Abstract
Dear Public readers,
Imagining America (IA) has been engaged in a year-long strategic planning process, leading up to our 20th anniversary National Gathering, October 18–20, 2019. With the goals of clearly defining our most important role today, better communicating who we are and what we do, and thinking strategically about how to best serve and organize our national consortium, we have arrived at a refreshed Vision, Mission, and Values statement. This statement is the product of a year of deep thinking and hard work by a Strategic Planning Task Force, our National Advisory Board, staff, and allied scholars and artists. Together we immersed ourselves in IA’s history, programs, research, accomplishments, and challenges over the past 19 years, including through one-on-one conversations, readings, retreats, and webinars with former IA leaders.
Through this process, we asked ourselves what is the most important role Imagining America can play today—in a time when many people can more easily imagine impending political and ecological doom than a hopeful future. In addition to the work described above, we conducted an analysis of the now more crowded fields of higher education networks and cultural organizing initiatives, within the context of changing structures of higher education and our polarized and unequal yet highly activated society. Together, we determined that our most important role is to support and ignite “the work of imagining”—the practice of coming together across university and community lines as our full selves in critical yet empathetic and joyful spaces to collaboratively study, imagine, and enact better ways of living and working together. We decided that IA’s most important “north star” to guide this work is our values, highlighted below.
From this analysis, we are currently drafting a set of Goals that represent IA’s unique opportunities and responsibilities in the years ahead. This winter and spring, IA staff, National Advisory Board members, and allies will travel across the country to receive feedback on these goals and to learn about the most pressing hopes, dreams, and challenges across our national consortium.
In this brief letter I share our refreshed Vision, Mission, and Values, and describe how our recent National Gathering in Chicago was a powerful example of this work.
Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life—Refreshed Vision, Mission, and Values
Vision
We envision a world of expansive social imagination, constructed by multiple ways of knowing, where people work together to nurture and create healthy, vibrant, and joyful communities.
Mission
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. By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.
Values: We Believe . . .
Imagining America is committed to bringing people together as our full selves in critical yet hopeful spaces to imagine better ways of living, learning, and working together. To do this work, we believe:
| It is important to struggle with the idea of “America.” The idea of “America” embodies both the prophetic vision and legacy of social movements that have fought for a fully equitable, broad-based popular democracy, and a troubling history of violence, oppression, and genocide. To realize our vision, we believe that it is important to struggle with this contradiction and how it has and continues to manifest domestically, regionally, and globally. |
| Creative culture is an important site of liberation. The bold power of art and design holds the key to bringing people together in imagining and embodying a better future. Creative practices force us to suspend belief, step outside of dead-end thinking, and imagine a different way of being. Collaborative, creative culture making brings people together in ways that foster empathy, joy, play, and connection. |
| Organized ideas matter in the project of personal, institutional, and societal transformation. A sense of what is possible (even imaginable) is partially defined by ideas about how the world works. Public humanities, community-engaged scholarship, and storytelling are central to the long-haul project of social change towards a more just, nurturing, and equitable world. |
| Nothing is completely new. Our work builds upon the strengths, legacies, and innovations of our elders and ancestors while simultaneously lifting the voices of youth. The most powerful work is intergenerational and incorporates multiple opportunities to learn from each other. |
| How we learn and work with one another matters. We believe in the capacity of every human being to learn, grow, create knowledge, and lead change. Teaching and organizing that is driven by curiosity, care, compassion, openness, and belief in everyone’s intellectual, creative, and leadership capacity holds the key to building individual and collective agency/power. |
| Living up to our values requires institutional and societal change. This includes, and goes beyond, supporting higher education institutions in achieving their public purpose and toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in a truly participatory democratic culture. |
The 2018 Imagining America National Gathering in Chicago was organized around the theme Transformative Imaginations: Decarceration and Liberatory Futures. Cosponsored by Illinois Humanities and a steering committee of community and campus partners, this Gathering was one of the first demonstrations of our refreshed Vision, Mission, Values, and Goals. Today, we face many crises that challenge our capacity to believe another world is possible. Inspired by Illinois Humanities’ Envisioning Justice initiative, the crisis that served as a central organizing theme for this year’s Gathering was the United States' carceral system. From children to seniors, foreign nationals to US citizens, the United States’ carceral state locks up more than 10 million individuals each year through a vast network of prisons, jails, juvenile correction facilities, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and state psychiatric institutions. The United States locks up more people, per capita, than any other nation in the world. This system also restricts the lives of nearly five million individuals currently on probation or parole and destabilizes an exponential number of families and communities.
Beyond the carceral state, we are all impacted by or implicated in systems that contain, control, and restrict ways of thinking and acting freely in our society. In higher education, though simultaneously a space of great promise and transformation, we are often taught to shrink our minds and behaviors through disciplinary and professional boundaries that do not nourish our complex and interconnected lives and dreams. Addressing the multiple crises of our time requires moving beyond stuck ways of thinking and preconceptions about what is politically expedient or immediately achievable. Imagining America conferences show how work at the intersection of public scholarship, creative cultural organizing, and community-engaged learning inspires a more expansive social imagination and range of actions. As we experienced together in Chicago, public scholars, cultural organizers, artists, and participatory designers played a central role in breaking through codes of silence by bringing critical, yet hopeful, narratives to the public stage.
In Chicago, we witnessed what Robin Kelley (2002) calls “freedom dreams,” hopeful imaginations and enactments of a new society inspired by, but not limited to, engagement with the urgent problems of people struggling for greater social, political, and economic voice and power. As George Lipsitz (2017) reminds us in his recent contribution to Futures of Black Radicalism, historic and ongoing struggles for freedom have relied on the dialectical relationship between the termination of existing politics that don’t serve us and the creation of new, more fully democratic practices and institutions. The 2018 Gathering inspired both a critique of systems that contain, limit, and divide people along gender, race, nationality, ability, geographic, political, and other lines, and inspired more caring and inclusive ways of living, working, learning, and creating with one another. With over 80 workshops, performances, PechaKuchas, and plenaries, and approximately 500 participants from across higher education and community-based cultural production and organizing spaces, the 2018 IA Annual Gathering offered a rigorous, thoughtful, and open way to share and understand each other’s stories—expanding the public imagination of who we are as we envision and enact our collective future.
Directly tackling our crisis of imagination, participants in the 2018 Gathering made space for deep listening, provoked and encouraged each other, and collectively pushed ourselves to imagine and enact a better future. Reflecting on the Gathering, conference lead organizer and IA Managing Director Mina Matlon recalled a few images and moments from the gathering: “the burning of sage backstage by rap-librarian and performer Roy Kinsey as he cleared the air for our Opening Plenary; a university provost, professor, and the student cofounder of Beyond the Stats, a UC Davis collective for formerly incarcerated student scholars, discussing poetry; individuals huddled around a cell phone listening intently to Sandra Brown, a currently incarcerated scholar; conference participants writing letter responses to men living on death row who shared with us their stories; creating a healing space through dance and music with my fellow participants in a drumming circle; walking through a buzzing central meeting place where attendees participated in a career-mapping pop-up with 2017 Randy Martin Award winner Kim Yasuda; exploring books, zines, and calls to action by booksellers and community groups such as New Village Press, Chicago Books to Women in Prison, Free Write Arts and Literacy, Black and Pink, Organized Communities Against Deportations, and the Bard Prison Initiative.”
The IA staff was deeply moved by the ways in which the national IA consortium took up the invitation to consider how all of our work is connected to systems that deny human worth and potential. Our community challenged itself to walk into and grapple with such tensions, emerging richer in knowledge and stronger in our practices. We continue to consider how to move beyond the carceral state in this issue of Public, “Beyond Mass Incarceration: New Horizons of Liberation and Freedom.” This year, at our 20th Anniversary National Gathering in Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 18–20, 2019, we will take on the challenge of reimagining “America” in times of crisis as well as a local focus on themes including migration, land, and belonging being developed by the local host Steering Committee. We hope to see you there.
In community,
Erica Kohl-Arenas
Works Cited
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.
Lipsitz, George. 2017. “What Is This Black in the Black Radical Tradition?” In Futures of Black Radicalism edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin. New York: Verso.
