NSCAD University details its innovative research programmes that work with the community, for the community.
Art plays a significant role in our society. As an arts and design university, NSCAD University (also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) is uniquely positioned to adapt and meet the needs of the society it serves.
What sets NSCAD apart is its deep connection to the community. Our approach is distinct within the cultural education sector in Canada as it reflects how nearly all our research involves partnerships with communities. NSCAD consistently redefines its relationship with the community, extending beyond the university to enhance accessibility and better address the needs of a diverse student body and community partners.
Community engagement in our research is a critical way to solve larger societal and systemic problems.
How we engage in social research at an art and design university depends on the artist, designer, or scholar conducting it. Research may be an act of creation work, it might be scholarly research, or, frequently, it is a combination of the two.
Practice-led research provides a framework for faculty and students to engage in high-quality artistic creation supported by theory and practice. It allows for the development of new knowledge and effective application. The framework is always evolving in terms of how we can conceptualise it, how it applies to our work, what fits within it, and the type of thinking it allows.
Research creation (a Canadian term that is interchangeable with practice-led research) conceptualises art-making as research with direct implications for the economy, societal wellbeing, and new teaching methodologies that allow for more diverse participation at the secondary and post-secondary levels.
NSCAD’s participation in research creation and the importance of community involvement in the university’s research environment can be best explained through its innovative projects.
The Flaxmobile project
The Flaxmobile project is a three-year research initiative led by Professor Jennifer Green (Craft/Textile) that aims to support farmers and craftspeople across Mi’kma’ki, Nova Scotia. The Flaxmobile is a mobile education and processing facility focused on cultivating flax as an alternative to synthetic and fossil fuel-based fibres.
Our primary goal is to develop a critical network of farmers, fibre mills, craftspeople, and consumers along a local textile supply chain to address the craft and material security gap in Nova Scotia.
The project work is deeply rooted in culture and place, working hands-on in the field to cultivate, care for, harvest, and process flax into linen. We are engaging 15 farmers and 15 craftspeople paired together, granting craftspeople a better understanding of the origin and processing of the materials they use. Farmers are relearning how to grow flax, processors are discovering new ways to process it, and people across the supply chain are collaborating and adjusting to utilise these
new materials.
This involvement informs the revival of flax culture in the region and influences the materials and products being created by craftspeople in studio-based work.
Through a practice-led methodology called transition design, the project aims to understand how a lack of local textile production has become systemically entrenched. One of the key principles of transition design is that societal problems manifest in specific ways depending on context and location.
Our community engagement activities involved more than 80 people and provided valuable insight into how the issues surrounding the global fast fashion industry and the lack of local textile manufacturing are manifesting within the community.
The project aims to suggest interventions that can help shift our current unsustainable textile production and consumption practices towards more sustainable ones by engaging with communities across the entire textile supply chain.
The Community Mobile Media Lab
The Community Mobile Media Lab (CMML) is a mobile media research lab led by Professor Solomon Nagler (Media Arts/Film) that provides infrastructure and supports research projects through partnerships with communities. Our primary research aims to reduce barriers for underrepresented communities that do not typically have access to conventional media arts and film production training and promote the sharing of culture, heritage, and identity.
Despite numerous calls to diversify the industry, many reports lack practical advice and fail to address the real challenges people face. As such, we are going directly into communities with local partners to develop more professional and industry-specific training,
creating opportunities for job placement and economic empowerment.
Thanks to a substantial grant from Research Nova Scotia to run the lab and another grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to purchase the highest-quality, industry-standard gear, we are able to equip students to transition more easily into the commercial industry.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, post-secondary training for certain industries is mainly located in the capital city, creating significant barriers for individuals from other communities who cannot easily travel to study. As a result, we are not only bringing equipment to these communities but also producing film and documentary work with them that we are then able to screen and assist in distributing to festivals around the globe.
Impressively, important industry players have taken notice of our preliminary work and are providing additional funding for more projects.
The training programme gained momentum quickly. In our first year, we mainly worked with organisations in Halifax that catered to the African Nova Scotian and Urban Indigenous populations. As our reach expanded, other communities outside of Halifax approached us with interest in the training we offered.
The main focus going forward is to change the way filmmaking is taught at NSCAD. We are considering creating a certificate programme specifically for individuals from underrepresented communities to make the transition into the job market easier. This programme would be geared towards those who face financial barriers and may not have completed high school, providing culturally appropriate training and learning.
Our long-term goal is to use this collaborative methodology in an international context, seeking ways to apply filmmaking as a tool for community healing. We are exploring how filmmaking can be utilised to bring communities together and promote storytelling as a means of connecting and finding common ground. This three-year hyperlocal project is really just the beginning.
Planting the seeds of hope across Turtle Island: Connecting Mi’kmaq and Zapotec youth to Elders, language and culture through Indigenous food production and participatory visual methods
This project, led by Dr Joshua Schwab-Cartas, (funded by SSHRC Insight Development Grant) focuses on restoring intergenerational relations between Indigenous youth and Elders through a series of workshops in Canada and Mexico based on storytelling using cellphilms (short videos purposefully made on cellphones/tablets) and art making (murals) in relation to traditional Indigenous food production. The project will connect Indigenous youth across both local and international regions to share ideas, develop support systems, and create practices of solidarity.
It has four objectives:
- Connecting youth with elders
- Centring Indigenous ancestral practices, such as food production/preparation and Indigenous languages
- Encouraging knowledge exchange and solidarity across Turtle Island (North America)
- Using available resources to develop sustainable community-based action.
Four research questions will guide the project:
- How can practice-based experiential learning support language acquisition, food security, and wellbeing among youth?
- How can digital technologies be incorporated into such a model that is founded upon ancestral modes of experiential learning?
- What does it mean to collaboratively explore what traditional food practices of Mi’kmaq and Zapotec youth and Elders can be incorporated into language revitalisation practices?
- How has Indigenous language attrition affected traditional food practices and intergenerational knowledge transfer?
Four interconnected areas of theorisation will inform this project: Two-Eyed Seeing, Communalidad, Critical Food Guidance and Multiliteracies. Bringing together these theories, which are typically seen as separate, will be key to ensuring that the project is grounded in both Mi’kmaq and Zapotec epistemologies and traditional foodways.
A participatory methodological framework will inform this study, as participants will have control over the research agenda, process, action, and ownership. In contrast, the latter will be informed by The First Nations principles of ownership, control, access, and possession – more commonly known as OCAP. In addition to following the principles in OCAP, this project will also use the four Rs of doing ethical research with Indigenous communities, which are respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility (Kirkness & Barnhardt, 1991).
Participatory research unites inquiry with tangible action. Everyday citizens are key in identifying issues that affect their communities and what course of
action needs to be pursued. Furthermore, since this project is grounded in both Comunalidad and Two Eyed-Seeing, which, like participatory action research, are found with the transformative paradigm (Kovach, 2009) that “includes principles of co-learning, experiential methods, shared knowledge practices, respectful relationships, and mutually beneficial results” (Gaudet, 2014, p. 73).
The project will produce rich qualitative data documented through fieldnotes, recordings of team meetings and visual documents. All materials produced in the project (drawings, photos, videos) will be used as data to create learning resources and community archival material. This project will engage in collective research with our Elders, children and parents, which will document traditional practices – from cooking to sandal crafting and fishing – while exploring the ways language and traditional knowledge are passed on. Together with the community, I will work towards our main deliverables:
- Create a series of cellphilms in both communities that document both language and ancestral food practices
- Public screenings of the cellphilms created followed by a public talk and a Q&A
- Write and publish a report (in collaboration with the communities) and scholarly article(s) that both assess the outcomes of the project and recommendations to foster future language learning among youth
- A multilingual (L’nui’simk, Diidxazá, Spanish & English) recipe book that documents the recipes learned by youth in both communities, which will also include pictures, drawings and a multilingual language glossary.
The Storying Transnational Knowledge Project
Our main goal is to co-create storytelling platforms with young people, focusing on newcomers. By working with them to share their stories through conventional mediums such as picture books, podcasts, and oral histories, as well as through creative expression in areas like fashion and textiles, we aim to convey personal and collective narratives.
The project originated from previously funded research that generated 35 unique picture books with children who had refugee experience in Halifax and Coventry, UK – known as a city of sanctuary with a history of welcoming refugees. However, this only scratched the surface in terms of exploring narrative creation and the various forms it can take as a means of expression.
The current project, led by Dr April Mandrona, (funded by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant) delves deeper into the relationship between art-making and storytelling with newcomer young people. There are two study sites in Canada, Halifax and Montreal, and two in Australia, Darwin and Adelaide. As an art education initiative, the focus is on developing skills and knowledge, maintaining relationships, networking, and community building.
Multimodal storytelling is based on the everyday knowledge of ordinary people, considering the ways in which stories are told, held, and shared. Through discussion and art-making, we create an ethical framework for telling individual and collective stories to navigate the issues experienced in day-to-day life that are tied to larger social concerns such as stigma, poverty, and isolation.
This approach can help address issues related to displacement experienced by newcomers, build connections with local communities, and improve attitudes toward non-natives in education and social services. With a federal mandate to accommodate more newcomers, we must consider the conditions into which newcomers are being welcomed. Historically, there has been a tendency to disregard the skills and knowledge they bring. It is essential to seriously consider how damaging this script can be, focus on building better relationships, and examine what it means to be a good host.
The so-called refugee crisis has implications for Canada, particularly in Halifax as a port city, such as the impact on the public school system, which now has about 80 languages represented due to the influx of newcomers. Australia grapples with similar issues, and both countries have a difficult history of the colonisation of Indigenous peoples – to which our current relationship with newcomers and refugees is tied.
The intention is not to carry out a comparative study but rather to examine opportunities for collaboration across research sites. The project will develop processes to share stories between these locations, whether through mobile apps, digital technologies, or other avenues that we may not have yet considered. Our goal is to build connections between groups, understand the nature of these connections, and explore how storytelling and art can facilitate and evolve these relationships.
Fundamentally, we are all stories. The stories we tell ourselves internally shape who we are and interact with the stories we tell others. Exploring this creatively can help us understand each other better.
Contributors:
Jana Macalik
April Mandrona
Jennifer Green
Carla Taunton
Joshua Schwab-Cartas
Solomon Nagler
Please note, this article will also appear in the 19th edition of our quarterly publication.
