There is an exciting resurgence in critical public scholarship: a push for universities to reach beyond their academic audiences and build stronger partnerships with community-based organizations and others to address pressing social issues, such as affordable housing, educational justice, immigrant integration, community health, food security, economic security, environmental justice, and addressing the climate crisis. There is also important research that engages community members, including youth, in imagining and creating the communities in which they want to live. A particularly rich vein of engaged scholarship involves undergraduates as equal knowledge producers. 

The conference will highlight nationally instructive local models, such as UC Santa Cruz’s Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) and the newly launched center Campus + Community, which will elevate and magnify the multiple assets and collective power that diverse students, committed faculty, and community-based practitioners bring to collaborative approaches. The conference will also address methods for building institutional support for collaborative research, how to strategically leverage relations with collaborative partners, forms of applied research and teaching for social good, and how to build cross-sector networks for practitioners, students, and early career scholars. 

The conference brings together university scholars, community-based practitioners and researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, community members and organizations, foundation program officers, organizers, artists, and activists to share stories, strategies, practices, and solutions for action and the truly equitable co-production of knowledge. 

The conference will take place in beautiful Santa Cruz, California on October 26-28, 2022. Conference registration will begin in June 2022. Registration fees will be on a sliding scale, with some scholarships available and priority given to student and community member participants. In addition to registration fees, teams and participants should plan to fundraise to cover housing and transportation. Most meals during the conference will be provided.

Co-sponsored by the Arts Research Institute.