The ART&DESIGN for Social Justice Symposium focuses on how the tools and inherent abilities within the areas of art and design can be utilized in addressing issues confronting less advantaged groups within our local communities, states, regions or world. The event is designed to generate synergy, spawn collaborative projects among participants, create new scholarly initiatives, and allow examination of the role that art and design plays in the telling of a broader social narrative.
It has been decided to hold this Symposium every other year. Thus, the next Symposium will be held January, 2014.
The sixth annual Symposium was held Monday, January 16, 2012 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.) The Symposium was held in the newly renovated William Johnston Building on the FSU campus. Papers and posters were solicited from academics, graduate students, and practitioners from the greatest extent of the arts and design that interface with issues of social justice (architecture, interior design, art education, fine art, dance, theater, music, film, social services, etc.) The Symposium Schedule is available at the upper right of this website.
A business model that began with three high school students wanting cool hats to wear on the ski slopes has gone global – first to Uganda and now Peru. Our 2012 keynote speaker, Stewart Ramsey, along with Kohl Crecelius and Travis Hartanov founded Krochet Kids International (KKi). They realized the simplicity of crocheting to be its most profound quality. With hook and yarn Third World people could make amazing products. Being paid a fair wage to do so would allow for them, for the first time, to provide for their families and begin planning for the future. By teaching these people to crochet, they would be empowering them to rise above poverty. In 2007, Krochet Kids received nonprofit status, and that summer a group of 10 traveled to Uganda and taught 10 women to crochet. What happened next amazed them all. Over the last four years, KKi has generated over $1 million in revenue to support and grow economic development programs in Uganda. More than 70 percent of the proceeds have been generated through the sale of crocheted headgear and accessories. This success has rendered the Uganda program self-sustaining – no longer reliant on outside donations. “We don’t know of any other nonprofit that’s able to support itself solely through product sales,” said Crecelius. “That hat does so much. It gives the lady who makes it a job and creates a continuing income cycle... Hats really can change the world.”
The 2012 Symposium Proceedings, will be accessible on this website shortly.
The fifth annual 2011 Symposium was held Monday, January 17, 2011. The opening keynote speaker was Tim Duggan, director of Brad Pitt's "Make it Right Foundation" in New Orleans, which like this symposium was also celebrating its fifth anniversary (since Hurricane Katrina.) The lunch keynote speaker was activist Jim Towey, founder, Aging with Dignity, and former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
The 2010 Symposium was held January 18, 2010, in association with the 15th anniversary of the Kids' Guernica International Peace Mural Project, which involved workshops, exhibits and events preceeding the actual Symposium. The Call for Papers for the fourth annual 2010 Symposium brought in submissions from across the United States and numerous international sites. Accepted participants came from 17 different states and 11 foreign countries. The Keynote speaker was DR. TAKUYA KANEDA, Professor of Art Education at Otsuma Women's University in Tokyo. The endnote speaker was RAYMOND L. GOODSON who is the Chairman and Founder of 3Form Inc. and a long-term advocate of corporate sustainability.
The full proceedings from the 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007 and 2006 symposia can be found at the upper right of this website.
The ART&DESIGN for Social Justice Symposium is sponsored by the Department of Interior Design and the Department of Art Education and underwritten by the College of Visual Arts, Theatre & Dance of Florida State University. This symposium is an annual event.
If you have questions about the symposium please contact:
Eric Wiedegreen, Symposium Co-Chair
(FSU Chair of Interior Design)
ewiedegr@fsu.edu
850.644.1436
Dave Gussak, Symposium Co-Chair
(FSU Chair of Art Education)
dgussak@fsu.edu
850.645.5663
Peter Munton, Symposium Coordinator
pmunton@fsu.edu
850.644.1436
Marlo Ransdell, Paper and Proceedings Editor
mransdell@fsu.edu
850.644.8326
social justice n.
"Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others."
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice