a nd-­w oke-­ indoctrination/ (accessed October 7, 2022). 5. Michael Mitchell, Michael Leachman, and Matt Saenz, “State Higher Education Funding Cuts Have Pushed Costs to Students, Worsened Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 24, 2019 https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-­b udget-­a nd-­t ax/state-­h igher-­ education-­funding-­cuts-­have-­pushed-­costs-­to-­students (accessed October 6, 2022). 6. Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 192. 7. Kunst, Artist at Work, 8–9. 8. Samuel Beckett, Worstward, Ho! In Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1989). 9. Cameron Cartiere and Anthony Schrag, The Failures of Public Art and Participation (New York and London: Routledge, 2023), 3.

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Index1

A Accessibility, 102, 105, 115 Activism, 37, 112, 135, 138–140 art activism, 135, 140 Actors’ Shakespeare Project, 122 Affective solidarity, 103, 124, 132 (see also Hemmings, C.) ties, 46, 71, 73 (see also Carrillo Rowe, A.) Aging, 5, 8, 12, 30, 95–98, 101, 105, 106, 108, 110 age studies, 95, 98, 103, 105, 106, 111 Ahmed, S., 69, 71, 73, 89 See also Stranger fetishism Alexander, M., 132 Anthropocene, 37

Apopka Farmworker Memorial, 26, 43, 59 Applied learning, 52, 54, 56, 61, 77, 124 Applied theatre, 8, 69, 78, 91, 122, 125, 139 Arts and wellness, 30, 100, 101 Arts programming, 11, 106, 121, 134 Art therapy, 126 Assessment, 10, 32, 33, 37, 148 See also Self-assessment Asylum seeking, 69 See also Immigration; Resettlement Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA), 12, 28, 29, 32, 96, 98, 100–103, 107–114 Authenticity, 79, 80

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Listengarten, K. Watson, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education, The Arts in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29811-0

167

168 

INDEX

B Bain, K., 21, 32 See also Deep learning Balfour, M., 78, 122 Ballet pedagogy, 125 See also Dance Bassous, R., 75 Basting, A., 12, 99, 102, 106, 109, 111, 112 See also Creative Community of Care (CCC) Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The, 22, 27, 68, 88 See also Beckett, S.; Mengestu, D. Beckett, S., 122, 150 Belonging, 13, 60, 73, 82 See also Home; Identity Bhabha, H., 8 See also Cultural hybridity Black Lives Matter, 137, 138 Blood at the Root, 137–139, 141 See also Morisseau, D. Boal, A., 125 Boesen, B., 53 See also Puddin’ and the Grumble Booker, O., 31, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140 Borders disciplinary borders, 141 national borders, 67, 91 policed borders, 81 Branfman, S., 124 Brewster, L., 121 Burns, K., 136 Buswell, G., 134 Butler, J., 78, 91 See also Precarity C Calder, A., 74 Calhoun, K., 130, 131, 136

Capitalism, 5, 38, 131, 150 global capitalism, 36–37, 67 See also Class Carbonell, G., 137 Carceral landscape, 29, 119–141 Caregivers, 12, 28, 29, 96–98, 100, 101, 104, 107, 109–111, 113, 115, 116 See also Care partners Care partners, 96, 98, 100, 101, 110, 116 Carrillo Rowe, A., 46, 71 See also Affective, ties Cartiere, C., 3, 150 Cassanello, R., 45 Castro, C., 85 Cheliotis, L., 121 Citizenry, 2, 21 Civic commitment, 149 See also Civic responsibility Civic engagement, 52, 56, 61, 135, 137 Civic identity, 148 Civic knowledge, 10, 130 Civic responsibility, 60, 68, 77, 140 See also Civic commitment Class, 5, 8, 22, 25, 38, 39, 45, 51, 56, 61, 96, 100, 109, 112, 113, 120–128, 134–136, 138–141, 147–149 See also Capitalism Clements, P., 120, 139 Clifford, D., 134 Climate change, 5, 8, 11, 12, 24, 31, 36–38, 47, 51, 52, 61, 67, 74 See also Environmental crisis Co-creation, 56, 77, 106, 127 See also Creativity; Schmoelz, A. Cohen-Cruz, J., 3, 91 Collaboration, 5–8, 11, 19–33, 45, 76, 86, 91, 98, 101, 108, 115, 116, 120, 125, 130, 140, 148–150 collaborative arts practices, 6

 INDEX 

Collective storytelling, 104 See also Shared storytelling Colonialism colonial history, 44 coloniality, 74 Community community-building, 106, 109, 112, 135, 140 engagement, 3, 11, 22, 115 facing programs, 11, 38 local community, 4, 5, 20, 27, 30, 33, 43, 44, 57, 60, 62, 78, 97, 120, 134, 147, 150 (see also Local turn) Community Outreach Enterprise, 134 Community stakeholders, 23, 25 Contaminated diversity, 67, 75, 91 See also Tsing, A. Cooper, P., 75, 91 Cornejo, C., 48, 60 COVID-19, 1, 33, 139, 140 See also Global pandemic Creative Community of Care (CCC), 12, 28, 95–116 See also Basting, A. Creativity, 2, 20, 98, 111, 112, 120, 139 See also Co-creation Criminal justice system, 129, 136, 137, 141 Critical race theory, 8 Cultural hybridity, 8 See also Bhabha, H. Cunningham, Sean E., 84 Curriculum, 2, 29, 31, 39, 57, 96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 111–114, 121, 124 student-authored curriculum, 103 D Dance, 111, 124, 125, 132 See also Ballet pedagogy Deep learning

169

self-growth, 21 self-reflection, 21 See also Bain, K. Dementia, 12, 22, 28, 95–99, 101–104, 106, 111, 112, 115, 116 See also Memory loss Demos, T. J., 38 Der Marderosian, A., 75 Desjardins, R., 123 Detention, 71, 81, 122 Devos, B., 59, 60 Dierdorff, B., 48 Disability, 5, 8, 9, 31, 59, 95, 96, 98, 101, 103, 105, 119, 121, 126, 134, 147, 149 studies, 9, 96, 99 Discrimination, 48, 98, 119, 141, 149, 150 Displacement, 5, 8, 11–13, 27, 31, 48, 67–71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 82–84, 86, 87, 91, 147 See also Trauma Diverse communities, 3, 10, 77, 148 Diversity, 8, 21, 46, 52, 54, 67, 80–82, 148, 149 See also Inclusion Dreisinger, B., 133, 136 Dust Bowl, 38, 41, 58 E Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) Festival, 36 Ecocriticism, 8, 23, 35–62 ecocritical, 35–38, 45, 48, 52, 53, 56, 62 Ecological theatre ecodramaturgy, 36, 52 ecoscenography, 52 Ecology, 11, 23, 36–39, 45, 58, 61, 75, 91 ecological turn, 36 Economos, J., 51

170 

INDEX

Edgar, D., 27, 68, 78, 80 See also Pentecost Emancipatory education, 121, 124 See also Freire, P.; Liberatory education Environment exurban environment, 38, 47, 51 sustainable environment, 5 Environmental crisis, 36, 37, 56, 59, 61, 67 Environmental degradation, 11, 24, 26, 38, 48, 67 See also Rubble ecology Environmental racism, 25, 36 Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs), 10, 11, 38–52, 54–62, 69, 70, 72–75, 77–91, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 107–115, 120–136, 140, 141, 147 Ethics ethical reasoning, 10, 131, 135 ethics of representation, 73 Etienne, C., 134, 135 Exile, 68, 69, 84, 86, 88, 89 exilic narratives, 12, 75, 78, 88 Experiential learning, 115 See also Integrative learning F Farm Security Administration (FSA), 40, 41, 43 See also Resettlement Administration Farmworkers, 9, 23, 24, 40–45, 57, 59, 60 Fauth, J., 57–59 Film, 1, 9, 24–27, 41, 42, 45–47, 61, 71–73, 76, 89, 90, 123, 130, 132, 134, 136 Florida Highwaymen, 49 See also Roberts, L. Florida Prison Education Project (FPEP), 20, 30, 31, 120, 125, 127, 128, 135, 136

Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, 134, 137 Food insecurity, 45, 51, 52, 54, 57, 67 Foucault, M., 8, 129 See also Heterotopias Foundations, 10, 12, 22, 28, 44, 113, 136, 139 See also Grants Freire, P., 121, 124, 139 See also Emancipatory education; Liberatory education Fronczek, J., 40, 129, 133, 135, 136 Fuchs, E., 96 G Garbayo, L., 113 Garcia-Roig, L., 47 Gaspar, M., 133 Gershman, C., 85 Global pandemic, 96, 138, 150 See also COVID-19 Gottesman, E., 137 Gough, R., 96 Graney, P., 124 Grants, 13, 22, 23, 28, 30, 96, 100, 101, 111, 150 See also Foundations Grapes of Wrath, The, 22–26, 38, 39, 49, 51, 53–56, 58, 61 See also Steinbeck, J. Gregos, K., 136 Grenier, A., 103 Gullette, M., 95 H Hahamovitch, C., 58, 59 Haraway, D., 7, 38, 67, 147 See also Systemic urgencies Harris House, 113 Healthy communities, 98, 101

 INDEX 

Hemmings, C., 103, 124 See also Affective, solidarity Henkin, N., 106 Heterotopias, 8, 129, 141 See also Foucault, M. Heyer, R., 130 Higher education, 1, 2, 9, 12, 19–22, 29, 30, 38, 69, 99, 101, 120, 128, 140, 150 High impact practice, 113 Hiwa K, 71, 73, 76–78, 89–91 Holiday, B., 137 See also “Strange Fruit” Holzhauer, E., 48 Home, 4, 8, 24, 38, 43, 46, 58, 60, 67–92, 97, 106, 148 See also Belonging; Identity hooks, b., 8, 121 See also Radical openness Horn, E., 53 Humanitarian crises, 23 I Identity, 8, 13, 36, 68, 73, 75, 80, 82, 86–88, 98, 124, 138, 148 See also Belonging; Home Immersive, 99, 106–109 See also Machon, J. Immigration, 57, 58, 69, 73, 84, 85, 150 See also Asylum seeking; Resettlement Incarcerated students, 31, 32, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141 See also Mass incarceration Inclusion, 28, 42, 54, 55, 70, 80, 90, 111, 115, 131, 137, 149 Inclusive, 4, 55, 80, 99–102, 125 Inclusivity, 8, 99, 100, 111, 115 See also Inclusive Ingram, K., 80

171

Injustice, 38, 45, 136, 139, 140 environmental injustice, 67 Institutions, 4, 24, 101, 102, 133, 147–150 institutionalized, 119, 134 Integrative learning, 55, 113 See also Experiential learning Interdisciplinary, 6, 27 Intergenerational, 12, 29, 97–99, 102, 106, 109, 110, 112, 115 See also Manheimer, R. Intersectionality, 38 J Jackson, P., 85 Jeffers, J., 69, 78 Jenkins, W., 48 Justice, 2, 8, 119–141 restorative justice, 120, 134 K Kampen, D., 53 See also Puddin’ and the Grumble Kimball, C., 85 Kindelan, N., 2, 52, 98, 114 Knickerbocker, C., 47 Kobaslija, A., 136 Kunst, B., 150 L Labor, 4, 11, 24, 38, 41–43, 45, 54, 56, 58, 59, 130, 131 migrant labor, 24, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 51, 57 Lange, D., 41 Language, 9, 10, 27, 69, 72, 75, 78, 80–83, 89–91, 98, 99, 101, 103, 111, 123, 126, 127, 135, 138, 140 See also Multilingual

172 

INDEX

Lee, L., 43, 44, 59, 60 Leeper, D., 49 Lefebvre, H., 8 See also Spatial triad Leonardo, S., 132, 136 Lester, C., 51 Liberatory education, 139 See also Emancipatory education; Freire, P. Local turn, 3–5, 38 See also Community, local community Lorio, G., 76 M Machon, J., 106 See also Immersive Manheimer, R., 12, 99 See also Intergenerational Marginalized, 4, 91, 116, 119, 135, 140 See also Underserved Martin, D., 47, 48 Mass incarceration, 5, 29, 31, 119, 128–130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141 See also Incarcerated students McAvinchey, C., 125 McCormick, C., 130, 131, 136 McKenzie, M., 134 McKittrick, K., 131 Medea Project, 122 Memoir writing, 121, 125, 127 Memory loss, 97, 103, 110, 116 See also Dementia Mengestu, D., 22, 27, 68, 72, 84, 88 See also Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The Messersmith, M., 47, 48 Migration, 11, 27, 38, 39, 44, 51, 67–69, 74, 86, 91 migratory geography, 78

Mills, L., 45 Morisseau, D., 137–139 See also Blood at the Root Multiculturalism, 2, 69 Multigenerational, 55 Multilingual, 81, 84, 138 See also Language Music, 9, 56, 95, 96, 100, 102, 104, 105, 111–113, 124, 130, 132 Mydans, C., 41 N Nakajima, N., 96 NEA Big Read, 22, 56, 96, 150 Nedeljkovic, V., 70, 71 Niess, C., 81, 108 Non-incarcerated students, 29, 120, 121, 124, 130, 135, 139–141 No Place for a Child, 134 Novick, L., 136 Nwakanma, O., 89–91 O Ocoee Massacre, 46 Other, 21, 22, 28, 36–38, 48, 50, 52, 57, 61, 62, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77–81, 84–87, 89, 91, 148 Otherness, 85 P Parks, G., 41 Participatory practice, 77 Partnership, 22, 27, 54 See also Community stakeholders Pedagogy, 2, 21, 26, 33, 125 culturally responsive pedagogy, 7 Penelope Project, 106 Pentecost, 27, 68, 78–84, 89–91, 138 People’s Paper Co-op, 133

 INDEX 

Performing arts, 1–4, 10–12, 35, 36, 38, 78, 91, 120, 125 Plantation economy, 37, 42, 44, 45, 131, 137 See also Plantationocene Plantationocene, 37, 38, 42, 46, 54, 59, 67–69, 78, 83, 84, 131 See also Plantation economy Poetry, 26, 31, 39, 51, 68, 89, 91, 100, 121, 125, 127, 128, 132 Poverty, 11, 37, 38, 45, 54–57, 61, 67, 119, 130, 135, 149 See also Systemic inequality, 37 Precarity, 74, 78, 84, 103, 150 See also Butler, J. Prison prison-based arts programs, 120 prison-industrial complex, 130, 133, 140 Project-based learning (PBL), 10, 39 Public policy, 3, 31, 149 Public programs, 25, 56–61, 87–91, 136–140 Puddin’ and the Grumble, 25, 53, 54, 56 See also Boesen, B.; Kampen, D. Q Quintero, J., 134 R Racial profiling, 119 Racism anti-Black racism, 46, 130, 137 racist practices, 139 spatial inequalities, 139 systemic racism, 5, 8, 132, 133, 137, 141 Radical openness, 38, 69, 82, 139 See also hooks, b.; Soja, E.

173

Refugee experience, 28, 71, 74 Rehabilitation, 120, 141 Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), 122 Reinelt, J., 77, 80, 92 Resettlement, 69, 72 See also Asylum seeking; Immigration Resettlement Administration, 40 See also Farm Security Administration (FSA) Ricciardelli, R., 124 Roberts, L., 49 See also Florida Highwaymen Rollins Museum of Art, 4, 137 Rothstein, A., 41 Rubble ecology, 75, 91 See also Environmental degradation Rubrics, 147, 148 Ru Camp Champs, 134 Rucker, P., 130, 136 Ruyter, M., 126, 135 S Sacks, O., 105 Saldaña, R., 134 Schmoelz, A., 112 See also Co-creativity School-to-prison pipeline, 137 See also Mass incarceration Schrag, A., 3, 150 Schreyer, P., 48 Self-assessment, 32, 96, 148 See also Assessment Settlement, 46, 78 settlers, 4, 44 Shailor, J., 122 Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB), 122, 123 Shakespeare, William, 103, 104, 121–123

174 

INDEX

Shared storytelling, 80, 101, 107, 112 Sheppard, A., 124 Shillinglaw, S., 61 Shrestha, B., 73 Slongwhite, D., 59, 60 Smith, Jules André, 48 Socially engaged art, 13, 92, 108 Soja, E., 8, 38, 68, 69, 82, 139, 141 See also Thirdspace Sojourn Theatre, 106 Solidarity, 71, 84, 124 affective solidarity, 103, 124, 132 (see also Hemmings, C.) Sontag, S., 50, 74, 75, 78 Spatial justice, 8, 128, 141 See also Soja E.; Thirdspace Spatial triad, 8 See also Lefebvre, H. St. John Mandel, E., 22, 96 See also Station Eleven Station Eleven, 22, 96, 103–105 See also St. John Mandel, E. Steinbeck, J., 22–25, 38, 49, 54–56, 61 See also Grapes of Wrath, The Stigmatization, 96, 120, 121, 140 Stone, R., 106 Storycatchers Theatre, 122 “Strange Fruit,” 137 See also Holiday, B. Stranger fetishism, 89 See also Ahmed, S. Suh, E., 74, 91 Surveillance, 71 Systemic inequality, 37 See also Poverty Systemic issues, 150 Systemic racism, 5, 8, 132, 133, 137, 141 See also Racism

Systemic urgencies, 8, 38, 147, 149, 150 See also Haraway, D. System impacted, 119, 128 Systems of power, 131, 149 T Tezcür, G., 88, 89 Thaxton, T., 51 Theatre UCF, 78, 79, 83, 98, 137 Thirdspace, 8, 38, 68, 69, 82, 87, 119–141 See also Soja, E. Thomas, H. W., 133, 136, 137 Thompson, J., 122, 123 Tourism, 4, 39, 40, 44, 46 Transdisciplinarity, 5, 6, 21, 61, 97, 109, 112, 148 transdisciplinary, 2, 3, 5–12, 19–33, 35, 36, 38, 43, 45, 48, 51–53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 68, 71, 77, 78, 80, 84, 88–91, 96, 98, 99, 102, 109, 115, 121, 128, 130, 132, 133, 140, 147–150 See also Piaget, J. Trauma, 70, 71, 75–78, 82, 85, 87, 88, 122, 124–126, 132 See also Displacement Tsing, A., 67, 75 See also Contaminated diversity U UCF Art Gallery, 4, 20, 25–27, 39, 40, 43, 50, 57, 72, 84, 86, 128, 129, 137, 140 Underserved, 22, 29, 119 See also Marginalized University art gallery, 4, 5, 39, 48, 73, 77, 87, 128, 136 University of Central Florida (UCF), 4, 13, 20, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 43,

 INDEX 

45, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60, 61, 84, 97, 100–102, 108, 109, 113, 126, 137, 148 University theatre, 5

“With All” project, 111 Wolcott, M., 41 Wright, Stephen Caldwell, 46

V Van Beck, L., 49 Visual arts, 2, 3, 12, 35, 43, 80, 89, 96, 104, 120–128, 130, 135, 136, 141

X Xenophobia, 68

W Whiteland, S., 97, 104 Winn, L., 74

Y Young, P., 133 Z Zeilig, H., 111

175