The
Neighborhood Roundtable
photo © Andrew Leiser 2011 Neighborhood Narratives, Drexel, summer 2011
Friday, April 20th, 11am to 2pm
Macalister Hall, Rm. 2019-2020 (Corner of 33rd &
Chestnut St.), Drexel University
Working in partnership
with a range of West Philadelphia community organizations, Drexel University
recently initiated a set of community revitalization strategies along historic
Lancaster Avenue. On April 20th (11am - 2pm), Drexel's Center for Mobilities Research
and Policy will sponsor a community conversation about the role artists might
play in these Powelton, Mantua and Belmont neighborhood enrichment efforts. Can
artists be catalysts for change? How and under what conditions? What does ideal
collaboration between artists, institutions and the Lancaster community look
like?
Co-hosted by Mimi
Sheller (Director, mCenter: The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy) and
Hana Iverson (Director, the Neighborhood Narratives Project) with support from
the Center for Creative Research at NYU, The Neighborhood Roundtable will
provide an opportunity for neighborhood and community representatives to engage
in creative conversation about these issues with renowned artist/activists,
Drexel students and faculty.
The Roundtable takes
place in Macalister Hall, Rm. 2019-2020, at the corner of 33rd &
Chestnut. There is some construction in
the area, so please cross part way down the block, and enter to the right.
There is an elevator behind the Barnes & Noble book store.
Confirmed participants include:
Co-Moderators:
Mimi Sheller (Drexel faculty; Director, mCenter)
Hana Iverson (Drexel faculty; Director, Neighborhood
Narratives; CCR Fellow)
Participants:
Lucy
Kerman (Vice Provost for Community and Education)
Liz Lerman (Artist, Founding Artistic Director Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, CCR
Founding Fellow)
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Artist, Founder and Artistic Director Urban Bushwomen,
CCR Founding Fellow)
Mark Christman (Representative from University City District:
38th Street/South)
George Stevens (President of the new 21st Century Business Community org
James Wright (Representative Peoples’ Emergency Center: 38th Street/North)
Center for Mobilities Research and Policy
Drexel’s Center for
Mobilities Research and Policy aims to be a national leader in shaping future
healthy and sustainable mobilities, and promoting mobility justice at both
global and local scales. We convene students, faculty, communities and
interdisciplinary research networks around:
1) Advancing new
mobility systems and integrated visions for sustainable cities and mobility
justice.
2) Harnessing the
potentials of new mobile communication technologies for smart growth, community
health, public art, and civic participation.
3) Training Drexel
students to understand and solve “real world” mobility challenges, working with
community partners.
4) Engaging Drexel
University with local communities, national partners, and global networks.
The term “mobilities”
applies to both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and
information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily
transportation, movement through public and private space, and mobile
communications. The mCenter promotes new theoretical approaches, new methods,
and the academic leadership to research, envision, and foster alternative
mobility futures based on innovative collaborations between the arts and social
sciences, engineering, business, law, media and design, and public health. This
is an area of growing academic interest, policy debate, and research
investment. The mCenter is becoming a nexus for generating innovative
collaborations within Drexel, across the Greater Philadelphia region, and
internationally.
Center for Creative Research and the
Neighborhood Narratives Project
Artists and universities in the United States have long enjoyed the
benefits of proximity to one another and are participants in a powerful, historically
embedded and endlessly re-invented relationship with one another. As
major non-profit actors in American life, both are builders, makers and shapers
of society’s values. In 2005, a group of mature choreographers came together to
form the Center for Creative Research, in order to investigate and redefine how
independent artists and institutions of higher learning could engage with one
another. Key questions included, how can reciprocal relationships
evolve between artists, institutions and communities, and how might these
relationships facilitate mutually-beneficial exchanges between participants
while increasing the depth of students’ experiential learning? As a nexus of
this investigation, a collaboration was developed with the Neighborhood
Narratives Project, a mobile locative media curriculum that engages students in
a practice of situated story-telling incorporating aspects of cultural and
visual anthropology, ethnography, geography and, with the recent addition of
CCR artists, the role of embodied practice in interdisciplinary
investigation. The Neighborhood Narratives
Project is a vehicle to engage interactively and interconnect
community, requiring students and artists to invite public participation,
enabling organic growth of a community’s collective narrative and empowering
citizens to embed social knowledge in the wired/wireless landscape of the urban
environment.
