Past to Present
Amplifying Refugee Voices: Art, Memory, and Collective Interventionist Archiving
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathy Carbone
Art is a powerful medium for telling, sharing, and remembering stories. Since the onset of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, an increasing number of artists have been telling stories about why people are forced to flee and what home, displacement, and refugeehood look like to them—challenging the erasure of these stories from collective memory and highlighting the complex factors driving contemporary migrations. This paper examines a collaboration among an international group of artists, curators, activists, and an archivist to develop The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action. This participatory, community-led archive documents, preserves, and disseminates art related to displacement and refugeehood. The Amplification Project aims to amplify refugee narratives and agency in archives and greater collective memory, disrupt dehumanizing media and political representations of refugees, and foster awareness about the myriad ways individuals and communities experience and navigate forced displacement from a global perspective. Drawing on my role as co-founder, director, and archivist of The Amplification Project, this paper integrates reflective practitioner insights with scholarly discourse grounded in community archives, participatory archives, art and cultural studies, and migration studies. I will also discuss the concept of “collective interventionist archiving”—a praxis that embodies the project’s ethos. This approach underscores the activist potential of crowd-sourced participatory digital archiving as a means to contest dominant narratives that marginalize or misrepresent individuals and communities, foster solidarity, and resist archival and societal memory erasures.
Rethinking Garden Co-design Paradigm with Large Language Models: A Case for Creating a Community-Engaged Space
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xuanfang Wang, Yan Huang
In recent years, the burgeoning field of garden co-design, spearheaded by urban residents, has significantly advanced public engagement and satisfied intrinsic needs. Nonetheless, conventional implementations often encounter inefficiencies due to divergences caused by power structures, stakeholder interests, and cognitive disparities between leading designers and participant residents. With recent advancements in the cognitive capabilities and reasoning powers of Large Language Models (LLMs), a novel opportunity has emerged to leverage these technologies in reshaping the paradigm of garden co-design. This paper presents an innovative bio-harmony garden co-design model, which seamlessly integrates LLMs with collaborative design knowledge. This model facilitates a transformative shift towards a resident-centric co-design approach through (i) user requirement translation, (ii) plant category solving, and (iii) horticultural-LLM reasoning. We evaluated the proposed model on the 6,970-square-meter Arconati farm with 53 urban residents participating and providing both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly enhances key aspects of the co-design process—design engagement, expectation alignment, and feedback responsiveness—by over 21%, compared to traditional designer-led paradigms.
Envisioning a Synergistic Model for Social Work and the Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brian Kelly
Individuals, groups, and communities use the arts as important forms of communication and expression, including advocacy, knowledge production and dissemination, and resistance to oppression. As the world contends with the effects of multiple, interrelated global crises (e.g., COVD-19, climate change) and assaults on human rights (e.g., violence against Black, Brown, female-identifying, and trans and non-binary bodies), it is hard to imagine a more urgent time to envision how social workers can more actively engage the arts to promote social justice, equity, and inclusion. Identifying such a vision promotes reciprocal client-worker collaboration, assists in democratizing services, and elevates the strengths and assets of individuals, groups, and communities. This presentation will highlight synergies among the principles and practices of social work and the arts. Central to this vision is the prioritization of social worker-artists, a hybridized identity, where social workers embrace and harness their artistic talents to serve clients across the full spectrum of practice. The paper addresses how this hybridized identity adds value to social work practice, teaching, and scholarship. It also examines the benefits and challenges of integrating aural, narrative, performing, and visual arts in social work practice at micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Finally, we share a perspective on what social work practice and these art forms offer each other, with a particular focus on 1) affirmation of contextually specific art and person-in-environment practice; and 2) collectivity and empowerment through art and strengths-based approaches.
