The 2008 Imagining America Conference

THEME:
"Layers of Place, Movements of People: Public Engagement in a Diverse America"
October 2-4, 2008
Los Angeles, California
Hosted by the Center for Diversity and Democracy, University of Southern California.

Join us to discuss how peoples, places, and disciplines intersect and shape the work of public engagement. Los Angeles is the ideal site for these conversations, as a world city that attracts and reconfigures people from across the globe. It is also an overlapping convergence of communities and landscapes: spatial and imagined, cultural and commercial, racial, ethnic, and generational, religious and ideological, urban, suburban, rural, and wild. How do colleges and universities relate to these layers of local life?

How do scholars and artists respond to the displacement resulting from the “development” of the university, college, city, or town? What role 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? How might the research, practice, and collaborations of scholars and artists contribute to public discussion of demographic, social, and political change?

Read about past conferences:
2007 Conference (Syracuse, NY)
2006 Conference (Columbus, OH)
2005 Conference (New Brunswick, NJ)
2004 Conference (Philadelphia, PA)
2003 Conference (Urbana, IL)
2002 Conference (Ann Arbor, MI)
2000 Conference (Chicago, IL)

Conference Media Archive
Photos, videos, and additional resources from past Imagining America conferences are available. Please contact the office with your request.

Imagining America National Conferences

Our annual conferences are crucial to the work that Imagining America does. These events allow public scholars in the cultural disciplines to form a network, to share best practices, to visit project sites, and to gain inspiration and motivation for their work. The conferences take place in a workshop format.

These conferences are also the site where the network outside our consortium comes to gather and work. Within our larger network are organizations such as Americans for the Arts, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Community College Humanities Association, and Campus Compact. Learn more about our partnerships with these organizations here.

Campbell

James Campbell of Brown University talks with Robbie McCauley of Emerson College after his electrifying delivery of the 2007 keynote address. Tom Dutton of Miami University waits to share his thoughts as well. Photo courtesy of Syracuse University.

The 2008 Imagining America Conference

HOTEL INFORMATION:
Millenium Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles
506 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90071
For conference rates, reserve online here, or call (213) 612-1575 and mention code "IMAAM."

DRIVING DIRECTIONS:
Click here for driving directions to Parking Stucture Two at the USC Davidson Executive Conference Center.

ADVANCED READING:

In preparation for the workshop
Public Humanities Scholarship: Enlarging the Perspective(s), please read Bruce Burgett's Mixed Genealogies; Earnest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990 (out of press, but widely available); the Tenure Team Initiative Report;and Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement.

In preparation for the workshop Placing Public Engagement at the Local | Global Intersection, please read this paper.