By the late 1990s, the national conversation about the civic purposes of higher education was well-established, reinvigorated during the previous decade, in part through the creation of national engagement associations, such as Campus Compact, and by a number of influential reports and articles on the topic, such as the writings of Ernest Boyer.
Much of the engagement infrastructure in the academy was operating out of newly created centers for service-learning and community partnerships. Such spaces signaled a desire to align campus activities with institutional rhetoric concerning higher education’s mission to serve the public good. However, values of reciprocity and mutual benefit sometimes went unrealized, and these centers were typically separate from the academic units grounded in specific knowledge content. While the critique of traditional “service” was leading to a more developed “engagement” framework, scant attention was being paid to the intellectually generative power fostered through partnership between university-affiliated scholars and their community-based peers. Most importantly, humanities, arts, and design were underrepresented in both institutional and national conversations about engagement.
Within this context, University of Michigan’s Julie Ellison and David Scobey were developing an engaged arts and humanities presence at the University, especially through Scobey’s Arts of Citizenship program. Wanting to reflect excellence in scholarly and creative practice while also adhering to and advancing the ideals of engagement, Ellison and Scobey involved scholars from around the country (among them Harry Boyte, Kathy Woodward, Greg Jay, and Julia Lupton) who were also building programs that were attempting to bring cultural and intercultural analysis and critical practice to the fore. There was recognition of a kind of informal “movement” growing amongst artists, humanists, designers, and other scholars in the cultural disciplines who passionately wanted to claim engagement at the core of their identities as intellectuals and artists.
A number of significant non-academic cultural engagement initiatives were concurrently blossoming, such as the Animating Democracy Initiative in 1996, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in 1998, the Community Arts Network in 1999, and International Coalition of Sites of Conscience in 1999. A network and body of knowledge was developing, revealing powerful conceptual and critical practice models that offered inspiring points of contact for motivated people in the academy. Many state humanities councils were engaged, a diversity agenda was being discussed in the art world, and prominent community artists were collaborating with campuses. There was a whole domain of robust organization with which higher education-based scholars and artists could collaborate. Into this context, in 1999, Ellison and her University of Michigan and national colleagues launched Imagining America.
Related Reading
“Keyword: Hope” by Julie Ellison in the IA Newsletter, Issue No. 13
An Exit with a View – IA Research Director Timothy K. Eatman’s presentation to the 2011 conference of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, Chicago, IL, on Publicly Engaged Scholarship
