USA. June 2024 - May 2025. UKy CFA CURATE Award

Our pilot project, Women’s Oral Histories of Arts Administration, addresses the significant gap in knowledge by highlighting the voices of women who contributed to the development of arts administration as a field of study, and the women who continue to pioneer and lead the field through professional practice, research, and education. Importantly, we define the term ‘women’ inclusively and in solidarity with the significant, but often ignored, contributions of women of color, marginalized women, minoritized women, transgender women, and gender non-conforming people who have or are currently leading and innovating the field of arts administration in practice, research, and/or education.

Lexington, KY. September 2023. UKy Office for Institutional Diversity.

The Department of Arts Administration will celebrate the contributions of women scholars in the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of arts administration by bringing together an intergenerational group of women-identifying scholars, from undergraduate students to emeritus professors into a one-day symposium themed around the past, present, and future of women’s perspectives in arts administration scholarship. The symposium will take place as an adjoining day of activities, commencing the day before the Social Theory, Politics & the Arts Conference—an international conference and “the oldest and one of the most influential academic gatherings in the field of arts management and cultural policy”.

Lexington, KY. January - June 2021. UKy UNiTE Pilot Funding & IRC.

During a time of great racial disparities exasperated by the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BIPOC lives and global attention to anti-Blackness brought about by police brutality like those found in our own backyard (qua Breonna Taylor), more than ever do we need to capture counterstories of BIPOC faculty and staff. Doing so, brings humanity back into research itself, for as university researchers we must remember research is nothing but capturing a pulse of a given time. Now is that time. The objective of this study is to create a novel approach for gathering data from BIPOC university employees through qualitative methods such as listening and counterstories and to verify this approach as innovative and viable for producing rich, useful institutional data. To achieve our objective outcome our study aims to systematically collect counterstories and listen to the narratives of BIPOCs university employees in the midst of progressing their careers. The pilot project also aims to create a qualitative dataset from the preliminary findings and utilizing narrative research methods. Preliminary and evidence-based findings will position the project for further research activities such as the development of a digital platform resources for BIPOC university employees; the creation and sharing of recommendations to inform institutional strategies around diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and the, ultimate, development of an institutional framework and subsequent model to inform DEI efforts around employee recruitment and retention.