Julie Gaynes is a PhD Candidate who uses oral history and critical ethnography to document how indigenous knowledge shapes restorative justice systems and women’s solidarity in the Lamaholot region of East Indonesia. She is a cut paper artist and bookmaker who explores collage as a means to co-author cultural narratives.

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​I use hands-on methods to teach research approaches that are fun for artists, writers, and academics.

I believe in helping others find empowerment through creativity. Artful narratives are central to both research design and data representation. For undergraduates or graduates in the humanities, I ask my students about the meaning of “story” and how stories inform our shared conceptions of the past and present. How do different styles of media and rhetoric inform “truth” in our social circles? How can we investigate rhetorical techniques behind “truth” narratives in a cross-cultural context?

I teach graduate students in cross-cultural studies to write for academia, and I also train them to devise public-facing narratives that impact public knowledge at the grassroots. I have found across academic disciplines that scholars are hungry for creative tools for presenting their research. I would like to work with research facilitators, and potentially their participants, in strategizing the completion of creative projects that evoke cross-cultural understanding through mixed-media storytelling.

I am open to facilitating adult trainings and continuing education courses that propel aspirations of people from all backgrounds. I firmly believe that everyone has a creative research-based project within them. Sometimes we just need community support, and often the nudge of a deadline, to help those creative dreams become realities. As a life-long learner who finds purpose in a sense of wonder, I hope to share that wonder is positively contagious and essential for personal growth. My greatest passion is in helping adults realize creative and intellectual capacities they never thought possible and in building communities around the idea that our world's greatest gifts come through small creative acts.