The Neighborhood Roundtable

The Neighborhood Roundtable

photo © Andrew Leiser 2011 Neighborhood Narratives, Drexel, summer 2011

Friday, April 20th, 11am to 2pm

Macalister Hall, Rm. 2019-2020 (Corner of 33rd & Chestnut St.), Drexel University

Working in partnership with a range of West Philadelphia community organizations, Drexel University recently initiated a set of community revitalization strategies along historic Lancaster Avenue. On April 20th (11am - 2pm), Drexel's Center for Mobilities Research and Policy will sponsor a community conversation about the role artists might play in these Powelton, Mantua and Belmont neighborhood enrichment efforts. Can artists be catalysts for change? How and under what conditions? What does ideal collaboration between artists, institutions and the Lancaster community look like?

Co-hosted by Mimi Sheller (Director, mCenter: The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy) and Hana Iverson (Director, the Neighborhood Narratives Project) with support from the Center for Creative Research at NYU, The Neighborhood Roundtable will provide an opportunity for neighborhood and community representatives to engage in creative conversation about these issues with renowned artist/activists, Drexel students and faculty.

The Roundtable takes place in Macalister Hall, Rm. 2019-2020, at the corner of 33rd & Chestnut.  There is some construction in the area, so please cross part way down the block, and enter to the right. There is an elevator behind the Barnes & Noble book store.

Please RSVP to mimi.sheller@drexel.edu 

Confirmed participants include:

Co-Moderators:

Mimi Sheller (Drexel faculty; Director, mCenter)

Hana Iverson (Drexel faculty; Director, Neighborhood Narratives; CCR Fellow)

Participants:

Lucy Kerman (Vice Provost for Community and Education)

Liz Lerman (Artist, Founding Artistic Director Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, CCR Founding Fellow)

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Artist, Founder and Artistic Director Urban Bushwomen, CCR Founding Fellow)

Mark Christman (Representative from University City District: 38th Street/South)

George Stevens (President of the new 21st Century Business Community org

James Wright (Representative Peoples’ Emergency Center: 38th Street/North)

Center for Mobilities Research and Policy

Drexel’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy aims to be a national leader in shaping future healthy and sustainable mobilities, and promoting mobility justice at both global and local scales. We convene students, faculty, communities and interdisciplinary research networks around:

1) Advancing new mobility systems and integrated visions for sustainable cities and mobility justice.

2) Harnessing the potentials of new mobile communication technologies for smart growth, community health, public art, and civic participation.

3) Training Drexel students to understand and solve “real world” mobility challenges, working with community partners.

4) Engaging Drexel University with local communities, national partners, and global networks.

The term “mobilities” applies to both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private space, and mobile communications. The mCenter promotes new theoretical approaches, new methods, and the academic leadership to research, envision, and foster alternative mobility futures based on innovative collaborations between the arts and social sciences, engineering, business, law, media and design, and public health. This is an area of growing academic interest, policy debate, and research investment. The mCenter is becoming a nexus for generating innovative collaborations within Drexel, across the Greater Philadelphia region, and internationally.

Center for Creative Research and the Neighborhood Narratives Project

Artists and universities in the United States have long enjoyed the benefits of proximity to one another and are participants in a powerful, historically embedded and endlessly re-invented relationship with one another.  As major non-profit actors in American life, both are builders, makers and shapers of society’s values. In 2005, a group of mature choreographers came together to form the Center for Creative Research, in order to investigate and redefine how independent artists and institutions of higher learning could engage with one another. Key questions included, how can reciprocal relationships evolve between artists, institutions and communities, and how might these relationships facilitate mutually-beneficial exchanges between participants while increasing the depth of students’ experiential learning? As a nexus of this investigation, a collaboration was developed with the Neighborhood Narratives Project, a mobile locative media curriculum that engages students in a practice of situated story-telling incorporating aspects of cultural and visual anthropology, ethnography, geography and, with the recent addition of CCR artists, the role of embodied practice in interdisciplinary investigation.  The Neighborhood Narratives Project is a vehicle to engage interactively and interconnect community, requiring students and artists to invite public participation, enabling organic growth of a community’s collective narrative and empowering citizens to embed social knowledge in the wired/wireless landscape of the urban environment.