Grant to help study impact of COVID-19 on jail populations

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Not long after 2020 began, COVID-19 began taking over headlines around the world. Cases of and deaths from COVID-19 were rising in the United States. Eric Grommon was following those headlines—but he also was watching something else.

Grommon, an associate criminal justice professor at O’Neill IUPUI and the interim director of the Center for Health and Justice Research at the IU Public Policy Institute, was paying close attention to how the virus could affect people behind bars.

“Jails have the potential to amplify the spread of the virus,” Grommon says. “They manage vulnerable populations with higher rates of chronic medical conditions, psychological distress, and substance use disorders.”

To slow the spread of COVID-19, leaders across the country ordered court systems to reduce jail populations. Grommon says part of the reason for that decision was that it is impossible for jails to adhere to social distancing recommendations because they often operate near capacity. He also points out that because jail populations turn over quickly, asymptomatic and positive cases could easily flow between jails and communities as the population changes.

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Intergroup Dialogue: the difference between debate, discussion, and dialogue

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Do you know the difference between debate, discussion, and dialogue? Understanding the differences can help you have better conversations that lead to social and self-awareness.

By Tamra Wright, Lecturer and Intergroup Dialogue Facilitator, O’Neill IUPUI

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “people fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.”

To combat fear—an emotion so powerful in its ability to paralyze and divide—we must communicate through meaningful and sustained dialogue. The most important conversations are often the hardest to have. It’s easier to avoid them, especially if the topics are sensitive and uncomfortable. But avoidance does little to quell the fears that exist when it comes to communicating across differences and engaging in difficult conversations.

To have those conversations, it’s important to first understand the difference between dialogue, discussion, and debate. This is especially critical as students return to college campuses and online platforms, where they will no doubt encounter challenging topics.

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How leaders can pivot with courage

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Leslie Wells

As the world begins to collectively envision a post-COVID reality, leaders around the globe are faced with the challenge of plotting a new course for getting back to business amid a future full of unknowns.

Sara M. Johnson, the director of IU Executive Education at the O’Neill School, says that uncertainty is causing confusion, a lack of clarity, and even a shaking of confidence for many leaders worldwide. That’s why Executive Education and Consulus, a global innovation consultancy headquartered in Singapore, have partnered to host a free international webinar on August 27 called “Pivot with Courage.” Attendees can register for the event on the Executive Education website.

“You must have courage to lead in times like these,” Johnson says. “We’ve had to pivot to our current virtual world. We anticipate that—around the globe—we’ll pivot back to something that is not what it used to be but also is not completely virtual. This pivot will not be a simple process.”

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Crowdfunding the arts during COVID

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Written by: Michael Weigel

As a graduate research assistant at the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab at the IU Center for Cultural Affairs, much of my work in the past two years has focused on economic factors that influence artists who use crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter to finance and showcase their work.

Kickstarter is the dominant platform in the United States and around the world, with more than 18 million investing in excess of $5 billion to fund almost 200,000 successful projects. Analyzing data from their site can help us understand online crowdfunding dynamics on the whole. According to a Pew Research Center study, almost 1 in 4 Americans have contributed to a crowdfunding project, which serves as an indication of the reach and importance of online crowdfunding platforms for creative workers in a variety of sectors.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has upended and changed our economy in ways that are unpredictable and continuing to evolve. Arts and culture crowdfunders have felt the effects of this upheaval at the platform level and on an individual basis.

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Cultivating creative sector discussion during COVID-19

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Written by: Michael Weigel, O’Neill MPA student

While many people were quarantined at home, the Center for Cultural Affairs and the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab at the O’Neill School worked diligently to bring those in the creative sector together to look toward the ever-evolving future of the arts in a post-COVID world.

On June 9, 2020, CCA organizers hosted a virtual research workshop entitled Leveraging Creativity. The event included presentation and discussion of new scholarly work from dozens of researchers around the world focused on arts, entrepreneurship, and the creative sector. Even while remaining socially distanced, the event was a successful opportunity for dynamic discussion of pressing topics within this discipline and strongly contributed to the advancement of arts entrepreneurship research.

Several of the papers focused on the role of arts organizations, interventions, and entrepreneurs in the field. Their topics ranged from their impact on student development to professional settings to communities at large.

At the undergraduate level, one study looked at arts education through theater courses has been shown to help college students from all majors develop empathetic traits in ways that reinforce the importance of arts education for students, employers and education professionals.
Once those students graduate and enter the workforce, more new research explored the ways in which an artist’s presence impacts decision-making dynamics in the public sector. The results of that experiment indicated that residency programs allowed for intrapreneurial artists to enhance organizational innovativeness via the creativity and novelty of their contributions to public-sector problem-solving. The figure below shows the disparities in how experts rated the contributions of control groups versus groups with artists in the dimensions of creativity, novelty, and usefulness.

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