Imagining America Conference: Engaging Through Place

Posted by on June 16, 2006

Dear C.A.N. Colleagues:

We write to invite you to attend Engaging Through Place, the sixth annual Imagining America conference, on October 7 and 8th, in Columbus, Ohio. The conference is co-sponsored by Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and the Ohio State University. Our partner at Ohio State is the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, a creative site for public scholarship in Ohio.

Imagining America is a national consortium of over 70 colleges and universities dedicated to putting cultural work in the public interest at the heart of American higher education and local community life.

The theme of the conference, Engaging Through Place, zeroes in on the profound changes in scholarship, creative practice, and teaching arising from work that is in?and about?sites, cities, neighborhoods, and regions. The conference emphasizes the ?power of place? that is driving the adventurous restructuring of the humanities and arts on and off campus. Columbus offers wonderful opportunities to explore this theme, combining a state capital, a land grant university committed to engagement, and a downtown with a riverfront, museums, and markets.

The keynote address, ?Changing the Conversation about Higher Education?s Public Mission and Work,? will be given by Scott Peters of Cornell University. Peters will point us toward a fresh understanding of the role of place for the civic professional. Amy Driscoll of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will moderate a plenary panel, featuring David Mathews, President of the Kettering Foundation, Roderick Chu, Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, and Gail Dubrow, Dean of the Graduate School, University of Minnesota. Other speakers will include Karen Halttunen, former President of the American Studies Association, talking about the roles of K-12 teachers in cultural civic work and Steven Lavine, President of the California Institute of the Arts, leading a presentation on IA?s Tenure Team Initiative.

This year?s sessions will bring many lessons from the field. Faculty from Tulane, Xavier, and Loyola will assess higher education?s response to Hurricane Katrina. Creators of new undergraduate curriculum and graduate degree programs will share ?real time? reports. A research team from the University of Chicago will offer its analysis of cultural scenes. Columbus artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson will discuss her work with others, including colleagues who reflect on its implications for the new Carnegie classification for community engagement. In all of the workshops and panels, we will learn how our ideas and experiences of place are restructuring the production of new knowledge and the creation of engaged publics.

On Saturday, October 7, we will meet in the Ohio Statehouse, a National Historic Landmark recently restored to its 1865 splendor. With our breakout sessions taking place in the historic Senate hearing rooms and opportunities to talk in the Statehouse Crypt, we will be working on civic engagement in a living civic museum. On Sunday, October 8, we will gather at the nearby Renaissance Hotel along with participants in Outreach Scholarship, an annual conference supported by four major land-grant universities. We invite IA participants to take advantage of this opportunity and to register for both conferences and take in a long weekend of sessions, keynotes, and networking with publicly engaged colleagues. Learn more at http://www.outreachscholarship.org

Online registration is now available, though Imagining America?s website: http://www.ia.umich.edu. This year, we are instituting an ?early bird? registration option, with lower conference fees for participants who register before September 6. Hotel information and the conference program will also be posted on our website, with regular updates. For more information, contact Juliet Feibel at (734) 277-2630 or on email (julietf@umich.edu).

We are eager to include you in this conversation about higher education, the arts and humanities, and the public good, and look forward to seeing you in October.

Sincerely,

Julie Ellison
Director, Imagining America
University of Michigan

Christian Zacher
Director, Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities
The Ohio State University