Making Space

Making Space is a four day, interdisciplinary workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi that brings together fellows from the Critical Collaborations program, NYUAD leadership and faculty, and members of the creative community in the UAE.

Through a series of dialogic encounters on and off campus, faculty and alumni of the Department of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYUNY interact with faculty and students of the Social Research and Public Policy Program at NYUAD’s Social Science Division to engage in a self-reflexive experiment.

The program is designed to allow participants to think with each other about challenges in their work or creative processes and share their experiences with collaboration across diverse methodologies. The conversations unfold in a series of contexts that stimulate a reflection on the social categories that each participant navigates in relation to their research/creative practice.

By explicitly situating our experiences in relation to the embedded contexts of NYUAD, GNU, UAE and the Middle East we hope to find ways of unsettling hypervisible dichotomies and forging new forms of collaboration. With activities situated both on and off campus, the workshop employs an experiential education pedagogy in its program. The immersive nature of the workshop creates a fertile environment for discussion, self reflection, and the nourishment of interdisciplinary practices at NYUAD.

To read a short essay published about Making Space in a special issue on Art as Research in Electra Street (Journal of Arts and Humanities) click here (see pages 41-53).

To see a visual documentation of the workshop click here. 

About Critical Collaborations

Critical Collaborations is a working group of the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study and Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts. The program is a three-year investigation into the relationship between social change and creativity with a focus on collaborative, multi-disciplinary methodology. In particular, the fellowship program investigates how critical collaboration can contribute to change at the interpersonal, social, and structural levels.

Engaging emergent practitioners from the Tisch’s Art & Public Policy alumni network, along with NYU faculty members and practitioners local to six GNU sites (Abu Dhabi, Accra, Buenos Aires, Florence, Shanghai, Sydney), the Critical Collaboration Working Group seeks to recognize and embody local dynamics with global implications. By combining traditional academic methods like social research with creative investigation and expression, fellows are able to more deeply explore their subject matter and spark meaningful dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.