Call for Graduate Student PAGE Fellows at Imagining America's 9th Annual Conference, 10/02-04/08, Los Angeles, CA

What is "Publicly Active Graduate Education"? How does scholarship activate civic engagement, and vice versa? When theory and practice unite in community-based projects led by graduate students, what are the implications—for graduate students, for the communities involved, and for graduate education?

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life invites graduate students in the arts, humanities, and design with a demonstrated interest in public engagement to apply to be PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) Fellows at Imagining America’s 2008 national conference. Fellows will attend the daylong, pre-conference PAGE Summit (Thursday, October 2nd) devoted to building the theoretical and practical language with which to articulate their own public scholarship; will attend the general conference sessions; will have an opportunity for individual mentorship with leaders in the field of public cultural practice; and will be invited to participate in the conference’s poster session.

Graduate students at all stages of their MA/MFA/PhD programs are eligible to be PAGE Fellows or if they have received their degree in the last two years. Fellows will receive $600 towards the expenses of attending the conference, and will have their conference registration fee waived. To apply, send a brief letter of interest and a 1-2 page CV by July 1st, 2008 to: Robin Goettel, Assistant Director, Imagining America, Syracuse University. Applicants should address their specific interest in this year’s conference theme (see below) and their active investments in public engagement. Applications may be sent electronically (rjgoette at syr dot edu) or via mail (Robin Goettel, Imagining America, Syracuse University, 203A Tolley Building, Syracuse, NY 13244). Priority will be given to Imagining America member institutions, although all applications will be considered. A list of member institutions, and more information about Imagining America, can be found at: www.imaginingamerica.org.

Imagining America invites faculty, students, and community partners to participate in our October 2008 conference in Los Angeles, hosted by USC. A particular focus will be the diverse layers of people, places, and disciplinary intersections that shape the work of public engagement. Los Angeles is a world city that attracts and reconfigures people, culture, ideas, and capital from across the globe. It is an urban center, an overlapping convergence of local communities and landscapes - spatial and imagined, urban and suburban, cultural and commercial, racial, ethnic, and generational, religious and ideological, agricultural and preserved wilderness. These layers of place and populations create multi-textured, intersecting, and contested meaning.

We invite conference proposals for seminars, roundtables, workshops, and panels (see descriptions below) on partnerships and projects touching on these topics as they relate to diversity and engagement:

Layers of Peoples, Places, and Histories: What is the relationship of colleges and universities to the layers of local life, both evident and submerged, all around them? How can we peel back the strata of these landscapes and histories in order to draw attention to what came before? In what ways can scholars and artists respond to the displacement of peoples and sites that result from the "development" of the university, college, city, or town?

Social Movements & Diversity: What roles do public scholars and artists play in political and cultural conversations about the meaning of demographic, racial, and ethnic change within rapidly changing communities of all sizes, nationally and internationally? How do scholars and artists contribute to public understanding of social movements that connect or divide people locally and
across the nation? How might recent developments in the worlds of politics and culture (the 2008 election, the immigration reform debate, reconfigurations in technologies of communication) reshape the research and artistic agendas of public scholars?

Engagement across Sectors: How does scholarship in the humanities and the arts serve as a bridge between colleges and universities and the local, national, and global communities in which they reside? How might collaborations between scholars in the humanities and the arts contribute to public discussion of demographic, social, and political change?