University of Alabama at Birmingham
The a2ru summits bring together students who have an interest in the arts, crossing disciplinary boundaries and developing collaborative projects. students joined their peers at a student summit to explore projects related to food, the common language of life.
Four students and graphic design Associate Professor Doug Barrett, MFA, from the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Art History represented UAB at the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities 2019 Emerging Creatives Student Summit, “Food and Place,” hosted by James Madison University.
UAB is a founding member of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, and the summit is part of its national conference.
The students are Sara Lee and Micah Briggs of Birmingham and Irasema Quezada Hammock of Juarez, Mexico, who will all graduate in 2019, and Caroline Whitaker of Enterprise, Alabama, who will graduate in 2020.
The a2ru summits bring together students who have an interest in the arts, crossing disciplinary boundaries and developing collaborative projects. Each year, 80-100 undergraduate and graduate students attend the summit from a2ru partner universities across the country, along with 12-15 administrators, faculty and staff. Summits have a strong project-based component with activities such as panel discussions with special guests, keynote speakers, site visits or field trips, performances and exhibitions, networking opportunities, and skill-building experiences throughout to collaboratively solve challenges with projects that integrate the arts and design with other disciplines to produce new knowledge.
James Madison University is located at the center of the Shenandoah Valley, a diverse community defined by food production, from family-run farms to large-scale commercial agriculture. The summit featured panels and working group leadership from distinguished professors at the university, as well as leading artists and scholars from around the country.
Before the conference, the UAB students toured the Mt. Crawford Creamery with dairy staff. Before the conference, the UAB students toured the Mt. Crawford Creamery with dairy staff. They learned about milk production and processing and tasted several dairy products.
At the summit, students self-selected into groups of seven after a series of ice breaker exercises. Each group brainstormed and developed a project based on “Food and Place” issues. Students attended morning presentations and discussions from national food and justice artists and experts, and they toured a local justice-based community called Ivy and Fig. Students also participated in a community lot cleanup and garden preparation workshop. Time was set aside for students to work in groups, reflect on conference activities, get critique from faculty and speakers, and ultimately present finished projects to the conference.
Quezada Hammock presented “Food, Insight, Action,” a small-scale gardening zine. Briggs and Lee presented “Stop and Smell the Roses,” exploring the power of smell to memory and food practices. Whitaker presented “Crop Stop,” developing a model for making vegetables more accessible in food deserts.