Call For Participation

We are back! In partnership with Tulane University, Ashé Cultural Arts Center and a diverse Working Group^[1], Imagining America (IA) invites participants to the long-awaited return of the ritual of an in-person IA National Gathering. This year’s Gathering theme Rituals of Repair and Renewal invites participants to engage in joyful celebration of the magic in being together. Taking place in the city of New Orleans, where culture is daily born and reborn, the three-day immersive event will set the stage for participants to enact rituals of reflection, repair, renewal, wellness, and imagination. Culture makers and movement organizers alike know that ritual is central to creating community and building power for change. When ritual is collective it forges the sacred consciousness of “we” – the knowledge that we are all in it together. Embodied ritual, singing, dancing, laughing, marching, and making things together helps us grieve and heal, sustains our spirits, and inspires hope and joy. When ritual is intergenerational it joins the past and present to carry us into the future. Creative rituals help us imagine beyond both the mundane and serious challenges of our daily lives, building energy for shared struggle.

The rituals performed by institutions of higher education have produced harm and displacement, yet have also contributed to community-university aligned movements for social, cultural, and racial justice. How do we hold universities accountable to stated missions to serve the public good, when patterns of extractive research, disaster profiteering, and community redevelopment continue to have negative impacts on the people and places they claim to benefit? How do we disrupt rituals of exploitative research and center the values and practices of truly reciprocal and collaborative scholarship and culture making? The organizers of this year’s National Gathering, representing a three-year partnership between Imagining America, Tulane University, and Ashé Cultural Arts Center, propose that answers can be found in the wisdom of intentional alliances between regional culture keepers and next generation community-engaged graduate scholars.

As New Orleanians know, the rituals of grassroots culture keepers, artists, and musicians transform trauma and pain into joy, healing, pleasure, brilliance, and hope. In academic institutions, engaged, public, and creative graduate scholarship programs are hopeful and creative spaces where the university is re-imagined. The diversity of BIPOC and first-generation artists, organizers, and researchers pushing the boundaries of academic institutions transforms the harm of disciplinary boundaries and rules into more contextualized, rigorous, and caring ways of seeing and being in the world. Together, community-based culture keepers and engaged graduate scholars can lead us towards better practices and rituals of personal and collective renewal and repair.

Scaffolded by New Orleans’ life-sustaining rituals, from jazz funerals for the things we can no longer accept to celebratory second lines, the roundtables, workshops, dialogues, and creative spaces of the 2022 IA National Gathering invite us to imagine the world we want and need across community and university lines. The rising waters and raging fires of the climate crisis, entrenched structures of racism and oppression, and the uncertainty of the ongoing global pandemic present an urgent and necessary call for re-imagining and repair.  How do we mend our individual and collective exhaustion, grief, and anger? How do we heal our families, communities, and earth? As we peer through the portal of the global pandemic, we invite participants to engage in collective rituals of repair, renewal, and release, by transforming and unlearning that which never served us and manifesting new ways of being together.

The call invites proposals that address the general theme of Rituals of Renewal and Repair, as well as proposals that focus specifically on the promises of engaged graduate education in building a pathway toward more egalitarian relationships between universities and communities. This track will highlight generative relationships between graduate scholars and community culture keepers in the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Engaged Community Scholarship and feature national discussions on the future direction of engaged graduate education, including research from Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative and PAGE scholars, as well as other similar graduate programs.

The submission deadline is Friday, June 10, 2022, at 11:59 PM PT.

Deadline extended to Wednesday, June 15, 2022, at 11:59 PM PT

Submit your proposal online or download a printable PDF form.

This Call for Participation is open to everyone, IA members and Non-Members.