This site is a place where TRU students in GEOG 4990: Empowering Geographies and VISA 3830: Making Art with Community can upload photos, documents and videos highlighting their experiences, creations, and reflections.
Students were engaged in a transdisciplinary learning experience involving using theories and creative practices to highlight community voices. A partnership with the Kamloops Food Policy Council served as the meeting place for the two courses, but from there, students delved into questions of community connection, materiality, extinction, policy, and self reflection.
The stories, images, photos, and videos that you see here demonstrate the tapestry of learning that was co-created between students, their professors, and community members as they walked an uncertain path of allowing and honouring process over outcomes.
Empowering Geographies is a fourth-year course focused on empowering marginalized voices and working with community. Geography as a field is place-based – theories and ideas are always tied to the places and spaces in which we navigate our lives. The field is also inherently interdisciplinary, weaving in philosophy and art and psychology and science and politics and tying it to the on-the-ground lived experience of the world. Students in GEOG 4990 were given the freedom to design a project that empowered voices and connected to place.
Making Art with Community is a third-year course that explores collective art making through hands-on experiences and community engagement. Community-engaged art practices encompass participatory art, interactive art, relational aesthetics, socially engaged practices, and community art. These approaches to art making may be an artist’s sole focus or may be a branch of a more encompassing studio practice. Making art with community is inherently interdisciplinary; the art mediums and methods employed may engage with any conceptual theme or practical application. Students in VISA 3830 designed and facilitated projects that integrated community at the heart of their development to explore the meanings and possibilities of making art together.