Ground
Works

The Filipino migrant worker’s story takes place across continents, resulting in gaps and silences within their story when viewed from a single perspective. How can techniques in illustration be used to challenge linearity and dominant perspectives? How can it be used to record and retell histories of marginalized/migrant populations? In a collaboration with Damayan Migrant Workers Association and Barnard College History Department, the project utilizes both art-based research and field work methodologies toward an illustrated visual essay of the experience of the Filipino migrant domestic worker in New York City. It looks at how illustration can be used as a tool for documentation and journalism. Illustration can record and inform, but it can also fill silences in the archive, as well as protect subjects who may be undocumented or trafficked, especially in contexts in which photography might have jeopardized their safety. Field work, reportage drawing, and interview aid in recording my experience as a volunteer staff member in Damayan. In late 2023, I illustrated and designed 20 Years of Damayan, a visual historical timeline for the organization, assisted by collaborative archival research with Barnard College History. I then brought my illustration methodology to Little Manila, the Filipino im/migrant enclave in Queens, New York.

The integration of environmental science with arts and humanities (eSAH) has the potential to advance public understanding of science while inspiring emotional responses and attitude shifts that lead to pro-environmental behavior. The In a Time of Change (ITOC) program, an eSAH incubator in Alaska, uses place as a boundary object to bridge relationships between artists, writers, and scientists. Participants co-investigate a place-based environmental theme over the course of a year, then present their work at a public exhibit. At these exhibitions, the art and writing about place become boundary objects themselves around which broader publics gather to engage with ideas and landscapes. In this article, we describe the ITOC program and the broader ecosystems of eSAH work in which it is nested, including the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, where most sites host some kind of eSAH inquiry. We then use the case study of a recent ITOC project, Microbial Worlds, to demonstrate the ways relationships between artists, writers, and scientists are transmitted to audiences through eSAH collaborative exhibits, resulting in impacts to audience knowledge and attitudes about the natural world and broad support for eSAH approaches to environmental problem solving.