Imagining Futures
The Common Ground Imagining Futures Series is a new annual offering designed to create focused spaces for exchange across broad areas of inquiry within Common Ground. Organized around four distinct symposium strands — Imagining Creative Worlds, Imagining Human Worlds, Imagining Social Worlds, and Imagining Sustainable Worlds — the series brings together scholars, researchers, educators, practitioners, and professionals working across related fields and research communities in shared thematic conversation.
The series has been developed as part of Common Ground’s ongoing research into the knowledge experience. It is intended to explore more connected and continuous forms of knowledge exchange across research communities, while also creating opportunities for concentrated dialogue in an online environment. Rather than replicating the scale of a full conference, each symposium in the series is designed as a more focused forum for emerging questions, interdisciplinary engagement, and sustained discussion around a unifying theme.
Each event in the series is anchored in one of Common Ground’s broad areas of activity while inviting participation across related Research Networks and overlapping fields. Imagining Creative Worlds engages artistic, visual, design, media, publishing, and curatorial practices. Imagining Human Worlds brings together work across culture, history, language, belief, interpretation, and learning. Imagining Social Worlds focuses on institutions, communities, identity, communication, governance, inequality, and social change. Imagining Sustainable Worlds addresses climate, ecology, food systems, the built environment, infrastructure, and long-term collective futures. In this way, the series is both structured and expansive: grounded in established research communities while designed to foster wider intellectual connections across them.
The Common Ground Imagining Futures Series offers a new setting for participants to share work, test ideas, and contribute to a connected ecology of research, practice, publication, and field formation.
Imagining Creative Worlds creates a space for dialogue across artistic, visual, design, media, and curatorial practices. It is intended to bring together participants whose work engages the making, mediation, interpretation, and public circulation of cultural forms. Broad enough to connect multiple modes of creative inquiry, the symposium focuses on how worlds are represented, crafted, exhibited, communicated, and reimagined through aesthetic and cultural practice
Research Networks: The Arts in Society; The Image; Design Principles & Practices; Communication & Media Studies; Information, Medium & Society – The Publishing Studies Research Network; The Inclusive Museum
Imagining Human Worlds offers a space for exchange across the broad terrain of humanistic inquiry. It focuses on the ways human beings make meaning through language, belief, history, philosophy, interpretation, and learning. The symposium is intended to connect scholars working on enduring human questions as well as changing intellectual and cultural conditions, creating a forum for reflection on the symbolic, ethical, historical, and educational dimensions of human worlds.
Research Networks: New Directions in the Humanities; The Learner; e-Learning & Innovative Pedagogies; Religion in Society; Human-Centered AI
Imagining Social Worlds creates a forum for examining how social life is organized, experienced, governed, contested, and transformed. Bringing together work from across the social sciences and related applied fields, it focuses on institutions, communities, identities, inequalities, and the changing structures of collective life. The symposium is intended to foster dialogue across diverse approaches to social inquiry while maintaining a shared concern with public life, organization, belonging, and social change.
Research Networks: Interdisciplinary Social Sciences; Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations; Global Studies; Organization Studies; Technology, Knowledge & Society; Sport & Society
Imagining Sustainable Worlds focuses on the environmental, material, spatial, and systemic conditions through which futures are shaped. It brings into conversation work on climate, sustainability, food systems, tourism, infrastructure, and the built environment, asking how worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, and transformed over time. The symposium is intended to create a shared space for research on long-term viability, resilience, environmental change, and the infrastructures of collective life
Research Networks: On Sustainability; Climate Change: Impacts & Responses; The Constructed Environment; Food Studies; Tourism & Leisure Studies; Aging & Social Change; Health, Wellness & Society