Assembling Voices gathers in NYC

Assembling Voices Fellows attend an archiving workshop with Shannon O'Neill, Curator for NYU’s Tamiment-Wagner Collections.

In November 2022, we introduced you to our latest cohort of Assembling Voices Fellows. For refresher on the program:

Assembling Voices is a year-long Fellowship for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, performers, activists, workers, and others with compelling ideas for public initiatives that bring people together around issues of democracy and trust.

Assembling Voices is part of our ongoing effort to facilitate inventive forms of communication and collaboration between students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

To enable our Fellows’ work, we provide them with financial, administrative, and intellectual support. Last month, we invited our Fellows to our office in New York for two days of connection, collaboration, and training.

A central part of this visit was connecting our Fellows to our intellectual network. We collaborated with our Fellows to create a custom workshop schedule, which included sessions with OHMA all-stars Amy Starecheski and Nyssa Chow. We were honored to learn about successful public engagement from the Fellows over shared meals and conversations.

An integral part of this experience was connecting the Fellows to each other. Despite differences in geography, community issues, and methodological approaches, Fellows were energized by learning from each other and finding common ground in their work.

This year’s Assembling Voices cohort poses with Rebecca Feldherr, our program coordinator.

“Being able to exchange ideas on process and experience has helped me reassess and refine my approach to this work,” noted Fellow C. Dìaz. As Fellow Ricia Chansky put it, “[we] not only learned about each others’ projects, but the overlap between them… [which] allowed us to really engage with one another through a shared language of activism and integrated conceptual frameworks that strive to center community voices.”

Fellows Naomi and Mauricio saw this meeting as a jumping off point for future collaboration:

We saw great overlap and points of connection in our work, both philosophically and methodologically, and as a result are now in conversation about ways to collaborate in the long term.

By working with their communities, support at Incite, and each other, our Fellows are furthering new modes of public engagement that advance equity and democracy. We’ll keep you posted on how their work evolves. For more information on the program and our incredible cohort’s work, visit our website.

Want to get involved in Assembling Voices? Next month we’ll start our search for 2023-2024 Fellows by putting out a call for applications—subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to know.

Assembling Voices is also accepting new donors. If you’re interested in supporting our Fellows’ work, send us a note at assembling-voices@columbia.edu.