Creative Wellbeing: Arts, Culture & Health
Goals
Students in the Creative Wellbeing VIP can join existing community-based projects or propose new individual or group initiatives to pursue throughout the semester. Current subprojects include
- La Peña del SurCo—a monthly Latin American folk music gathering promoting intergenerational wellbeing and community belonging
- Music and Health Story Lab (which requires prior enrollment in the community-engaged CURE course of the same name MUS429/529)
- Creative Aging Practicum at Armory Park Senior Center.
Depending on your interests, participants can gain hands-on experience in fieldwork, qualitative research, arts-based research, practice as research, multimodal digital storytelling, and video/audio editing. Whether you're an artist, researcher, current or future healthcare professional, activist, or curious learner, this is your opportunity to engage in meaningful, community-rooted inquiry through the lens of creativity, culture, and care.
La Peña del SurCo
*Gain hands-on experience with practice-based research and community-engaged arts and health promotion at La Peña del SurCo, a monthly Latin American Folk Music gathering designed to promote intergenerational wellbeing and diasporic belonging in Tucson.*
Duties include: helping organize monthly events, photo and video documentation, interviews with participants, event promotion, taking fieldnotes at events, producing accompanying materials for project website. www.elsurcotucon.com
Music and Health Story Lab
*Build culturally diverse content for the Music & Health Story Lab Website using ethnographic and arts-based methods to produce short digital stories about relationships between music, health and wellbeing*
Duties include: interviewing, poetry writing, filmmaking, photo essays, and digital story production.
Pre-requesite: MUS429/529 Music, Health & Wellness Story Lab Course
Creative Aging Practicum
*Explore relationships between creativity and healthy aging while engaging in creative programming at Armory Park Senior Center or other facilities serving older adults*
Duties include: assisting with existing creative aging programs at the senior center, proposing and developing new creative engagement opportunities, and/or documenting and producing short digital stories about creativity and wellbeing with older adults.
Issues Involved or Addressed
- Arts and Health
- Creative and Healthy Aging
- Storytelling
- Ethnomusicology
- Arts-based research
- Practice as Research/ Artistic Inquiry
- Ethnographic research
- Community-engaged research
- Public-facing scholarship
- Applied Intercultural Arts Research
Academic Majors of Interest
- Open to All Majors
* We especially welcome students pursuing degrees related to health sciences, arts/humanities and/or all forms of storytelling and cultural studies.
Preferred Interests and Preparation
There are no prerequisites for joining our lab, but we welcome experience in any of the following areas:
- Educational or work experience in fields of health and wellbeing
- Background in creative arts (anything from being a performer to using arts as a mode of storytelling and research production).
- Experience in community organizing/community engagement
- Experience doing fieldwork and qualitative or arts-based research
- Audiovisual documentation skills and web design
- Experience in ethnographic research methods
- Experience in storytelling
- Interest in Latin American Studies
- Interest in Ethnomusicology
- Interest in Aging/Gerontology
- Experience in cultural studies, or fluency in other languages
Application Process
To express interest in this team, please complete the VIP Interest Form and select "Creative Wellbeing: Arts, Culture & Health."
This team accepts students at the start of each semester.
This team recruits students for both credit and federal work-study options for VIP participation.
Team Advisors
Image credits for this website:
- Chris Zatarain, for Peña photos (main team image and subproject photo)
- Art credit to Gene Slape for the collage shown for the Creative Aging Practicum subproject.