Presenters: Stephanie Maroney, Managing Director of Imagining America, and Anuj Vaidya, Communications Director of Imagining America

Please join us for a special workshop with Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Learn about the member benefits, such as fellowships, conferences, research, and resources, available to UCSC faculty, students, and staff. IA will share a toolkit and creative engagement tools to help organize the people, projects, and partners on our campus doing community-engaged work. This discussion will offer strategies for energizing your campus community to engage with community members and uplift public scholarship. 

Public Scholar Tools Offered by Imagining America 

Inspired by a three-year action research project, the IA public scholar tools are designed to spark conversation about the joys, contributions, and struggles of public scholars and artists. The Conversation Cards aim to break the silence surrounding elite academic cultures that value a limited range of understandings of what kinds of knowledge matters and to nurture supportive relationships and environments for public scholars to thrive. The Public Scholar Imagination Guide provides a variety of reflection and action tools for anyone trying to improve their own practice and for those interested in making the university a more hospitable, caring, and creative place to nurture public, engaged, and activist scholarship, artmaking, and design.

About Imagining America

The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. Imagining America is guided by 7 values and committed to bringing people together as our full selves in critical yet hopeful spaces to imagine better ways of living, learning and working together.

Please register to join us for this workshop and lunch.