In partnership with Tulane University, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, and a diverse Working Group^[1], Imagining America (IA) invites participants to submit a proposal for the in-person IA National Gathering, from Friday, October 14 to Sunday, October 16, 2022, in New Orleans.

This year's Gathering theme Rituals of Repair and Renewal invites participants to engage in joyful celebration of the magic in being together. Taking place in the city of New Orleans, where culture is daily born and reborn, the three-day immersive event will set the stage for participants to enact rituals of reflection, repair, renewal, wellness, and imagination. Culture makers and movement organizers alike know that ritual is central to creating community and building power for change. When ritual is collective it forges the sacred consciousness of "we" – the knowledge that we are all in it together. Embodied ritual, singing, dancing, laughing, marching, and making things together helps us grieve and heal, sustains our spirits, and inspires hope and joy. When ritual is intergenerational it joins the past and present to carry us into the future. Creative rituals help us imagine beyond both the mundane and serious challenges of our daily lives, building energy for shared struggle.

• How does ritual in our daily work and lives help heal individual and collective traumas?

• How do the rituals of cultural and creative practitioners dismantle enduring oppressions, such as environmental racism and colonialism, and inspire hopeful visions of the future?

• How do the methods of art, design, and narrative practice connect and ignite people around an equitable, just, and caring vision for the future and create pathways to fight for it together?

• How does the work of artists, designers, and interdisciplinary humanities scholars help us radically re-imagine education in ways that are more sustainable, just, and healing?

• How do immersive embodied experiences, like dance and song, help people engage in the urgent daily work of creating the future?

• How does embodied movement (in dance, theater, and storytelling) support people through migrations across places experiencing war, drought, flooding, and displacement?

• What can we learn from musical traditions as rituals for freedom and justice?

• What kinds of food rituals sustain community, culture, and well-being?

• How does the work of public, engaged, and activist artists, designers, and humanities scholars help us radically re-imagine the struggle for climate justice?

• How is the next generation of engaged graduate scholars paving the way for a more caring, humane, and socially and racially just approach to research and action?

• How are faculty and staff in higher education striving to combat social and racial inequalities reflected in higher education and our greater communities?

• What are the tools (data, digital, and design) that scholars can share with communities to advance their resident-led municipal advocacy and social justice fights?

Submit a proposal to present at Imagining America's 2022 National Gathering Rituals of Repair and Renewal. Review the call for participation for more information about Gathering themes and how to apply. Whether you intend to submit a proposal or simply join in the rituals of repair and renewal, mark your calendars! We look forward to seeing you there!

For more information about this event, please email gathering@imaginingamerica.org

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.

IA’s national gatherings convene more than 500 public scholars, artists, designers, teachers, students, and cultural organizers who are addressing the most pressing issues of our time. Both the 2020 Collective Creative Engagement and the 2021 in-person IA National Gathering are organized in partnership with Tulane University and programmed in close collaboration with a New Orleans steering committee. New Orleans is the site of the 2021 IA National Gathering.

^[1] Carol Bebelle, Frederick ‘Wood’ Delahoussaye, Denise Frazier, Cherice Harrison-Nelson, MaPó Kinnord, Erica Kohl-Arenas, Ryan McBride, Pepiro, Diana Soto-Olson, Erin Syoen, Miriam Taylor, Trina Van Schyndel, Monique Verdin, Justin Wolfe