









































W
W E L C O M E

alain barker, guest editor, faculty indiana  
university jacobs school of music

Welcome to this edition of ENGAGE! in which we 
explore the power of the arts in our communities 
through an inspiring and diverse set of articles 
written by practitioners, administrators, research-
ers, and teachers from different parts of the world. 

The arts play a significant role in reconnecting us 
to each other, building empathy, and restoring 
balance and justice. They have a unique way of 
navigating communal and cultural spaces. The 
arts open paths that help us find common ground, 
expand understanding, enhance diplomacy, and 
encourage shared knowledge. At its core, art 
enables us to slow down, opening opportunities to 
consider new perspectives. 

We invite you to stay with these articles for a while, 
to take them in at a pace that helps you to switch 
modes and savor their implications.  
 

Included in this issue is Eric Booth’s A New 
Framework for Understanding the Field of Artists 
Who Work in Community and Education Settings, 
an excellent proposal by one of the country’s lead-
ers in community arts engagement. Booth recog-
nizes the impact of the large workforce of teaching 
artists in the U.S. and around the world. Through 
his seven (plus one) Purpose Threads, he focuses 
on key elements that serve to empower artists who 
have a passion and commitment to their commu-
nities. Included are community-based examples 
of organizations that employ teaching artists to 
achieve their goals, and suggestions on how to 
evaluate each Purpose. Booth was named in the 
“Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential Leaders in 
the Nonprofit Arts (USA) for 2015” by the Western 
States Arts Federation (WESTAF). For his new 
framework, he draws from his experiences at the 
Juilliard School, Stanford University, NYU, Tan-
glewood, twenty years of leadership at the Kenne-
dy Center and, most recently, the Lincoln Center 

Education Teaching Artist Development Labs. 

Learning Informally: A Case for Arts in Vocation-
al Education and Training in Uganda, Maxwell 
Openjuru Ladaah, George Ladaah Openjuru, Kathy 
Sanford, Bruno de Oliveira Jayme, and David Monk, 
introduce a case for holistic learning by harnessing 
the potential of the informal creative arts sector. As a 
way of bypassing entrenched biases that still exist in 
formal neoliberal education practices, the research 
reveals enormous potential in youth-led commu-
nity arts vocational training. The paper argues that 
“including arts in education is integral to the trans-
formed approach to learning and livelihoods needed 
for dynamic communities capable of adapting and 
flourishing.” This is especially important to consider 
as the government of Uganda embarks on its Vision 
2040, designed to address challenges in the educa-
tion system. The location of this research is Gulu, 
a vibrant Ugandan city going through a period of 
transition and transformation following thirty years 
of civil war. 

Serving Those Who Have Served: Creative Arts 
for Veterans describes the healing power of the arts 
through a partnership that was developed by Lau-
ren Daugherty, Arts-based Wellness Experiences 
Manager and art therapist at the Sidney and Lois 
Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, and 
Todd Burkhardt, Director of Campus Partnerships at 
the IU Center for Rural Engagement. The project had 
particular significance for Burkhardt who recently 
transitioned from almost 30 years of active duty in 
the US military and was struggling with a sense of 
alienation in his civilian life. By participating in an 
arts-based wellness experience at the Eskenazi Mu-
seum, Burkhardt realized how immensely valuable 
such a program would be for other veterans who 
were struggling in similar ways. The initiative devel-
oped collaboratively with Daugherty offers therapeu-
tically informed arts-based activity to veterans and 
their families across the State of Indiana, promoting 

ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts 4



W E L C O M E

general health and wellbeing. It’s an important outlet 
for veterans to “learn coping skills when dealing with 
trauma from the past alongside current stressors in 
their life.”

Why Cultural Diplomacy is More Relevant – And 
More Challenging – Than Ever is an illuminating 
piece by William Harvey and Fernanda Villalvazo, 
two respected violinists who are founders of cultural 
diplomacy organizations. Harvey is concertmaster 
of Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. His career 
includes four years of teaching and performance at 
Afghanistan National Institute of Music. As found-
er of the international not-for-profit, Cultures in 
Harmony, he has extensive experience in cultural 
development and diplomacy through the creative 
arts. Villalvazo’s career follows a similar path with 
training at some of the finest conservatories in the 
world and an awakening to the power of music as 
a vehicle for cultural connection. Her organization, 
Péepem Art Association, promotes intercultural ex-
change through music and art. Together, the work of 
these two visionaries connects musicians from North 
America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Their explorations 
take them to remote locations, including the Sierra 
Tarahumara mountains of northern Mexico. Re-
sponding to the multiple challenges we’re currently 
faced with, they suggest that “no single discipline can 
claim to solve these problems, but cultural diploma-
cy does attempt to alleviate them by affirming the 
connections that reminds us all of our membership 
in one human family.”

Measuring Impact: A Collaborative Communi-
ty Project to Measure Peace Building, written by 
Johnna Belkiewitz, Jessica Flores, Jocelyne Hernan-
dez, Alex Prentice, Rachel Smith, Dountonia Batts, 
and Victoria G. Wilburn, focuses on one geographic 
location, Indianapolis; one not-for-profit, the Peace 
Learning Center; and a uniquely collaborative part-
nership with Indiana University occupational ther-
apy doctoral students. The Center works to promote 
peace through educational and advocacy programs, 
including equity learning, restorative practices, 
social emotional learning, and family learning. The 
semester-long project, involving a group of five re-

searchers from IU, established implementable tools 
that measure the impact of the Center’s efforts in 
the Indianapolis community. As a result, the Center 
was provided both “qualitative and quantitative data 
about perceived safety, violence, and peace from 
youth and parents in the communities that the orga-
nization serves.”

In Using Art to Undermine Epistemic Injustice in 
DBT Research, collaborative artmaking is used as a 
strategy to disrupt the power relationship between 
researchers and research participants. Elizabeth 
Bailey, describes the distortions of perception within 
shared literature about dialectical behavior therapy 
(DBT). Her study approaches the problem through 
arts-based research (ABR), a process in which knowl-
edge is “created and physicalized through the collab-
orative construction of work and the roles that partic-
ipants embody.” The view assembled by researchers 
is consequently reframed by insights gained through 
collaborative, participatory artmaking. 

As many communities gentrify, they are often 
stripped of their cultural and social history. Storytell-
ing to Preserve a Community’s History, by Des-
mond L. Kemp, Latosha Rowley, and Stacia Murphy, 
describes a program led by five graduate students 
at IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University – 
Indianapolis) who were invited to help mitigate this 
problem through a collaborative, community-based 
participatory research project with the Harrison 
Center for the Arts near Indianapolis’ Martindale 
Brightwood neighborhood. Mentored by CRISP, The 
Center for Research on Inclusion and Social Policy 
at IUPUI, the group set about engaging with com-
munity members to capture stories, memories, and 
reflections about the area’s history, helping create 
“a new reality for future generations.” Central to the 
research was CBPR: Community-Based Participatory 
Research, a method that involves the community as 
research study partners rather than just subjects. 
This approach enabled the researchers to foreground 
the community’s culture, revealing multiple ways 
to appreciate ‘histories’ of place and identity. One 
significant takeaway from the experience was a sug-
gestion by the researchers that CBPR could be used 

5 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1



more widely in research, given that it 
is both impactful and beneficial while 
maintaining a community’s culture.

With the rapid expansion of online 
conversations during the pandemic, 
the final article in this issue of  
ENGAGE! moves away from the arts 
and tracks how regular Zoom sessions 
can bring people together in surpris-
ingly meaningful ways. Testimonios 
of (In)Justice and Communal Spaces: 
Four Latinas in their First Year of 
Teaching, written by IUPUI associate 
professor Teresa Sosa, follows the 
lives of four Latinas as they begin 
their first year of teaching in elemen-
tary schools. Central to the weekly 
gatherings on Zoom is a commitment 
to communal mentoring and a recog-
nition of Latina womanist epistemol-
ogy. The study ultimately becomes a 
call to expand collective mentoring 
and support, “making a case for how 
these types of communal spaces are 
necessary across various institutions 
and spaces for Latinas."

At a time when Russia’s war on 
Ukraine has displaced millions, when 
the pandemic has shown how vulner-
able and tenuous our lives are, and 
with a growing alarm about a sus-
tainable planet, this month’s issue of 
ENGAGE! reminds me of the centrali-
ty of our shared humanity. Within our 
lives, artmaking is a powerful agent of 
meaningful exchange and can provide 
the catalyst needed to solve major 
challenges. It can illuminate diver-
sity in ways that are empathetic and 
transformational. As mentioned in the 
Harvey-Villalvazo article on cultural 
diplomacy, one can only hope that 

art will continue to play a vital role in 
inspiring “all eight billion residents 
of this planet to see themselves in the 
other.”

Designer
nick asbell 
IUPUI 

Office of 
community  
engagement staff
liz m. terry 
IUPUI
 

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

6

Online journal 
development
ted polley 
IUPUI 
 

Associate editors
william b. crow 
Lehigh University

carolyn gentle-genitty 
Indiana University

jim grim 
IUPUI

rita hodges 
University of Pennsylvania

natasha howard 
Morehouse College

terri jett 
Butler University

brendan maxcy 
IUPUI

carol mullen 
Virginia Tech

mary price 
Forum on Education Abroad

carol rogers 
IUPUI

javiette vashan samuel 
Univeristy of Tennessee, 
Knoxville

sarah stanlick 
Worcester Polytechnic 
Institute

ellen szarleta 
IU, Northwest

laura weaver 
Community-Engaged Alliance

Editors
khaula murtada 
IUPUI 

andrea copeland 
IUPUI


