Imagining America recently received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their Leading and Learning Initiative. The goal of the project is to shift institutional culture in higher education toward greater support of public scholarship in the humanities, the arts, and design.
This three-year initiative will have two primary outcomes:
- it will increase awareness of the value of research and creative practice that engage diverse communities in addressing pressing public issues;
- it will build the institutional capacity needed to support and enable such work.
“At a time when society is deeply divided and when many people are fearful, discouraged, and struggling —through enduring inequalities across social, economic, racial, and gendered lines —there is a clear need for collaborative and community-based knowledge-making. Public scholarship—including both research and creative work such as public histories, community art-making, and poetry—have a unique power to bring people together to study and reflect on the world as it is and to imagine what it might be. Strong voices speaking out on urgent social and environmental issues are necessary if we are to create the just and healthy world that we want. IA believes that institutions of higher education have an important role to play in lifting scholarship that inspires public ideas, creativity, and critical hope, all desperately needed today." - Erica Kohl-Arenas, Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis, Imagining America’s Faculty Director, and the lead researcher on the new initiative.
