Graduate students and junior faculty are invited to participate in a mentored creative project development group. This group is for scholars interested in doing or presenting research through visual, material, or otherwise creative means.
HASTAC 2023 invites us to “engage with creative and design-based approaches to technology and education, particularly around issues of social justice and allied movements of design justice, data justice, algorithmic accountability, (digital) literacies, open knowledge, and accessibility, broadly construed.” This call for participation invites HASTAC Scholars and early-career academics to build creative, design-based scholarship and representations of research with the support of experienced mentors and a community of peers.
Creative Futures participants will be supported in making artistic visualizations, presentations, and interpretations of their research data for exhibition at the HASTAC 2023 Conference. Participants will meet twice monthly for one hour with mentors Nikki Stevens and Molly Morin, and will have access to office hours and group critiques (focused group discussions of work in progress) from October 2022 – June 2023. Those who complete a work for exhibition will be invited to join us at the conference for installation and guest reviews of the work.
HASTAC has long been a network for innovative interdisciplinary scholarship and new approaches to pedagogy. This call presents an opportunity to look towards the future, support new scholarship, and find new ways of thinking about research. The Creative Futures program will nurture new creative research projects for exhibition at HASTAC 2023.
More details
Who can participate?
Graduate students and junior faculty who are new to making, or would like help developing their projects
What do I need?
- A seed of an idea (however small) that you would like support to develop
- About 2 hours/month for synchronous meetings
- Time and desire to work on a project for the HASTAC 2023 conference
I’m not an artist and have never been to a critique (crit). What are they like?
A crit is a discussion of an artist/maker’s work, usually done with peers, mentors, and/or outside experts. For our crits, participants will bring their work to a zoom meeting and our group will offer their questions, interpretations, suggestions, and references that may be helpful to improving the work. This should be a generative process in which you have an opportunity to better understand how others perceive the work and to learn from peers. After the first few crits lead and structured by Molly and Nikki, the group will work together to decide how to best structure these meetings.
What is the application process?
We are accepting the first 20 people who apply with complete applications. Participants will be notified by October 15, 2022. Projects completed through Creative Futures will automatically be included in the conference; you do not need to submit this work separately through the main submission system. Creative Futures participants may submit additional work to the conference through the main submission system.
What if I’m not selected?
If people withdraw, we will contact folks and invite them to join. We will consider people withdrawn after they miss several meetings, and after we email them to confirm.
Who are Nikki and Molly?
About Nikki Stevens: Nikki Stevens (they/them) is a software engineer, award-winning open source contributor, and critical technology researcher. Stevens’s research focuses on ways that data models uphold systems of white supremacy and cisgender normativity and the interventions that are possible. In industry, Stevens led the architecture of software products that have won numerous awards, including at SXSW. In open source, Stevens work in the Drupal community earned them the 2017 Aaron Winborn Award and recognitions by Red Hat and The Linux Foundation. They are currently a researcher at Dartmouth College.
About Molly Morin: Molly Morin (she/her) is an Arts Researcher in Residence at Dartmouth College. Morin’s work teases out long held cultural assumptions influenced by Enlightenment logics that we accept as true, neutral, and necessary, and explores ways in which recent advances in computation can amplify and extend power imbalances already present in social, political, and art-world systems. Morin has given invited lectures at the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, The Society for Science, Literature and the Arts, and the National Academy of Science. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at The Collaboratory at UC Santa Barbara, the University of Dallas, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. She was a 2020 Utah Visual Arts Fellow and her work is included in the state’s Alice Merrill Horne collection.