During the Spring of 2023 I facilitated a Livable Futures student research community as a course at The Ohio State University. Students from a wide range of disciplines participated including dance, geography, design and creative writing and together we created an eBook about our experience.
Photo by Siera Dance and Katie O’Loughlin for Livable Futures 2023. Dancer Mercedes Hicks.
Centering Black and Indigenous Voices
We created the eBook by writing and creating visual and movement responses to a series of performances, readings, and other events. In curating the events to attend, we made the work of Black and Indigenous artists and authors happening at the Wexner Center for the Arts and in our larger community the central subject of our creative inquiry.
Our focus was on performance practice and their unique potential for creating space and time outside of everyday life for deep reflection and transformation. And together we wrote and made visual journals and synthesized what we received from the artistic works.
This Livable Futures eBOOK brings together a selection of the incredible written and photographic essays completed by the students and is full of inspiration and ideas for our community. A central question animating the book and the project as a whole is
“How might arts practices support and sustain the creation of more livable futures and what can we share from this for others?”
We found great nourishment and insight in these performances, screenings, exhibitions and events and we hope you will too.
More about the eBook and Course:
I’ve been a professor for twenty years. I find that hard to believe. I never planned this particular path, I’m an artist and the child of activists. I love facilitating groups toward our collective liberation and mentoring others in their creative longings. I come alive in inclusive spaces of inquiry, play, and curiosity. And I was raised in experiential and research oriented learning contexts. And yet, even given my roots in liberatory pedagogies, I have found myself over the years doing what I think the institution requires of me: teaching what I “should” teach, giving grades, and covering the content I think I am duty bound to cover, trying to fit into old systems. The upheaval, need, and humanity of the past three years of pandemic living and teaching have at last dislodged me from any final vestiges of these limiting beliefs. This year, with support from a Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, I put out a call to students across campus to engage in creative research inquiry with me around Livable Futures.
ACCAD 5500 Course Flyer
This Livable Futures course fosters creative and scholarly responses to planetary conditions of crisis and uncertainty. Livability is a term that encompasses social, technological, and ecological justice by inviting critical re-thinking of who survives and who gets to thrive in our communities and extending that consideration to more-than-human life. Students collaborate in ongoing faculty research and are guided in creating their own projects responding to the themes of the course. Drawing on resources from the Livable Futures project and programming path the Wexner Center for the Arts, we will listen and read shared texts and podcasts, attend performances, screenings, and public dialogs together and explore novel forms of synthesis. Students in this course are eligible to receive funding to support their projects provided by the instructor’s Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching.
We met once a week all together and another time each week in smaller co-working groups and then our third meeting was at the various shows, talks and exhibitions we attended.
Performances as Texts
Inspired by friends in Art Education (thank you Tamryn McDermott, Richard Fletcher, J.T. Richardson), I made the performance season at the Wexner Center for the Arts the “text” for the course, ie. the central learning material. In this way, the season became the syllabus. The students and I attended events each week. On our own time, we reflected in visual journals and short interpretative essays helping us to receive the nourishment of the program, synthesize it for others. In discussions and workshops, we sought to harvest and develop ideas for thriving in unstable times and creating more inclusive visions and actions for livability—the core mission of the larger Livable Futures project.
As we attended the shows, we moved beyond whether we “like or disliked” a piece and toward discovery the internal logic it offered, the nourishment available in deep attention and also asking how it might helps us think about livability and futures. Together we are seeking solution stories (as Frances Moore Lappe call them) and creative means of thriving amidst planetary conditions of crisis and uncertainty.
In a very concrete way, we asked together: How can we create livable futures on the planet now? How do artists and arts practices contribute to this?
Learning Community
The course attracted a beautiful interdisciplinary group of students from undergraduate to PhD, and from Design to Dance, Marketing to English to Geography.
This eBook issues forth from the learning community we created together.
I am so proud and inspired by the deep thought and consideration evidenced in the following essays by the students, the multi-vocality of the work and the ethics of care that permeates their work. I’m inspired and strengthened by their energy and creativity.
This is “hope work” as social justice and Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson calls it, “hope is this belief that our tomorrow can be better than our today. When Martin Luther King, Jr. says that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, that's about faith. But when we say the arc bends because people bend it, that's about hope.”[1] In this course, and in our collective sharing here, the students and I locating hope in each other, in sacred artistic spaces of performance and exhibition, in creative action, and in the practice of turning toward the issues at hand and feeling our ways into intention and action together, to start creating more livable futures, now.
Photo by Siera Dance and Katie O’Loughlin for Livable Futures 2023. Dancer Mercedes Hicks.
