Friday, September 24, 2010

Imagining America Conference Links

**New Programs I have learned about while at the Imagining America conference,  Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, in Seattle, WA

The Public Square  (Chicago) By building bridges between theory and practice, The Public Square encourages the use of ideas as tools to improve people’s lives. These programs promote participatory democracy and create space for public conversations. Knowledge is power, yet much crucial knowledge still circulates only in small, isolated communities. 

RW121 Emerson Medellín - a bi-lingual, bi-national project among 100 students working across 5 First-Year Research Writing classes at Emerson College and MIT in Boston and 5 library parks (Parques Bibliotecas) and the Universidad Nacional in Medellín, Colombia.

Make Art / Stop AIDS
part of Art and Global HealthCenter at UCLA
(nod to Douglas Crimp- In 1987  edited a special AIDS-issue of October, entitled AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. In his introduction to the edition Crimp argued for "cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS and its cultural consequences.")
 
Through Positive Eyes throughpositiveeyes.org
Through Positive Eyes tells the story of HIV/AIDS at the end of the third decade of the epidemic, when potent antiretroviral medication has been devised, but when treatment access is far from universal. (Los Angeles, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro)t

 The Art of Regional Change  (UC DAVIS) brings together scholars, students, artists, and community groups to collaborate on media arts projects that strengthen communities, generate engaged scholarship and inform regional decision-making

Marga, Inc - A Firm, Founded by David Maurrasse, Committed to Developing Communication between Communities and Institutes
Anchor Institutions Task Force  - network to promote the role of anchor institutions in community engagement

Children's Urban Geographies (Univ. of Buffalo)

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Notes on Community Engagement

Fragments of NOTES/THOUGHTS from the Imagining America conference, Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, Seattle, WA, 9.23-9.25.10

You can be global while being local.

Nancy Cantor, Chancellor - Scholarship in Action @ Syracuse U
institutional responsibility and engagement
promoting scholarship and community simultaneously
Say YES to education program providing tuition to Syracuse city high school students

Caryn McTighe Musil - American Association of Colleges and Universities
Our {universities and colleges) welfare tied to community's welfare
Civic learning spiral - braided elements with public action
 only 1% of community-based work is political according to the AAC studies.

If you have to come to help me....

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

Lila Watson, part of an Australian Aboriginal Group, is given credit for this quote, but when interviewed she “was quite clear… that she was not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process” northlandposter.com
(reference came from this blog)