Foundations and Field Evidence
In crisis settings, urgent needs take precedence—but what role might beauty play in helping people rebuild and feel at home again?
This opening session of the ‘Beauty, Art, Belonging & the Neuroscience of Place’ webinar series lays the foundation for rethinking beauty as a core component of safety, healing, and belonging. Home Ground Lab co-founders introduce their framework for beauty as essential infrastructure, drawing from both research and refugee-led practice. Alongside insights from UN-Habitat Afghanistan’s post-conflict housing work and a time for Q&A, the session brings together field evidence, lived experience, and emerging neuroscience.
Participants are invited to consider how the built environment can either deepen harm or support recovery. Together, we’ll explore how beauty, too often dismissed as a luxury, may in fact be vital to restoring dignity and coherence in the aftermath of crisis.
Speakers:
- Dr. Devora Neumark is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher and co-founder of Home Ground Lab. With over 30 years of leadership in academia, policy, and creative practice, they advance beauty as essential infrastructure in displacement contexts, combining participatory art, contemplative practice, and policy to promote climate justice, community resilience, dignity, and social innovation.
- Stephanie Acker, co-founder of Home Ground Lab, is a policy and communications practitioner whose work has centered on ‘home’ and has held roles with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, UNICEF, and the European University Institute. She has a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
- Stephanie Loose is the Country Programme Manager/Head of Office for UN-Habitat Afghanistan since October 2024. With over 25 years of professional experience in different countries, including in urban crisis and development settings, she strongly advocates for a humanitarian-development nexus. UN-Habitat has been implementing projects in Afghanistan for more than 30 years, applying people-centered, community-driven and area-based approaches.
Respondent:
Professor Cathrine Brun is Deputy Director at the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS), an independent research institute located between Beirut, Lebanon and Cambridge, UK. A human geographer, her research interests concern the ethics, politics and philosophy of humanitarianism through the lens of forced migration and conflict, young people, education, housing and home.
About the series: Beauty, Art, Belonging & the Neuroscience of Place
Co-hosted by Home Ground Lab & Clark University’s Integration & Belonging Hub
Can beauty help people heal? Rebuild? Belong?
This three-part webinar series explores how beauty, art, and design intersect with neuroscience, dignity, and resilience—especially in contexts of displacement, housing insecurity, and humanitarian response. From refugee camps and post-disaster neighborhoods to communities painting their way back to belonging, this series reveals a radical truth: Beauty is not a luxury. Beauty is infrastructure. Each session brings together global experts in neuroaesthetics, refugee leaders, urban designers, and humanitarian practitioners.
