May 14, 2024 - Community-engaged Policy and Practice and the Arts

M.E. Luka smiling

Abstract: In this talk, I will share some recent community-engaged and arts-based methods used in two quite different projects that are grounded in digital environments but also face challenges because of digital demands, all while playing out in real life communities. One involves the development of manifestos (towards an National Action Plan) to address urgent needs in community and marginalized media archives across Canada. This is grounded in a six-year SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant called Archive Counterarchive (https://counterarchive.ca/welcome) that involves more than 100 partners and academics. The other was a pilot project in the summer of 2023 with fledgling tiny community organization, Scarbrite, using intergenerational community-engaged, arts-based methods to facilitate a series of intergenerational mobile workshops across the Scarborough Greenway Network (https://www.scarbrite.ca/makers-in-motion/). It is one of several Listening Projects from the UTSC Urban Just Transitions Cluster of Scholarly Prominence (https://urbanjusttransitions.ca/), now in its final year.

Mary Elizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is Assistant Professor, Arts & Media Management at University of Toronto Scarborough, where she examines modes and meanings of co-creative production, distribution and dissemination in the digital age for the arts, media and civic sectors. She holds a Connaught New Researcher Fellowship examining creative networks in Canada and is a founding member of the Critical Digital Methods Institute, of research-creation group Narratives in Space + Time Society, and of the technoculture research group, the Fourchettes. Luka has many SHHRC funded partnerships along with Mitacs-funded research too. 

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Great Explorations is a series of academic discussions we hope will inspire our communities. We extend special thanks to our engaged, critical thinkers who attend our speaker series. The dialogues that come out of these talks, both in-person and online, are integral to our campus community and Scarborough communities at large. We welcome your input for future topics, as well as a review of previous recorded sessions available on YouTube.