CFP: 2015 Imagining America Conference

Posted on February 19, 2015

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life announces the 2015 National Conference Call for Participation

Conference theme; America Will Be! The Art and Power of “Weaving our We”
Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life
2015 National Conference
September 30 – October 3, 2015
Hosted by UMBC
Baltimore MD

The members of Imagining America advance a vision of the world in which publicly engaged artists, designers, scholars, and culture workers play critical roles in enacting the promise and ideals of a democratic society. Together, we explore the power of shared identity – of understanding who we are and what we stand for, and therefore, what we are called to do.

The purpose of this conference is to facilitate bold, creative and effective work that enables people to build and sustain the relationships that will link our stories, fulfill the democratic purposes of higher education, and address our collective challenges.

Call for Proposals

Proposed sessions should be as interactive as possible, and provide opportunities for sharing and co-creating practical and theoretical frameworks that guide our understanding of engaged art, scholarship, and design. Those proposing sessions should note that over the past several years, significant energy and interest within the consortium has been focused on:

The Bold Power of Arts, Humanities, and Design

  • How, precisely, can and do the arts, humanities, and design impact the quality of life?
  • How do we create expansive learning experiences which blend community and cultural work with academic work?
  • How can arts, humanities and design – on their own and in relationship with other fields and communities – animate, elevate and extend the power of democratic public work and create the aesthetic disruptions that allow a space for new ways of thinking and being in relationship?
  • How can we achieve a productive synthesis between our practices of cultural critique and counternarratives, and other, directly participatory, entrepreneurial and hopeful ways of engaging?

The Power of Story/Narrative

  • How can we best tell the stories of our tangible successes in multiple areas of longstanding social challenge?
  • How can we best identify and articulate the specific and critical mechanisms of positive change that occur when we engage the arts, humanities and design to improve lives?
  • What is the key research literature support that exists?
  • How do we tell our individual “stories of self” and our shared “stories of us” in ways that can transform our institutions into publicly engaged institutions and advance our work?
  • How we invite multiple stories and ways of knowing, and develop new kinds of relationships that advance a counter narrative of higher education as a space for risk-taking and transformation on campus and beyond?
  • How do we craft stories that are at once urgent and hopeful – that inspire people out of apathy, cynicism, and inertia, and toward a vision of the world “as it should be”?

Institutional and Community Transformation

  • How do we envision and manifest democratically transformed institutions, communities, and relationships?
  • How do we highlight and deepen understanding of emerging campus practices of democratic engagement and co-creation, changing policies and structures, and developing cultures of collaboration across disciplines and roles?
  • How do we develop creative, effective, and inclusive collective action in a society where vast gulfs exist between the lived realities of different racial, religious, and socioeconomic groups?
  • How do we attend to the urgency of our work in ways that are ethical, collaborative, democratic and fully inclusive?

The conference planners envision our time in Baltimore as an opportunity to move beyond our individual comfort zones and to expand our circles of relationships and our ways of knowing and doing as we attend to the urgent task of transforming the culture of higher education in ways that are relational, inclusive, democratic, and just.

The submission platform will open on March 2, 2015.
The deadline to submit proposals is April 2, 2015.

To learn more about session formats, click here.
To learn more about Baltimore, click here.
A hotel block is reserved for conference attendees at The Lord Baltimore Hotel.

Reposted from Imagining America

 

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