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How can art and creative practices engage trauma?
How can art and creative practices engage trauma?
We seek to consider both the possibilities and the challenges that this question evokes. How does this question, and how do understandings of trauma, differ or translate across cultures and communities, both within and outside of a Western context? What does it mean to ‘engage’ trauma—whose trauma, who is ‘engaging’ with it, and why? What is the role of the arts and creative practice within culture and politics? How does individual trauma relate to intergenerational and collective trauma?
Our LC should provide space for community connection and engaged learning through relationship building, robust conversation, and creative expression. We can create this through formal events, group advising, course/faculty collaboration, informal/drop-in opportunities, field trips, and more.
Spring 2025 Courses
Spring 2025 Courses
Affiliated Courses
Affiliated Courses
CS-0267-1: Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, Identity, and Emotion with Melissa Burch
CSI-0251-1: 20th & 21st Century Queer Poetics with Rueven Goldberg
HACU-0107-1: Non-Fiction Film Workshop with Abraham Ravett
HACU-0118-1: Dancing Coalition: Contact, Partnering and Ensemble Improvisation with Lailye Weidman
HACU-0131-1: Global Cinemas with Eva Reuschmann
HACU-0160-1: Appalachian String Band Ensemble with Rebecca (Becky) Miller
HACU-0203-1: Embodied Facilitation and Dance Pedagogy with Lailye Weidman
HACU-0243-1: Looking at Photography Books: Sequence and Design with Veronica Melendez
HACU-0270-1: Still Lives and Storylines: Narrative based photography with Kane Stewart
HACU-0272-1: Worldbuilding: Building dynamic worlds for Games, Animation and Other Media with Jennifer Gutterman
HACU-0273-1: Advanced Worldbuilding: Taking created worlds to the next level with Jennifer Gutterman
HACU-0275-1: Small Press: Independent Publishing & Community with Veronica Melendez
HACU-0279-1: Div II Project Seminar: Make a Movie! Collaborative Video Production with Eva Rueschmann
HACU-0285-1: Supported Projects in Dance and Performance Praxis with Lailye Weidman
HACU-0297-1: The Art of Repair: From Research to Studio Art Project with Daniel Schrade
HACU-0301-1: DIV III Seminar in Performance/Music with Rebecca (Becky) Miller
IA-0106-1: Writing About Place and Belonging with Faune Albert
IA-0110-1: Performance, Ritual and Astrology with Jonathan Dent
IA-0185-1: Designers Reading Plays: Musicals with Peter Kallok
IA-0206-1: Playwriting Level 2 with Jonathan Dent
A-0265-1: Queer Monstrosity in Horror Fiction and Film with Caoimhe Harlock
For more information about courses, check out The Hub
Spring 2025 Common Readings
Spring 2025 Common Readings
Alice Munro’s Passive Voice. by Rachel Aviv
The celebrated Nobel-prize winner writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story.
In this essay, Aviv explores the legacy of intergenerational trauma in the family of Alice Munro leading the reader to ask deep questions about ethics and what sacrifices artists are permitted to make for the sake of their art, and the legacies of artists that expand beyond their works.
"Becoming a Yam: Healing Narratives as Political Resistance in the Time of COVID-19" by Latoya B. Brooks and Kareema J. Gray
COVID-19 created a crisis that forced people to deal with the social, emotional, personal, and interpersonal impact of the virus in the United States. Simultaneously, Black people continued to be murdered and victimized by systemic racism and social injustice. Choosing wellness, self-recovery, and self-care during the global pandemonium surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an act of political resistance in the face of oppression and violence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the authors’ embodied uses of personal narratives centering the work sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, feminist theory, and African-centered social work paradigms as coping strategies and healing work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Past Events
Past Events
Book Bans: A Red Hot Roundtable
Tuesday, March 26th, 2024 / 4:00 - 5:30 pm / Library, 1st Floor
Join us for a lively discussion about challenged books and contemporary struggles for intellectual freedom. The panel includes:
Stephanie (Cole) Adams, Esq (attorney and 91F alum)
Martin Garnar (Director of the Library, Amherst College)
Tricia London (Librarian, Abington Public Schools)
Acadia Manley (Hampshire College student 23F and Abington Public Schools alum)
This event is generously sponsored by Five College Libraries Professional Development Committee, Hampshire College Learning Collaborative Network, Hampshire College Dean of Humanities and Arts, and Harold F. Johnson Library. Open to all Five College community members and light refreshments will be served.
For more information contact: Natane Halasz, nhLO@hampshire.edu
Past Student Projects
Past Student Projects
These students received seed funding from the Learning Collaboratives during the Fall 2023—Spring 2024 school year. Division noted was for that year.
A Breath Worth Fighting For (Thoughts on Pneuma: 2nd Iteration)
Mére Wilson | Div II
Mére is creating a performance piece for Hampshire College’s Winter Concert. This performance explores Mére’s Afro-Indigenous identity and the story of the Igbo Landing, a well-known tale of a mass suicide of slaves in Georgia that is often used to contemplate freedom, sacrifice, and home. Through performance, Mére is processing what/where home is to tem, as well as how breath exists in the Black/Indigenous body through generational trauma and the politics of breath.
What's In My Brain?
Seoyoung Yoon | Div II
For Seoyoung’s final project of their Subject Archives class, they plan to make an installation art, an igloo that is shaped like their neurodivergent brain. Having lived half in Korea and half in the other five countries, Seoyoung’s project speaks to how they were constantly battling with the perceptions of others on where their “weirdness” came from. Now that they know that they are neurodivergent (AuDHD), Seoyoung embraces their neurodiversity with their diverse, cultural backgrounds and advocates for their own, personal “weirdness”. Through this project, they hope to appreciate the inner self, without being too focused on other people's reactions.
Performance Art: Wooden Poetry, Clay Worlds
Karim Barrett | Div I
How can art and creative practices engage trauma? As Fred Motem says in reference to a lyric from Bob Marley, "in a kind of echo of Bob Marley's question, about whether blackness could be loved", Karim really wonders daily through these micro-aggressions and political racial hostilities, if this indeed is a possibility. Karim’s performance art in wood, poetry, and clay explores these themes, questions, and felt realities.
Puppetry History and Sandglass Theater
Graham Frechette | Div II
Graham is studying Sandglass Theater in Putney, Vermont. The theater and its community have a long history of storytelling, specifically from their experiences. They have regular shows. Graham has been able to attend these, and there are more to come. Going to their performances is like going to a conference, and LC funds allow Graham to continue researching and going to such innovative performances.
Get Connected
Get Connected
Coordinators
Coordinators
Peter Kallok, pkHA@hampshire.edu, Professor of Theatre Design
Koby Leff, kleff@hampshire.edu, Multimedia Producer
Cal Kennedy, ck24@hampshire.edu
Corinne Owens, cto24@hampshire.edu
Librarian
Librarian
Rachel Beckwith, rbLO@hampshire.edu, Director of the Library
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