Supporting early career scholars has been a recent priority for Wallace across its research focus areas. In fact, since 2019, the percentage of research grants awarded to early career scholars (as principal or co-principal investigators) has gone from 8 percent to over 50 percent.
The need to support early career scholars in the arts is especially pressing. Demand for new Ph.D.s is growing in STEM, health science, and business; however, the demand for doctoral graduates in education, social sciences, and the humanities, in particular, is stable or declining. Arts research tends to be concentrated in the latter group, pushing would-be arts researchers to other areas of study or out of academic research altogether.
We saw our current arts initiative, Advancing Well-Being in the Arts (AWA), as an opportunity to contribute toward building the bench of researchers familiar with the arts space, including researchers from communities historically underrepresented in academia.
Is It a Match?
A cornerstone of AWA is the Thriving Communities program, a five-year investment in 18 arts organizations spanning visual and performing arts, media arts, and community-based organizations focused on artistic practice. Based throughout the United States, including Puerto Rico, most of these organizations had little to no experience working in a research partnership but were excited to do so.
We worked with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to create a competitive program that would support 18-month research fellowships, pairing an early career scholar with each of the 18 organizations in Thriving Communities. Fellowships included a full year’s salary, stipends for travel, and other costs. Many of the fellows embedded for a year with their arts organization. All told, fellowships amounted to roughly $100,000 per fellow.
In addition to supporting early career scholars, the program was intended to produce research-based resources of value to the partnering arts organizations, as well as build their interest and capacity to engage with research. It was also intended to provide a model that other communities or funders could adopt to support early career researchers.
With almost all of the fellowships completed, we asked our colleagues at SSRC to share what they have learned about what it takes to build productive new research partnerships with community-based arts organizations. Their findings may be particularly important for early career scholars.
These additional roles and relationships with the organization provided more well-rounded experiences for the researcher and ultimately led to better research insights.
Considerations for building productive arts research partnerships
Expand the role of the “researcher.” Many of the smaller organizations didn’t necessarily have the capacity or interest in hosting a researcher as a fly-on-the-wall. Instead they invited researchers to dive in, pick up some tools, and help contribute to the work of the organization. This helped give researchers an important understanding of the organization. In some cases these new roles for researchers looked like consulting. For instance, Amanda Boston worked with The Laundromat Project in Brooklyn to support them with grant writing. In others cases, the roles were centered in the artistic space, such as with kt shorb, a director and performer, who was asked by Theater Mu to serve as dramaturg for their production of Hells Canyon. As SSRC program officer Rose Ojo-Ajayi notes: “These additional roles and relationships with the organization provided more well-rounded experiences for the researcher and ultimately led to better research insights.”
Create formal working agreements between the scholar and the organization. The development of working agreements formalized the process of setting mutual expectations and for thinking through the different ways in which research fellows could contribute to the organization. It was also important for the arts organizations to onboard researchers just as they would have done for a new staff member. This helped introduce the researchers to people, facilities, organizational histories, and the wide array of activities. These agreements additionally included deliverables for the final products up front, so everyone would know what they were working toward together.
Schedule time for creating trusting relationships between the scholar and staff members at the organization. Everyone knew that trust was essential in facilitating how the fellows would conduct their research and how staff would communicate with them. But creating the time for trust-building could not fall on the already-strapped arts organizations alone. With SSRC’s support, researchers could think through strategies for creating time to get to know one another. The expanded hands-on roles that the fellows took on was one element in building trust with their organization. SSRC program director Catalina Vallejo notes that researchers also needed to cultivate an understanding of their research approach among staff and leadership to foster trust. Regularly scheduled visits, whether virtual or in person, also helped. “The importance of consistent engagement and communication in building trust cannot be overstated,” Vallejo says. “For example, Jason White conducted his fellowship at the time when The Union for Contemporary Art founding director was transitioning out of her role, which meant that the organization and its staff were in flux. By maintaining consistent communication regarding his methodological approach and demonstrating a willingness to engage with different members of the organization, he was able to cultivate trust and deep respect that ultimately granted him access to The Union at this pivotal time.”
Think creatively about your goals and deliverables. Several researchers chose to document the arts organization they studied through creative projects. Silvia Rodriguez Vega created a zine that shows the history and values of Queer Woman of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), the organization they were paired with. The zine emphasizes, among other things, disability justice, which QWOCMAP defines as “centering the perspectives, wisdom, and needs of those who face the most impact of inaccessibility.” It also includes links to interviews and audio descriptions for the visually impaired. “The length and intensity of the fellowship allowed researchers and organizations to get to know each other in deep ways so that researchers could create outputs of value for both of them beyond traditional academic publications,” Vallejo says.
Help facilitate a support system for early career scholars working with small organizations. Fellows working with the AWA organizations benefitted from the network that SSRC helped to build among the 18 early career scholars and with the senior researchers on the advisory committee. They met on Zoom and in person periodically, where they could troubleshoot technical issues like creating a memorandum of understanding or organizational issues like staff turnover and leadership transitions. Working in small arts organizations where staff might be spread thin, fellows could turn to their research colleagues for crucial encouragement and support.
The length and intensity of the fellowship allowed researchers and organizations to get to know each other in deep ways.
What’s Next?
As fellows wrap up their last year of the program, we are interested and excited to follow their scholarship related to these and other projects. Two scholars already have papers about the organizations they worked with in print. Others have recently received their first academic appointments and still others have received new grant awards.
The results of these research partnerships will be published on the Wallace website in the coming months.
