Faculty Research Fellowship

“Boston Commons” considers the arts as a form of cultural commons that not only articulate shared experience, but also manifest ethical responsibility. As Northeastern University increasingly probes the ethical issues attending our socio-political and technological futures, the arts should be at the very forefront of this inquiry.

• Generate conversations (digital and face-to-face), collaborations, creative works, and critical interventions in disciplines across the college, university, and beyond that interrogate the arts as an ethical responsibility
• Develop an open-source digital repository for a range of related resources, including research publications, conference and symposium proceedings, and documentation of creative works

• Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Associate Professor, Architecture
• Rebekah E. Moore, Assistant Professor, Music
• Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, Associate Professor and Chair, Theatre

• What are the ethical implications for research, teaching, and disciplines of creative practice? 
• How are we valuing the arts beyond their monetization? How can the arts respond to capitalism in crisis?
• Where are the pressure points that are barriers to real change (e.g. journal hierarchies and power, labor of researching and creating innovative curricula when we stray from the canon)?

In February 2020, “Interrupting the Canon” initiated conversation around creative practice and ethics. The event centered around the ways that established modes of practice and hierarchies of academic “value” often shape inequity, undermine capacity, and foreclose collaboration in and across our fields. Throughout 2020, Fellows re-connected with participants through a series of online afternoon tea and conversation sessions. Together, the group navigated the expansion of initial research questions to consider the role of the arts and creative practice in times of crisis. In November 2021, Fellows gathered the group in person for “Revisit and Recalibrate: Interrupting the Canon, Part Two,” to re-engage conversations about what the intersection of art, inquiry, ethics, and action might look like in our diverse academic fields or creative practices in light of the extraordinary changes and challenges brought about by 2020, with all its social and political tumult.