Arts-Based Research (ABR) is a qualitative inquiry tradition that employs the arts as a means to generate, analyze and/or present research. With its roots in anthropology and sociology, ABR is a collection of research methodologies that center participants’ experiences and social conditions through a variety of artistic practices to generate, name, and capture their understandings of the world. What is more, ABR can represent research findings generated through more traditional means. Limited examples of ABR include ethnodrama, photo voice, narrative and poetic inquiry, painting as embodied inquiry, choreographic writing, and many other forms.

• (PI) Peter Duffy (Theatre And Dance)

The Black Arts Working Group is a monthly reading group that focuses on theories current to Black Studies, the visual arts, and performance studies. Geared primarily toward graduate students across the humanities, it also welcomes advanced undergraduates, to foster deeper inquiry and interdisciplinary cross-dialogue into Black Art—itself a profoundly interdisciplinary field that benefits from voices across traditional disciplines. The Black Arts Working Group fosters dialogue that centers collectivity and belonging among people of varied cultural, racial, ethnic, and disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities as long as they are invested in art and its relation to Black life, racial justice, and Black aesthetics. 

• (PI)  Abbe Schriber (Visual Art Design)

The Comics and Cultural Impact Group is an interdisciplinary collaboration that works to support the USC community in the study and teaching of comics and to aid in the development and use of USC’s significant comics-related resources. “Comics” encompasses a uniquely expressive medium and vital art form, a multifaceted array of interlocking industries, a wellspring of intellectual property central to global media strategies, and a means for representing and understanding culture. USC Libraries Special Collections currently houses both the Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, consisting of over 143,000 unique comic books, and the Derek P. Royal Graphic Novel Collection. USC faculty regularly teach classes on the study and making of comics, have been nominated for and have won the prestigious Eisner award for comics scholarship, and have fostered students who have gone on to careers in the comics industries. The USC and broader Columbia community includes comics creators whose work has earned them a dedicated fandom, the industry’s highest honors, and the attention of Hollywood. This group seeks to build from these resources to establish USC as a hub for comics studies and comics culture throughout the state and region.  

• (PI) Michael Weisenburg (Rare Books)  
• (PI) Mark Minett (Film & Media Studies and English)  

The Experimental Theory Research Group fosters community around the most exciting contemporary work in humanist theory. This group emphasizes “theory” as thought and creative activity that draws on a longstanding tradition in the humanities of asking unanswerable questions, asserting the value of abstract, conceptual thinking as a necessary medium for engaging a complex world, and suspending (provisionally) the need for immediate solutions or practical application. This is a type of thinking that carves out a space to pause, crack open, and reconceive the world as one thinks they know it. It institutes a break in everyday experience and conventional modes of perception, encouraging a new kind of sensuous knowledge that finds expression in what one might call an intellectually serious play. In this sense, theory itself is intrinsically experimental: it involves the posing of compelling hypotheses that generate, try out, improvise upon, discard, and recombine abstract models of reality, conjuring thereby alternative worlds that are rooted in but stifled by the spurious solidity of “how things are.” 

• (PI) Greg Forter (English)

The Nineteenth-Century Studies working group aims to develop collaborations among the outstanding faculty and graduate students working in field. Present participants, primarily in British and European studies, come from tenure homes in Art History; English; History; Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Rare Books and Special Collections; and Theater. This group welcomes participation from interested colleagues working across the Humanities and across the globe. By bringing together faculty and students from a range of disciplines, this group seeks to produce multi-faceted scholarly endeavors about the nineteenth century. The group meets monthly to discuss works in progress, scholarship of collective interest, and potential collaborative projects. This group is particularly interested in thinking together about the place of the Humanities in the public imagination of the long nineteenth century, and in the present moment. 

• (PI) Rebecca Stern (English)

The Underrepresented University History Research Group unites to faculty, staff, and students from different schools and departments, as well as researchers from partner institutions outside the university, to share their work, problem solve research questions, and work collaboratively to create a more complete picture of the history of the University of South Carolina.

The first history of South Carolina College was published in 1859, written by Professor Maximilian LaBorde. This book focused on the powerful people who created the university, the professors who ran the school, and the students who attended, all white men. Many accounts since have expanded the temporal scope of LaBorde’s work, but white men have still remained the central focus of most university histories. Over the past two decades, colleges and universities across the United States have endeavored to explore their histories of dispossession, often beginning with research into their connections to enslavement. This group fosters ongoing research and dialogue that explores the school’s role in enslavement as well as broadening the history of the University of South Carolina more generally.

• (PI) Jill Found (Civil Rights Center, Thomas Cooper Library)
• (PI) Kelly Goldberg (Honors College)

Because the history of lumber, wood products, and forest conservation has been grossly understudied in South Carolina, the Wood Basket Research Group seeks to better understand the range of effects that resulted, both positive -- economic development, the attraction of talent and new industries and industrial and design advancements -- as well as negative -- environmental degradation and the resulting re-development challenges. Today, South Carolina, part of the “wood basket of the world,” features 13 million acres of commercial forest land - about 2/3 of the state’s total land area. With over 90,000 jobs and an annual payroll of $4.1 billion, forestry is one of the most important manufacturing industries in the state. 

Click here for more information about the group and the history of lumber in South Carolina.

• (PI) Jessica Elfenbein (Professor of History, USC Columbia)

SouthernGauge is a screening series in Columbia, South Carolina which brings experimental, independent and new media art to the greater Columbia area. This group celebrates the underground and the experimental with an emphasis on community collaboration. This series holds events open to the public that showcase 16mm screenings and digital new media once a semester, including visiting artists. SouthernGauge venues range from small businesses to non-profit local organizations in the greater Columbia area. This group's goal to create more opportunities for viewing nontraditional forms of media art and art making at no ticket cost to the public. 

• (PI) Carleen Maur (Associate professor of Media Arts, School Of Visual Art Design)
• (PI) Laura Major (Library manager at the Moving Image Research Collection)