U-M Creative Currents

Exploring Creative Careers: Meet the 2024-2025 Residents (Part 1)

• Arts Initiative • Season 3 • Episode 5

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In this episode of U-M Creative Currents, we introduce listeners to the 2024-2025 Creative Careers Residents—Leah Crosby, Kara Roseborough, and sara faraj. Host Mark sits down with each resident to discuss their work, creative processes, and upcoming projects. From audio storytelling and jazz ballet to participatory photography, these artists and scholars are pushing boundaries in their respective fields.

Featured Guests & Projects:

  • Leah Crosby (MFA, Stamps School of Art & Design) – Crosby’s project is titled "Three Times as Tightly" and is a three-part audio work that uses marine animals as symbols to explore human attachment and identity formation. The three chapters include The Anglerfish, The Axolotl, and The Marine Iguana.

  • Kara Roseborough (MFA in Dance, SMTD) – Roseborough is developing a jazz ballet “La Vie en Rose,” which chronicles the journey of a small-town Black waitress with dreams of dancing in New York City. The piece examines issues of race and gender as they pertain to an artist’s journey and incorporate the history of Black people in southeast Michigan.

  • sara faraj (Master of Urban & Regional Planning, Taubman College) – Faraj facilitated Photovoice workshops in 2024-2025 to cultivate space for liberatory education and collective reflection for social change. The Photovoice methodology, which was developed by Caroline C. Wang and Mary Ann Burris, includes photography training, ethical considerations of photography, direction and narrative development through reflection and collaborative activities.

Relevant Links:


Season 3, Ep. 4: Leah Crosby, Kara Roseborough, Sara Faraj (Part 1)

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[00:00:05.506] Mark Clague:

Welcome to U of M Creative Currents, a Michigan arts podcast exploring collaborative creativity and showcasing how the arts can spark meaningful conversations. I'm your host, Mark Clague, and today we have a full house as we are joined by three University of Michigan alums and our 2024-25 Creative Careers Fellows. Our Creative Careers residencies provide financial support and benefits to help launch the careers of exceptional recent graduates from professional arts master's programs at the University of Michigan. Leah Crosby earned a master's of fine arts from the University of Michigan's Penny Stamp School of Art and Design. Kara Rosenberg earned a Master's of Fine Arts and Dance at the School of Music, Theater, and Dance. And Sarar Faraj is a graduate of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she received a Master's of Urban and Regional Planning. Welcome.


[00:00:51.890] Kara Roseborough, Leah Crosby, and Sara Faraj:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


[00:00:53.892] Mark Clague:

so great to have you all here. So why don't we go in that order, so Leah, Kara, and Sarar, and just tell us a little bit about yourself and tell me about your project that you're doing this year.


[00:01:04.462] Leah Crosby:

Sure. My name is Leah. I use they, them pronouns, and my project is a three-part experimental audio storytelling situation that looks at three marine creatures that are sort of animal misfits as symbols to understand identity co-formation, care and caregiving, and also just sort of general humannes 

[00:01:27.768] Mark Clague:

these real fish?


[00:01:29.829] Leah Crosby:

Yes. So part one is the anglerfish, part two is the axolotl, and part three is the marine fish. and each one of them has like really unique behavioral attributes that make them, I think, really interesting to explore as larger symbols for the human experience.


[00:01:46.707] Mark Clague:

So what's an axolotl?


[00:01:48.310] Leah Crosby:

An axolotl is a very strange marine creature who lives in one lake in an isolated part of Mexico. And within the context of this story, I'm particularly looking at their regenerative and healing abilities. So the axolotl is the only creature that can regrow not only like limbs but also organs parts of its nervous system whole chunks of its brain and the axolotl this is a very long story so I'll try and keep it short but I was prior to coming to grad school I was the full time living caregiver for a person who had terminal brain cancer and when she was undergoing radiation therapy I asked her what she thought about when she was on the table and she said you know I'm never scared because I have a happy little lizard in my brain who keeps me company when I'm on the table I just you know close my eyes and there's just this happy happy amphibian like smiling in my brain and I was like I think you're talking about an axolotl and she was like no no no it's not real it doesn't exist and then I pulled up a picture on my phone and she was like oh my gosh that's it that's who's in my brain and I thought it was it felt really magical that like while she was having brain cancer and undergoing like radiation therapy to like blast away her brain that this amphibian who can read grow its brain sort of appeared to her as like a totemic spiritual being. And so the second part of the audio story sort of starts there and expands outward and goes up and down and in between.


[00:03:18.545] Mark Clague:

That is so cool. And I think we know from medical research that your attitude and optimism and hope is so much an important part of treatment, right?


[00:03:27.055] Leah Crosby:

exciting. For sure. Yeah. And axolotls, they easily take transplants from other axolotls. And so that later becomes a symbolism of how if we're in relation to each other, I would take on some of your mannerisms or you would take on some of mine. And this idea also of seeing with new eyes because axolotls can accept eyeballs from other axolotls. And it's like, when do you become less of yourself after you've taken on all these attributes from other beings? So yeah, I mean, as you can see, that's like one of the three creatures. The other two are also strange in their own ways 

[00:04:04.435] Mark Clague:

That is awesome. Well, clearly we could talk about this for an hour. Easily. Kara, what about your project?


[00:04:10.981] Kara Roseborough:

Yes. My project is a two-act, one-hour jazz ballet. It is inspired by my time of working in the restaurant industry. I've worked every front-of-house position you can think of, host, server, bartender, all of that. And I started working in the restaurant industry while I was dancing for a ballet company. right? Absolutely, right? Yes, go six hours of rehearsal, go right into waiting tables. Yep. And as I was hearing the same pieces of music over and over again, I would be choreographing in my head in the slower days at the restaurant. And I was just imagining this story of a waitress who goes from a small town into a big city, but the entire kind of soundtrack of her journey being these songs that I would hear. So not your standard classical pieces, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, et cetera. But, you know, I want to hear some Duke Ellington and some Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald Gerald and that has very much been culturally for me as a black woman the soundtrack of my home my grandparents homes and things like that so this is very much a collision of different parts of myself in terms of being a black woman in America being a ballet dancer you know working in the restaurant industry working in the arts and thinking of this story not as just leaving the small town behind for some big dream but what parts of yourself do you take with you and And when things don't work out, when things do have to pivot for your career, how do you return to some of those foundational elements of who you are in order to continue to grow as an artist?


[00:05:47.245] Mark Clague:

So the title is La Vie en Rose, is that right? And is that the name of the restaurant or where does the title come from?


[00:05:52.490] Kara Roseborough:

No, it comes from the song, which is also featured in the ballet. And when I heard the song while working, I thought of it less as a love song to another person and as a love song to the arts and thinking about my relationship to ballet and just thinking of this you know lyric of you know give your heart and soul to me and life will always be la vie en rose and that's how I feel sometimes with ballet in a good way and a bad way it's a lot of work it's a lot of dedication as you know so many artistic disciplines are and just this promise that life will always be great if you kind of give yourself to the art form and just grappling with that as a premise and how to how does one's relationship with ballet or modern dance or any other kind of art change over time as you grow up and mature and the world happens around you and to you.


[00:06:41.862] Mark Clague:

That is really an amazing vision for the arts. So, Sara.


[00:06:45.827] sara faraj:

Yeah, so my name is Sara Faraj. I am, my project is called The Art of Knowing Your Power in Place and it aims to do just that. It aims to cultivate space for emancipatory praxis and process and liberatory education through the photo voice methodology, which is, I'll go into that a little bit later more about the methodology, but essentially this work aims to plant the seeds for social change. And it's sort of a culmination of my life's work as a self-taught photojournalist and through my experiences in urban planning and beyond and really just observing the world. And what this work aims to do is to photo voice create space for this work through workshops and facilitating photography training photo ethics and creating space for individual and collective reflection and ultimately an exhibition of photography so working with participants or who I like to call actually local researchers and additionally this work aims to develop content or materials to continue photo voice and grassroots work by creating materials for facilitation that I hope to share with grassroots organizations and community organizers on the ground and also to utilize in a consulting capacity beyond this and really this work I think holds a lot of power for folks to have access to photography and to get to sort of recenter and reframe who is the expert not just in urban planning but generally so really just creating space for folks to tell their own stories that often is, I think, rare, unfortunately, in this world. And folks are often narratives are placed onto them. And this is part of my larger body of work as an out of American woman, you know, to preserve culture and to sort of rewrite or to have folks have the opportunity to write their own history, especially in the face of cultural erasure and genocide, you from here on Turtle Island, modern day North America, to Palestine and beyond. So I really hope that this work can just raise awareness about folks' individual experiences and for folks to see the power of photography.


[00:09:20.908] Mark Clague:

That's great. Well, I see a lot of commonality in all three of your projects in the sense that you're all bringing your own identity and really sort of exploring the possibilities of arts. I mean, stretching what art could mean in a way that also really captures your moment in your own career development, right? Sort of going from school where you're being maybe told what art is or going through critique and having professors give you grades on what you're doing to a point where you really have the opportunity to break free from that training and those visions and really come up with your own voice. So that's really interesting. So Leah, let's maybe go a little deeper on your project because I understand it's also a sound project. So even though you graduated from a school of visual art, you're also bringing in multimedia and auditory experience. Can you talk a little bit about that journey for you?


[00:10:08.679] Leah Crosby:

Sure. One of the great things about the program at Stamps is that it is very interdisciplinary and you don't study painting and ceramics. You just study art in the broadest sense. And so that was part of the reason why I came here is because my art practice has been very wiggly. My undergraduate degree was actually in dance. I was raised in a really musical and theatrical family. I trained classically as a violinist and I'm a singer and a songwriter And story has always been really central to everything that I've done. And I have been using this year to, you know, for my MFA thesis, I made artist books and sculptures. And they were all multimedia sculptures. They were vending machines that had a very sort of particular story about them. That's a different project. This year, I'm focusing on audio storytelling because I think of, I'm really interested in audio storytelling, sort of philosophy as a medium in terms of it's very nimble. The work travels with me on an external hard drive and I work on my laptop and the audience for the work can be really small and intimate in something like a listening party, which is my planned public sharing for this project. Or the audience can be global if it's broadcast on the radio or lives on the internet. But my resource output doesn't change there. I make the work and it can either be for a small group or for a large group. And the work is also, it exists over time. It doesn't molder in a basement like my thesis work is doing. it or give you a gallery. Exactly, exactly. So it's difficult to get gallery shows and also they have lots of rules and it's not difficult to have a podcast or a website and you make your own rules. artists out there, right? Definitely, definitely. So I feel like I've been thinking a lot this year about how to how to have a sustainable art practice moving forward and I've always been really drawn to audio storytelling I did a lot of this work before going to graduate school and I'm excited to return to it as also a practice that's pretty like low waste and it also can scale with me so I can have like a tiny microphone that fits in my backpack or I can record in a studio but I don't need the studio it's like there's different levels of of sort of scrappiness. There's space for levels of scrappines 

[00:12:39.201] Mark Clague:

That's really cool. Well, I just want to take a moment as a sidebar just to say one of the cool things for me about being executive director of the Arts Initiative is that I get to learn about other parts of the university I didn't have a lot of contact with before, and stamps is one of those. And in talking to the dean, Carlos Jackson, come to really understand how unusual that stamps curriculum is, that it's really based on sort of competencies and modes of creativity and not on the particular practice. You don't get a ceramics degree or a painting degree or a design degree. Well, I guess there are design degrees, but it sounds like that's really a revolutionary thing and something that's really special about Michigan. But to follow up on your auditory, how do you make these different animals sound distinct?


[00:13:23.107] Leah Crosby:

Sure. So the work is a 90-minute audio piece in three general chapters, and it's a combination of a my narrative voice speaking, saying the story out loud, and then also with vocalizations over top of that. I'm a voracious learner of instruments, so I have used the Ann Arbor District Library Synthesizer Lending Program. So I play an Omnicord, several different Korg synthesizers, like a Volca bass machine, and a step sequencer. And it's been really fun for me to learn how to play all of those instruments. I knew how to play some of them. And then it's just running them through different sort effects pedals or patches. Digital audio workstations are very fun for me. It feels like all of this stuff that's in my brain, I feel like what I'm making is all of the noise that's in my brain.


[00:14:19.307] Mark Clague:

It's amazing to me how much you can do on a laptop these days. In the 1950s, RCA had dominated the recording market because they were the ones who had all the equipment. anybody can pick up a laptop and do some pretty sophisticated stuff.


[00:14:40.850] Leah Crosby:

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, just in terms of different sounds and things like that. So a lot of what I'm also using is field recordings that I've taken here in New York City, in Washington State, in my hometown. I've just been doing a lot of field recording this whole year and then also prior to this year and using some specialized microphones. So through some of the funding, I was able to get a hold of a geophone which comes out of the petroleum industry and is a microphone that's used to detect seismic activity. And so I put a geophone on the wall of a subway and got really, really cool bass rumbles. I was also using a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone. And so at one point, I have my head in a full sink of water, and I'm singing a song underwater as sort of like a desperation operatic plea that sort of sounds like... So yeah, it's been good creative playtime.


[00:15:38.393] Mark Clague:

Neat. And I'm sure people listening to this podcast will be like, I got to check this out.


[00:15:43.837] Leah Crosby:

listening session? Yeah. So on March 14th at 7 p.m. at the Canterbury House, which is in downtown Ann Arbor, there's going to be a live listening event. So people can come together and quietly in like a cozy space on couches and pillows all listen to this 90-minute work together with the lights off. And then the work is also going to live online. So it's going to be published to my podcast feed, which is called Tiny Pleasures and is available on Spotify and all the pod places. And then it will also live on a website that is not currently active, but eventually after March 14th, you'll be able to see it at bit.ly slash three times as tightly.


[00:16:27.404] Mark Clague:

Great. Kara, why don't you tell us a little bit about your project? And I'm particularly interested in the way you deal with plate Because as I understand it anyway, some of it's about Michigan and Detroit and some of it's about New York. Can you talk about that journey? What's the relationship? Because a restaurant is going to be in one particular place. Right. But is the journey the person then, the protagonist of your show?


[00:16:49.028] Kara Roseborough:

Yes, the journey is– it's her journey through space, literally also her artistic journey, her emotional journey. And certainly Detroit isn't a small town per se.


[00:17:02.361] Mark Clague:

the largest black community in the country.


[00:17:04.324] Kara Roseborough:

exactly right you know and so thinking about just leaving a community in which one feels very kind of insular or perhaps without certain resources without access to certain things and then going into a larger city I picked New York because for so many artists New York is seen as this mecca like you have to go to New York as a performing artist it was go to New York if you can make it there you can make it anywhere of course as the song says And that's where all the dances, that's where all the theater is. And it's like, well, no, there's great art happening everywhere, including in Southeast Michigan, for sure. And part of what I hope the journey of this protagonist is that people take away is this understanding of appreciating all of the richness that is within your own community and not needing to necessarily go out to some place that you put on a pedestal to have this wonderful career, this wonderful art artistic life, but that you can build that for yourself anywhere and that you can also bring what you've learned from outside of your community back into your community. And that's been a lesson that I've had to learn for myself, not having the most conventional ballet career. I was in a ballet company. I got a ballet degree, or I was in a ballet degree program, rather, and did all of the conventional steps to becoming a full-time professional ballet dancer. And then I was sitting there in the corps de ballet holding my place while the principal dancer's, you know, running around and doing wonderful things and going, I just want to make. I want to create and I want to do other things with my life and, you know, moved into a freelance career. And so a lot of this work feels semi-autobiographical, memoir-esque, however you want to put it. But yes, having this place of, you know, the richness and specificity of Detroit and specifically being culturally so deeply rooted within the Black experience Yes. Absolutely.


[00:19:33.743] Mark Clague:

visionary role models to have. But in other ways, you know, I think when we think of a lot of those dance traditions like the ballet, right, you think of a lot of white bodies on the stage. So, you know, maybe to get in a little bit into the weeds. So can you talk a little bit about how your piece explores those issues?


[00:19:51.123] Kara Roseborough:

Yes. Even just structurally, it was important to me when telling this story of a black woman using primarily balletic movement that I wasn't just using Eurocentric music. I And when they think about what is the classical music for the black community, we're talking about jazz. We're talking about also blues as well, but really jazz. And even in dance, when we talk about what is the classical dance form of the black American experience, we're talking about jazz as well, which is why there's a lot of movement-wise jazz influence on the balletic movement within this But to give her a movement vocabulary that felt very authentic to my community and to my experience was very important. And so having the music to support that became very important to this experience as well, to this choreographic experience. But yes, if you look at ballet, there are certainly black ballet dancers, of which I am one, but we are so spread out and it feels like it's few and far in between. And you do have wonderful institutions like Dance Theater of Harlem that has been championing black and brown ballet dancers for decades. upon decades now. And certainly Alvin Ailey, that has been an incredible modern dance institution. But when we're talking about black ballet dancers in great number, you're just not seeing that. We're not seeing that progressive movement as quickly as I and many other people would like to see in the field. And so this is pushing up against that as well, because you'll see, yes, her restaurant life, but also her auditioning life and a lot of the experiences that I had. And this is very much rooted in things that, you know, either rejection letters that I've gotten or things that have been said to my face, whether it was, you know, oh, you're black, so you will break what's called the color line in a corps de ballet where there's 16 white dancers on stage. We don't want you to be the one that's sticking out. To having a costume designer that refused to dye part of my tutu to match my costume or to match my skin, rather, because they said, when is the next time we're going to have a black woman wear this costume? So all of these things, they influence what's part of the narrative for this work. And I bring this up not to bog y'all down who are listening to this, but just to say that like these are the kinds of experiences that as an artist inspire you to pivot and think about your art and think about your movement through your art form and your field in a different way. I think that may have answered the question.


[00:22:23.902] Mark Clague:

Yeah. But I can just– I mean it was really visceral for me about the question about dyeing the costume, like just the message that you don't belong here or you're the exception. Yeah. And, you know, so on one hand, we expect the arts to blaze new trails, but it's hard to be just emotionally and psychologically to be the person who's getting that mixed message all the time.


[00:22:43.843] Kara Roseborough:

It is. And, you know, for something like ballet, which is so old and it from the outside may feel very stagnant, it can be frustrating because if you look at the history of ballet, ballet has always been evolutionary. It's always changing and with different political eras and whatnot. And that was a big part of my graduate research here at U of M was understanding just how much ballet has changed and been influenced by different cultures. And so I hope that with this work and with the other works in the future that I aspire to do, that people understand just how multifaceted ballet can be and is. And if we remove it from this exclusionary practice, this sociopolitical kind of idea that it has to remain white and European and X, Y, and Z, and instead just acknowledge it as the global art form that it is, it's only going to enrich the art form even more. And we can only, through that knowledge, provide even more to audiences of varying backgrounds 

[00:23:45.484] Mark Clague:

So will those of us in the Ann Arbor region have a chance to view your work in the coming months?


[00:23:49.869] Kara Roseborough:

Oh, yes. You can catch our show on March 29th and 30th at the Riverside Art Center in Ipsy. So come hang out in Ipsy. It's a cool place to be.


[00:23:58.999] Mark Clague:

That's a nice, beautiful gallery, too. A lot of cool things happening in that space.


[00:24:02.722] Kara Roseborough:

Yes, and I I will also do a quick plug. We are doing this production in collaboration with the Prison Creative Arts Project, and there will be original music along with many of our jazz and blues standards created by composer Maddie Levy, who is also an alumna from the music school here at U of M.


[00:24:18.921] Mark Clague:

I know Maddie well. When I was associate dean of undergraduate studies, I helped recruit her, so it's one of my prides 

[00:24:24.365] Kara Roseborough:

Yay.


[00:24:26.228] Mark Clague:

Zara, it sounds like your project is also about place in certain ways. You're a hometown, but it strikes me that you're also, you know, doing a piece about Arab identity. And one of the largest Arab communities is right nearby us here in Dearborn. So has that impacted your work in any way? I mean, if you're working with people, are you engaged with that community?


[00:24:45.548] sara faraj:

Yes. So that's been central and heart to my work. As I mentioned, too, I think a lot of this stems from my family's experience and forced displacement from southern Lebanon due to Israeli occupation and losing a lot of my own history and narrative and story unfortunately due to that and so this rediscovery of actually in 2019 a bunch of family photographs that along with you know being a photographer and understanding the power of photography in my own experience that sort of culmination made me realize the importance of again carrying on artifacts or history or stories that are often silenced or unheard or don't maybe or folks who are not seen as, as I mentioned, you know, experts. And so I think it's almost a radical act of hope to think into the future and to create those narratives. I've spoken to folks from the Dearborn community who have shared, like, the devastation of not being able to have family photos and those history, you know, they're in the rubble of their home or their family village. And so for me, I think, again, providing just even access to cameras for folks. So that's part of the project is the purchasing of cameras and dispersing them for folks to through prompts as the photo voice method entails kind of and again this is all like the project photo voice in itself is so an emancipatory process that aims to recenter so the participants are the local researchers like prompts may be provided but they have the agency to decide what it is that they see fit to photograph and so my hope with this work is to in a time of immense destruction and strife of you know in the region of the Levant and beyond which has been not just over the past you know 15 or so months but decades of this nearly a century and so I think I hope that this work creates space for folks to feel hopeful and to remain committed to sharing out even when sometimes things get really hard and heavy and And so I think thinking of place as well, I see this photo voice and documentary photography as a tool that, as I mentioned, kind of writing history or rewriting history. So it can be used as a tool of counter narrative, which I think is so important. I've done work in photojournalism and I've worked for Flint Journal and student publications and just gotten to continually ask the questions like who gets to decide that? Who gets to decide what's the important story? who gets to tell that story. And so I hope that this work, if, you know, continued in my career long-term just to get cameras into the hands of folks who maybe don't see themselves as important or feel encouraged or maybe feel disempowered or feel that, you know, they're not able to speak up. So I think that for me, my family immigrated or they were landed in Dearborn in Detroit where I was born. And so for me, for me that's central to this work is to have that narrative and that image of Dearborn specifically highlighted.


[00:28:11.169] Mark Clague:

Now we should give another brief shout out to the Arab American Museum in Dearborn which is the only museum of its kind in the United States certainly and again just 20 minutes away from Ann Arbor and really something that everybody should check out because it does tell a lot of those stories and that second floor gallery sort of goes through that whole history of Arab American life and then there's always these really cool special exhibits in the basement. So I hope your work gets showcased there. But maybe briefly, you can talk a little bit about like, where did photo voice come from as a practice and sort of what does it essentially try to do?


[00:28:47.047] sara faraj:

Yes. And just to also plug on March 28th, come on down to the Annex as well, where you'll be able to check out this work.


[00:28:54.634] Mark Clague:

Oh, wow.


[00:28:56.978] sara faraj:

the Miyako Yoshihama in the School of Social Work. If you are able to get into that class as a social work student or approval from, if you come from another program, I highly recommend it. It is, so the research methodology, it's a community-based participatory research methodology. It was developed in 1992 by two women, Carolyn C. Wang and Mary Ann Burris. Carolyn C. Wang actually was at the University of Michigan at the time and Mary Ann Burris at the Ford Foundation. They conducted a project in rural yunnan china where they worked with 62 women to address issues of women's well-being and reproductive health and it was a called photo novella at the time and so they basically were they realized that through providing photography training and camera to these women who often go unheard and unseen in their experiences that there were many social needs that needed support specifically you know photographs of women who are working the fields with their children right there next to them due to the lack of childcare. And so their visions and perspectives were able to reach decision makers who were willing to implement the changes needed and the Ford Foundation and folks and to get funding to support childcare and other things. And so since then, PhotoVoice has been utilized globally for decades in various subjects from environmental injustice to understanding the experiences of folks in detention work of indigenous perspectives. And I mean, the list goes on. And so, as I mentioned, you know, it entails training photography, providing cameras. The ultimate goal is social change and also to just create space for dialogue. So it's not just making photographs. There is what I really like to see as kind of the bread and butter of the methodology is people come together and they create space for that collective reflection, which the methodology is actually rooted in critical consciousness theory of education by Paula Freire and feminist theory and documentary photography. And so really it, as I mentioned, highlights the local researchers as the experts of their own experiences. They co-design the research project. I mean, this is what traditionally it should sort of maintain these ideas and aims to refrain from any sort of disempowerment. So telling participants what to photograph, Really, they have the agency. You can provide prompts that can inspire folks. And then when people come together through that collective reflection, or sometimes it's one-on-one interviews, themes can be identified to create action items. And then additionally, I think there is power in a couple of ways to potentially reach folks who have the decision-making power to enact that change. And then on an individual level as well, as I mentioned through my own personal experience, photography being a tool to... feel more empowered to share about my experiences or things that I see. And, you know, we all have unique perspectives, but sometimes when folks do come together, there is solidarity building and this co-production of knowledge and theory development. So through sharing experiences and from what I've seen from folks, common experiences may come up and folks, you know, may begin to feel, wait a second, all right, my experience is not isolated or, you know, actually maybe there are larger systems of oppression that are creating these conditions. It's not me and so um i think it's just an incredibly powerful methodology uh that research sorely needs more of to sort of


[00:32:46.782] Mark Clague:

now that's fantastic and real shows courage on your part to pass up the creative possibilities to others but it's nice to see because we talk about the arts and its power to spark social change in the abstract but it's nice to see you doing


[00:33:10.273] Mark Clague:

Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan Arts Initiative. Please subscribe to hear more great conversations with artists, scholars, and arts leaders from across the campus and across the globe. Send your comments and suggestions via email to creative currents at umich.edu. This episode of Creative Currents was produced by Mark Clague and Jessica Jenks, and our audio engineer is Audrey Banks. Our original theme music is composed and performed by Ansel Neely, a student at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance. To learn more about the University of Michigan's Arts Please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening.