Ruptures and Rebirths

The Future of Creativity, Agency, and Education

A themed issue of

Tradition-Innovations

[in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education]

Diamond Open Access / Peer-reviewed / No publication fees

An online journal published in association with a2ru - Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities - hosted by a2ru member UNLV.

A platform for conversations about how innovations engage with arts, design, and media traditions, in higher education and beyond.

To read the current issue of the journal, click here.

Timeline

This new themed issue seeks to bring together international voices, perspectives, and practices to illuminate how contemporary transformations may represent a re-imagining of artistic possibilities.

Does the current moment signal the end of inherited paradigms of art, creativity, and education? What are the questions arts, design, and media creatives and educators need to ask now?

You can submit your contribution - anonymized for double-blind peer review - via the "Submit Article" button on the left-hand side of the Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education] platform. To expedite the publication process, please use the templates at the bottom of this website if your contribution is appropriate in that format. We are open to other forms and media, and look forward to working with you in the publication process

Submission deadline for rolling publications in Fall 2026: June 1, 2026

Submission deadline for rolling publications in Winter 2026: September 1, 2026

Publication date: Rolling publications Summer - Fall - Winter 2026

Inquiries: Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education] Editor-in-Chief Yvonne Houy Yvonne.Houy@unlv.edu

Call for Contributions

Ruptures and Rebirths

The Future of Creativity, Agency, and Education

We are entering an era of ruptures and possible rebirths for the arts: Current definitions of art are fracturing at the intersection of intensified technological acceleration, cultural upheaval, and political volatility. Shifting global economies are reshaping long-standing assumptions about creativity, labor, authorship, and the cultural value of artistic work. At the center of this transformation stands the figure of the artist—an identity undergoing radical redefinition, perhaps confronting what some have described as the “death” of its traditional form while maintaining timeless traits of making, imagining, and discovery.

What does it mean to make art, to experience art, or to support artistic practice in this moment, when algorithmic systems influence how cultural work is imagined, produced, circulated, and valued—and when both the embodied experience of art and the embodied experience of making art are reshaped by digital tools and mediated environments? How might emerging technologies simultaneously destabilize established creative identities and open pathways to new forms of agency, authorship, expression, and embodied engagement? And what responsibilities do higher education institutions have in preparing artists, designers, and media practitioners for a landscape in which cultural production is increasingly hybrid, contested, and globally interdependent?

Interrogating these shifts formed the foundation of our recent themed issue, Artificial Intelligence and Possible Futures for the Arts, which examined how emerging technologies using AI are reshaping creative labor, authorship, pedagogy, and cultural production.

For this new themed issue, we place commentary, critical reflection, and creative response at the center. We invite educators, scholars, and creative practitioners to critically and productively respond to the arguments, tensions, provocations, and possibilities raised in Artificial Intelligence and Possible Futures for the Arts – and to expand the conversation.

We are seeking commentaries as well as research articles, creative works, and critical editorials that extend, challenge, or nuance the arguments raised in the earlier issue; offer updated perspectives on rapidly shifting cultural and institutional conditions; or situate current transformations within broader historical, pedagogical, cultural, or theoretical frameworks.

We welcome contributions that interrogate, historicize, or theorize these shifts; propose pedagogical or institutional innovations; or creatively reflect on the tensions and possibilities at stake in a moment that may signal ruptures and/or rebirths of artistic practices, their fundamental reconfigurations, or the emergence of new creative paradigms not yet named.

We welcome contributions that address, but are not limited to:

Reassess, extend, or challenge arguments from the earlier themed issue AI and Possible Futures for the Arts in light of the current landscape in creativity, agency, and education.
Offer perspectives on how technological, cultural, and institutional shifts are transforming creative practice, curricula, and teaching.
Examine emerging forms of artistic agency, authorship, embodied creative practice, and professional identity, including where these developments diverge from inherited models or point toward not-yet-imagined futures.
Consider how arts education institutions—and the communities they serve—might navigate a terrain where established structures are fracturing while new creative possibilities begin to take shape.
Reflect on how or why current transformations signal ruptures, rebirths, or a reconfiguration of long-standing paradigms that resist binary narratives.
Provide historical or cross-cultural insights into moments when art, creative work, or arts education was remade through cycles of upheaval and renewal.
Explore ethical, political, and economic implications of contemporary systems for students and educators as creative labor becomes increasingly hybrid, contested, and globally interdependent.
Propose curricular, pedagogical, or institutional models capable of supporting creative practice in a world where future forms of art and artistic labor cannot yet be fully imagined.
Challenge or reimagine the boundaries—including the embodied dimensions—of creative practice as ruptures and rebirths reshape what creative work can be.

Visual or multimedia submissions: Accompanied by a contextual statement, up to 2,000 words

Visual and multimedia contributions can include, but are not limited to, digital images, moving images, sound, interactive formats, or documentation of creative practice. These submissions should be accompanied by a contextual statement that situates the work within relevant creative, pedagogical, or scholarly contexts, and articulates its contribution to conversations raised by this themed issue.

Commentaries: up to 2,000 words responding to the AI and Possible Futures for the Arts special themed issue

Commentary contributions offer diverse perspectives on the shifting landscape of creativity, agency, and education, and can be short, argument-driven pieces that do not present new empirical research. They offer critical interpretation, analysis, or reflection on one or more contributions in the themed issue AI and Possible Futures for the Arts or on the broader conceptual, ethical, methodological, societal, or policy issues raised by this themed issue.

Research articles: up to 4,000 words (excluding references)

Research contributions present original scholarly or practice-based research that advances knowledge in the arts, design, and media fields. Submissions may include empirical studies, theoretical or literature-based inquiry, or practice-led research where creative practice generates new insights. Research contributions should clearly articulate their methods, context, and contribution to contemporary debates on creativity, agency, and education, and include references to relevant scholarship.

The editorial board encourages a broad range of responses including innovative and illustrative projects and teaching methods, as well as commentaries on the challenges—and opportunities—the current moment presents for arts, design, and media disciplines. We are open to the presentation medium and encourage creative contributions.

If you would like to see if your work would fit this themed issue, please feel free to contact Editor-in-Chief of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education] Yvonne Houy at Yvonne.Houy@unlv.edu.

About Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education ]

How can we build a future for teaching/mentoring creative work and research that honors core disciplinary traditions, supports interdisciplinary collaborations, and enhances transdisciplinary work? How can continually evolving digital technologies innovate the interwoven work of teaching-researching-creating, while supporting the best of traditional practices in the Arts, Design, and Media disciplines?

This peer-reviewed open access eJournal—collaboratively brought to life by the international Alliance for the Arts Research Universities (a2ru) network, and a2ru member UNLV—provides a multimedia forum to address this and connected questions by exploring how creative work, teaching/mentoring, and knowledge creation/research are linked and in conversation with one another.

In the challenging crucible of the pandemic, educators forged new techniques and innovative practices. Faculty in disciplines underserved by typical digital learning tools—such as in the arts, design, and media disciplines—explored and developed creative solutions as they shifted from in-person to remote teaching, researching, and creating. They adapted centuries-old teaching traditions to new digital technologies and in new contexts that were themselves changing rapidly.

Art, design, and media creatives and faculty continue to expand “tradition-innovations” - often, but not always through digital technologies - as higher education transforms in response to evolving challenges.

Aims & Scope

The mission of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design and Media Higher Education] is to

Provide interdisciplinary collaboration and peer-reviewed presentation/publication opportunities, including new forms of digital scholarship, for faculty in fine and performing arts, design and media, and related disciplines.
Create a regular dialog exploring the interplay between tradition and innovation in a rapidly changing technology environment.
Raise awareness about innovations in research, creative work, and teaching mentorship in the arts, design and media disciplines with potential to transform higher education.
Generate ideas for engaging online, remote, and hybrid teaching in our disciplines.

Publications and live-streamed panels will present innovations in research, teaching and creative work evolving rapidly in the current environment of cultural and technological change, accelerated by the pandemic.

The editorial board invites engaging contributions that provides possible answers to core questions at the heart of tradition-innovations in art, design and media:

How can we build a future for teaching/mentoring creative work and research that honors and enhances core disciplinary traditions, interdisciplinary collaboration, and transdisciplinary creation?
How do continually evolving digital technologies innovate the interwoven work of teaching-researching-creating?
How are creative practitioners/mentors evolving their practice in relation to digital media?
What are the links between traditional co-located spaces for creative work and teaching/mentoring - makerspaces, performance spaces, design spaces, museums/galleries - and digital media?
How can new technologies support the best of traditional practices in the arts, design, and media disciplines?
How do emerging innovations support – or supplant – teaching, research, and creative practice traditions in productive ways?
How can we nurture exploratory digital scholarship and interactive media at the intersection of teaching and creative knowledge creation?

This journal honors the diverse discourses of the arts, design, and media disciplines, and we welcome a wide variety of contributions that show how creative work, teaching/mentoring and knowledge creation/research are linked and in conversation with one another.

Submissions can include but are not limited to, compelling visual or digital pieces/portfolios that include succinct descriptions, reports of initiatives or projects, or longer academic essays with more extensive research citations.

Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design and Media Higher Education]

Yvonne Houy, Ph.D.

Yvonne Houy supports arts/research integration as UNLV College of Fine Arts Learning Technologist serving faculty in Architecture, Art, Dance, Film, Entertainment Engineering Design, Music and Theatre, and as a2ru Executive Committee emerita and special advisor. As member of the Nevada State Higher Education (NSHE) Emerging Technologies Advisory Group (ETAG), and the Center for Digital Education Higher Education AI Council, she engages in conversations and workgroups on AI in higher education regionally and nationally. A graduate of Cornell University (M.A. & Ph.D.) and the University of California, Berkeley (B.A.), and former Visiting Assistant Professor at the highly selective, liberal arts-focused Pomona College, Dr. Houy understands the needs and challenges of higher education institutions that value research, teaching, and diversity. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles, presentation posters, and digital scholarship on teaching innovation research, and book chapters on social control through emerging media technologies, resistance techniques to such social control mechanisms, and the intersection of sustainability and technology.

Yvonne.Houy@unlv.edu

Biography

Editorial Board of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design and Media Higher Education]

Angela M. Brommel, MFA Creative Writing, MA Theatre

Angela M. Brommel is Senior Advisor & Executive Director for the Arts at Nevada State College where she is Chief Curator of Collections & Galleries, and affiliate faculty. She has the esteemed honor of being Clark County Poet Laureate for the 2022-2024 term. Angela received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and an MA in Theatre from the University of Northern Iowa. The author of two books, Mojave in July (Tolsun Books) and Plutonium & Platinum Blonde (Serving House Books), her poetry has been published in the North American Review, The Best American Poetry blog, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2018 she was a Red Rock Canyon Artist-in-Residence, serving as the inaugural poet of the program. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor for The Citron Review. An interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose creative scholarship crosses Art, Creative Writing, and Theatre, some of her areas of creative work include art and literary history, curation, feminist criticism and theory, defamiliarization as feminist praxis in the work of women writers and painters, the arts as a healing modality, and the role of creatives in economic development and tourism.

Angela.Brommel@nsc.edu

Author Information

Keli DiRisio, MFA in Visual Communication Design, MS in Print Media

Keli DiRisio has a Master of Science and a Master of Fine Arts, both from RIT, in addition to having owned a design studio and video production company and working in the design industry for over 20 years. For the past five years, Keli has been a professor of Graphic Design at Rochester Institute of Technology, with her teachings focused not only the foundations of graphic design, but also on user motivations and how our design decisions can affect and infuence emotions. She is currently working on a mobile application solution with a clinical researcher and social worker to help college students understand and regulate their emotions and coping mechanisms as they apply to everyday stress and their mental health. Keli is also one of the founders and is the Creative Director of Command+g Design Lab, a student design studio at RIT.

keli.dirisio@rit.edu

Perrin Teal Sullivan, MFA, Resilience and Adaptation Fellow

Perrin Teal Sullivan is an artist, designer, and educator driven by a belief that the arts cultivate forms of knowledge that are essential to our agency and wellbeing – as individuals, communities, and ecosystems – in the face of complex challenges. Her work in STEAM education focuses on integrating art and science practices to help learners of all ages develop new perspectives and enhanced capacity for understanding and creating the world around them. She collaborates with diverse learning institutions including libraries, museums, science centers, and schools to design and develop integrated STEAM programs specific to their learning contexts.

pptealsullivan@alaska.edu

Fen Kennedy, Ph.D., Advanced Labanotator

Dr. Fen Kennedy is a dancer/scholar holding a PhD in Dance Studies from the Ohio State University and based at the University of Alabama. Their research investigates how dance articulates the values and norms of society, and how those norms can be challenged and changed. Their research can be read in Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Dance Education and is forthcoming in various anthologies. Their choreographic work includes Finches for the Gasden Museum of Art, and Walk As If You Could Break the Earth for the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at UA.

fkennedy@ua.edu

Personal Website

Nils Gore, M.Arch, Registered Architect; NCARB

Nils Gore is a licensed architect and a Professor in the Architecture Department at the University of Kansas, where he focuses on community engaged scholarship through completion of student design/build projects in the public realm. These projects include work in Mississippi, Lawrence, New Orleans and, most lately, Wyandotte County Kansas, where the work is focused on projects that promote public health through healthy eating and active living. In all of these projects, he works with students to develop innovative material and tectonic design solutions that enhance and support an enriched community life. The work has won numerous design awards, has been published in scholarly journals and book chapters, and has been presented in public lectures and scholarly presentations. He is a graduate of Kansas State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught at the Boston Architectural Center, Mississippi State University and the University of Kansas.

ngore@ku.edu

Personal Website

J.R. Campbell, MFA - Textile Art and Costume Design; PgCert - Phd Supervision in Art and Design

J.R. Campbell is helping to cultivate the Design Innovation Initiative at Kent State University to support design thinking, project-based learning, technology-infused maker communities and the curation of cross-disciplinary collaborative teams to tackle "wicked" problems. Campbell's research/creative work is grounded in textile design and technology applications in practice. Campbell has been researching, designing and creating artwork with digital textile/imaging technologies for more than 25 years. His work pushes the limits of imaging technologies as they relate to clothing, our environment and the human form.

jrcamp@kent.edu

Sarah O'Connell, MDra, Directing

Sarah O'Connell (MDra, Directing, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) is an international theatre producer and cultural strategist who advises public and private stakeholders on matters related to the Creative Economy. She is the Artistic Director of The Asylum Theatre in Las Vegas, and co-owner of Axislights Inc, a commercial lighting company that serves the live event industry. In 2015, she founded Eat More Art Vegas, an online platform dedicated to the advancement of southern Nevada's local arts, culture, and creative community.

sarah@eatmoreartvegas.com

Personal Website

Julian C. Chambliss, Ph.D.

Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is a co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC). His research focuses on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who has curated museum exhibitions, art shows, and public history projects. His recent writings on comics have appeared in Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023). His MSU Museum exhibition, “Techno: The Rise of Detroit’s Machine Music” (2025), explores the origins and evolution of techno music. His recent public scholarship projects include the open-access book Making Sense of Digital Humanities: Transformations and Interventions in Technoculture (2022) and the documentary, “Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism,” available through PBS.org. His classroom reader on Afrofuturism, Mapping Afrofuturism: Understanding Black Speculative Practice, was published in 2024.

chambl91@msu.edu

Personal Website

Juan Noguera, MID

Juan Noguera is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at RIT and former chair of Product Design at MICA. His work spans AI in product design, 3D printing, appropriate technologies, accessibility, and STEM toys. A 2024 Vilcek Prize recipient, he is recognized for inclusive, empowering design solutions that promote meaningful social and scientific engagement.

jcnfaa@rit.edu

Personal Website

Biography

Jutta Treviranus, Ph.D.

Dr. Jutta Treviranus is Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) at OCAD University and a global leader in inclusive design. She has pioneered inclusive design of digital tech, has led many international research networks, and has shaped key accessibility standards. She also founded an innovative graduate program in inclusive design. She was recognized for her leadership in equitable AI by Women in AI.

jtreviranus@ocadu.ca

Biography

A special thanks goes to the editorial board members of Traditions-Innovations in the Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education that are actively engaged in this special edition.

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Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication in Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education] provided he or she owns the copyright to the work being submitted or is authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception in the non-academic world to this might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer).

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