Clouds of colorful powder filled the air above the Sun Devil Fitness fields at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus on March 18 as more than 2,500 students gathered to celebrate Holi, a centuries-old Hindu tradition that marks the arrival of spring and celebrates love and friendship.

While the Hindu festival of colors originated in South Asia, it has now spread worldwide, with Holi events taking place globally. Holi celebrations have also been embraced on college campuses, including ASU, where the event was presented by the Indian Students Association. More than 2,500 students gathered March 18 on ASU's Tempe campus to celebrate Holi, a centuries-old Hindu festival of colors that marks the arrival of spring and celebrates love and friendship. Download Full Image

“We had a record attendance of 2,500-plus students at this year’s event, including students of varied backgrounds, ages and disciplines, as well as staff, faculty, family members and alumni,” said Yashaswini Karanth, association president and a graduate student studying materials science and engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “This number also includes 100 members of Team ISA (made up of the association's board members and dedicated volunteer group),” she added.

People all across the world celebrate Holi by throwing colorful powder into the air and splashing each other with it. There's significance behind every hue. Red is associated with passion and new life, and green represents growth and renewal. People also throw colorful water balloons at one another.

Karanth said Holi has long been one of India’s “fan-favorite” festivals, drawing large crowds each year, especially young people.

Poems as early as the fourth century CE describe Holi festivals in the Indian subcontinent. The celebrations herald the arrival of spring after a harsh winter, representing the eventual victory of virtue over evil. The festival is observed in the month of Phalguna in the Hindu lunar calendar, which corresponds to March. The observance of Holi began on March 8 this year.

“It marks the onset of an entire season of harvest festivals that India celebrates,” Karanth said. “I have always associated Holi with friendship, camaraderie and the innate joy in living as it celebrates these aspects through music, color play, dance, food and more,” she added.

Karanth, who grew up attending local community Holi festivals, said this year’s gathering enabled her and many other students to connect with peers from similar backgrounds while also showcasing their culture to fellow Sun Devils.

“Holi, to me, has always been about celebrating the joy of living life,” Karanth said. “As your white garment gets stained with colors fondly (and oftentimes aggressively) applied by your friends, there is no feeling to conquer the spirit of friendship, camaraderie and joy that fills the air as equally as the vibrant and rich colors of Holi. This is the moment when you can leave your worries behind and start something new," she added.

In recent years, the Holi celebration at ASU was presented on the lawn at the Palo Verde residence hall complex — also known as Palo Verde Beach. Karanth said a highlight of the 2023 event was the transition to a larger venue, which enabled event organizers to double the attendance this year.

Arizona State University faculty members are learning how to create and maintain places of diversity, equity and inclusion in their teaching, research and service as members of the ASU Faculty Academy.

This year, the academy, based at the university’s Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable Communities, welcomes its third cohort of faculty from multiple disciplines. Faculty Academy members learn about the history of the Dunbar Pavilion in Tucson from Barbara Lewis, the organization’s vice president and historian, as well as a former student. Photo by Anna Alvarez-Loucks/ASU Download Full Image

Participation in the academy helps members build skills, personal reflections and insights they can use to develop effective practices and curricula at the university, said interim studio director Chandra Crudup. Crudup is associate dean for inclusive design for equity and access at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions and a clinical associate professor of social work.

The studio, a joint effort of the Watts College and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, is rooted in the principles of creative placemaking and placekeeping, defined as “the strategic integration of arts, culture and community-engaged design into comprehensive community planning and development.”

Each Faculty Academy member focuses on a project of significance to their field of study and research, in an interdisciplinary peer-to-peer environment. The goal is for faculty to include themes of equitable creative placemaking and placekeeping in their teaching, research and service, Crudup said.

Crudup said the experience walks the nine cohort members through answering important questions as they build upon their existing practices. Questions include: How do we redress historical inequities? What makes a community healthy, equitable and just? What does it mean to center the culture, experience and joy of Black, Indigenous, people of color and other historically underrepresented groups in practice and pedagogy?

As senior coordinator Anna Alvarez-Loucks explains in a recent Medium post, joy and rest can be used to change systems by allowing ourselves to imagine and create new possibilities more in line with our own values.

“Instead of a luxury at odds with social justice, prioritizing joy can be an act of resistance in itself, which challenges inequity, engages community and enacts change in the oppressive systems we have inherited,” Alvarez-Loucks wrote.

While many participants are from the Watts College and the Herberger Institute, members of this year’s cohort also hail from other parts of the university. The cohort members are:

• Melita Belgrave, associate professor, School of Music, Dance and Theatre, and associate dean of culture and access, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
• Carla Bishop, assistant professor, The Sidney Poitier New American Film School.
• Deepak Chhabra, associate professor, School of Community Resources and Development.
• Robert Farid Karimi, assistant professor, School of Music, Dance and Theatre.
• Felicia Mitchell, associate professor, School of Social Work.
• Ijeoma Ogbonnaya, assistant professor, School of Social Work.
• Alberto Olivas, executive director, Pastor Center for Politics and Public Service, Watts College.
• Lauren Ruffin, associate professor, School of the Future of Innovation in Society; School of Arts, Media and Engineering.
• Jessica Salow, assistant archivist, University Archives.

Members of this year’s cohort began their seven-month academy experience in November at the ASU Art Museum on the Tempe campus. In February, the cohort traveled to Tucson to learn from the lived experiences of community partners on a variety of creative placemaking projects.

“The Faculty Academy is a place where the importance of individual humanity and relationships are centered instead of just production, and how art, design and culture are an intrinsic part of that,” Crudup said.

“Participants engage and ask questions about their own work and practices by integrating the guiding principles of creative placemaking and placekeeping,” she said. “The core of creative placemaking and placekeeping is about process. A student with a professor who went through the Faculty Academy might see more of a process of learning shift rather than just their assignments change.”

Members of the ASU Faculty Academy visit the Sosa Carrillo House in Tucson as part of a Borderlands presentation. Photo by Anna Alvarez-Loucks/ASU

The previous 2020–21 cohort’s projects reflected a wide variety of interests and disciplines:

• Meagan Ehlenz, associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, incorporated creative placemaking principles into two planning courses: a foundational course that contains themes of ethics, equity, social justice and community practice; and an applied community collaboration course. Ehlenz also researched the ways neighborhoods have used creativity (especially sidewalk chalk) to cope with/process the COVID pandemic.
• Stacey Kuznetsov, assistant professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering; and Cody Telep, associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice; collaborated on “Future of Place and Belonging,” a module that explored policing and place. It was included in an interactive materials course in spring 2021. Students used design fiction methods to envision the future of place and belonging. Telep, who is also associate director of the school, expanded his approach to research for the module to consider strengths, assets and culture, as well as take a critical look at community collaborations. 
• Benjamin Timpson, assistant professor in the School of Art, redesigned the curriculum for the Introduction to Photography I course in fall 2022 with a holistic approach that recognizes the injustices and biases of the medium.
• Brett Petersen, lecturer in the School of Social Work, used the principles of creative placemaking to develop classroom activities that can create equitable classroom communities, dismantle dominant culture and allow students to establish collaborative spaces.
• Chingwen Cheng, program head and associate professor in The Design School, integrated creative placemaking into a technical report for educating landscape architecture professionals about climate justice and climate actions through the American Society of Landscape Architects's Climate Action Plan and Climate Action Now: A Landscape Architect’s Guide to Climate Advocacy. The reports cover the role designers have in addressing systemic injustice in the built environment and serving as advocates for vulnerable communities. Cheng served on the DEIB Task Force at The Design School, working with students, staff and faculty to create a mission statement for the school. Currently, Cheng serves on the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) DEI Committee to promote equity cultures and DEI goals in the research community. In the capacity of landscape architecture program head, Cheng is developing a long-range plan that integrates JEDI (justice, equity, diversity and inclusion) principles for recruitment, mentoring, student and faculty success and well-being, marketing and curriculum development.
• Kelly Faye Jackson, associate professor in the School of Social Work, initiated a collaborative research project in spring 2021 using a new methodology, called Black feminist polyethnography, to examine gendered anti-Black racism within the social-work profession. This research project has resulted in the publication of two peer-reviewed articles in the journals "Affilia" (Jackson et al., 2022) and the "Journal of Social Work Education" (currently in-press) and inspired a YouTube webinar titled “Critical Feminism and Anti-Blackness: Implications for Social Work.” Jackson and her co-authors received the prestigious “Distinguished Feminist Scholarship and Practice in Social Work Award” (January 2023) for their 2022 "Affilia" article “Taking Back the Narrative: Gendered Anti-Blackness in Predominantly White Schools of Social Work.” Jackson continues to advocate for the creation of safe counterspaces for Black and mixed Black women scholars and is currently principal investigator on a research project to develop an empirical measure of gendered anti-Black racism in higher education.
• Cody Telep and Kate Fox, professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, developed a curriculum plan for the school to assess and improve the diversity, equity and inclusivity of its curriculum, policies and practices to include facilitation of more inclusive spaces, diverse perspectives, and creative solutions to improving diversity and equity.
• Joanna Lucio, senior associate dean and associate professor in the School of Public Affairs, created the Student Life Cycle Project, a critical analysis of interactions between students and the university, specifically in the Watts College. The project covered prospective students through alumni experiences, with focus on student co-creation of spaces and approaches to mentorships, internships and academic integrity policies. The goal of the project was to create more equitable interactions and outcomes for students throughout their time at the Watts College and to ensure that there are mechanisms for students to feel welcomed at each stage.