Themes
Community-campus partnerships come about and are sustained in a variety of ways; the work encompasses a great range of participants, topics, and interests. Communities and campuses are engaged in everything from ensuring safe delivery of newborns to providing end of life care – and everything in between. And while engaging in community-campus partnerships is important, it is also important that they have an impact on solving and helping us to critically think about the problems that we all face today and in the future. We invite you to consider the following themes for your proposal submission. If you do not find a theme that fits your presentation, we invite you to contact us.
Project conception, ideation, and determination! This theme celebrates community-campus partnerships that have developed to the stage of producing tangible changes in the world – such as reducing homelessness, preserving the environment, and creating access to credit. This theme invites proposals that:
- Inspire through sharing the essential elements that enable projects to achieve change;
- Connect the stages of the project lifecycle to the partners and context; or
- Support through sharing key lessons for the next generation of community-campus collaborations that want to transform society for the common good.
Engagement serves as an ethos and functional platform to bring together diverse academic and community entities, each having different strengths and differing sources of power. This theme invites proposals that:
- Inspire reflective practices for approaching critical questions;
- Critically examine methods that support inclusivity, creativity, and dialogue: listening, questioning, building consensus, holding space for conflict, puppetry, critical theatre; and
- Examine community-campus engagements from the lens of ethical research (policy and practice), viewing community as teachers, areas of misalignment between community-based research funding and project needs, and supporting academic transformational change (i.e., elevating what we mean by “engaged research”).
This theme examines different forms of community-campus engagement and probes the full potential of community-campus initiatives for the common good. This theme invites proposals that go beyond research partnerships to:
- Inspire through addressing the means, purpose, and the impacts of campus community partnerships that extend beyond research;
- Critically examine different forms of community-campus engagement (service learning, practicums, experiential learning, community events, arts based inquiry, performances, community installations, etc); or
- Support the development of understanding through surfacing cases, tensions, and stories, and critiques of alternative approaches to engagement which includes partnerships between campuses and communities.
Community-campus projects extend across time zones, languages, and political and cultural differences. This theme invites proposals that:
- Inspire through sharing the unique challenges and opportunities associated with projects that bridge distance and difference in order to achieve change;
- Connect the impacts that borderless projects can offer with participants and communities; or
- Support the development of borderless partnerships for others.
