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Register for Imagining a Better World: Arts, Activism, and Social Justice
The deadline to apply is April 14th.
Imagination and the arts offer both distinctive windows into the world today as well as powerful tools for reimagining it. As educators, we strive to provide students with both content and critical thinking tools to better understand how our world works and our place within it. While we learn about the forces, trends, and structures that shape our world, the people and communities we study across the globe and the students in our classrooms are not passive observers of inevitable outcomes but active agents, responding to and shaping our present and both imagining and planning for the future. In this workshop we will explore the role of imagination and creativity in promoting individual and collective agency and social change in varied global contexts, and the role of the arts in opening up new imaginative possibilities. We will explore how imagination and the arts allow us to bring more critical consciousness to the status quo, step into differing experiences of the status quo, and to imagine and re-imagine different realities and futures.
- What shapes your imagination? Your students? What is the role of art in shaping the metaphors and narratives that help us make sense of the world?
- What shapes our “moral imagination,” our sense of what is just, our understanding of what is possible, and what feels inevitable?
- How have artists and activists worked together, historically and in the present, to illustrate and influence global issues? What differing forms can/have individual and collective agency take(n)?
- How does power influence how art is created, shared, consumed and valued?
- In an increasingly visual world, how can we help students make sense of the images that are constantly coming our way? How do we help them make meaning of this barrage?
- How can we help harness students’ imagination as creators in responding to current events/global affairs?