Projects / archive

A practice built through projects.

Research, workshops, exhibitions, publications, films, organizations, gatherings, and public programs are different forms of the same long inquiry into how people create meaning, agency, care, and relation.

Journals and handmade books from Meadow Jones's material practice

2018–present · research / book / material practice

Trauma Diaspora

Beginning with the dissertation Archiving the Trauma Diaspora and continuing as a book project, this work examines how trauma and disability are lived, narrated, materialized, archived, and made public through art, writing, pedagogy, technology, and embodied practice.

Forms include scholarship, handmade books, archival objects, teaching, workshops, and public presentations.

Black textile figure with red stitching by Meadow Jones

2026 · Cunningham Township / UCIMC

Homecoming: Writing, Making, Belonging

A six-session arts-based writing program developed for people navigating housing and financial insecurity, grief, disability, addiction, trauma, and social isolation. The work joins facilitated writing, witnessing, making, collective publication, and public celebration.

Developed as part of a broader Township role in training, facilitation, program support, and health-and-wellness curriculum development.

Archive graphic for Writing for Resiliency and Connection

2020–present · long-duration writing community

Writing for Resiliency and Recovery

A sustained generative writing practice for people living with personal, institutional, and structural violence. The workshop treats writing as craft, inquiry, witness, and a way of developing language for difficult experience without requiring disclosure or a performance of recovery.

Books and journals representing collective publication work

2024–present · grief writing / community

The Art of Loss

An ongoing writing community centered on grief, loss, memory, and creative practice, developed through Amherst Writers & Artists and the Power of Story program.

Still from Emergence, a short film by Meadow Jones

2012–2015 · film / performance

Emergence & Pandora’s Dress

Short-film and performance work addressing gender, embodiment, trauma, dress, looking, and identity. Emergence screened in feminist and independent film contexts, and a still from the film appeared on the cover of Sensoria: A Journal of Mind, Brain and Culture, Vol. 11 No. 1 (2015). Pandora’s Dress circulated through film and performance contexts. The films received cinematographic, audience-impact, narrative-film, and feminist achievement recognition.

Documentation from Coming Home, a 2024 public art exhibition and poetry reading curated by Meadow Jones at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center.

2024 · exhibition / public program

Coming Home

Coming Home brought together work about being housed and unhoused, welcome and exclusion, bodies, buildings, families, and belonging through exhibition and public reading.

Curated at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center; the project extended from exhibition into poetry, publication, and public gathering.

Archive image associated with Meadow Jones's writing practice

2019–present · community / social practice

Gathering as form

Community Creativity Workshops, Sunday Night Salon, Queer Soup Night, readings, meals, and recurring gatherings treat hospitality and sustained participation as forms of cultural practice. The work asks how ordinary social structures can reduce isolation and build interdependence.

Archive banner from an earlier Meadow Jones writing program

2006–present · School for Designing a Society / Gesundheit

Designing social forms

Across teaching, facilitation, organizational leadership, and immersive programs, Jones has worked with the School for Designing a Society and Gesundheit Institute on collective inquiry into health care, desire, humanism, abolitionist and ecological solidarities, and experimental forms of living and learning together.

Archive portrait of Meadow Jones

2018–2020 · organizational research

CMind / Fetzer / Barger Leadership Institute

Executive consulting, social-transformation research, grant and membership strategy, qualitative program evaluation, interviews, participant observation, focus groups, photovoice, and institutional learning. These projects connect the organizational and research dimensions of the larger practice.

Paper and books representing writing and publishing work

2011–present · paper / zines / publication

Paper as praxis

Book arts, zines, chapbooks, paper, binding, and collective publication recur throughout the work. The 2023 Routledge chapter “Paper as Praxis,” co-authored with Steven Kostell, makes explicit the relationship between material process, knowledge, pedagogy, and practice.