2008 Critical Exchange Grants Winners

Imagining America is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Critical Exchange Grants.  These grants, of $2000 each, are intended to support visits of faculty, staff, and students between IA member institutions that help to develop programs, build regional collaborations, or jump-start engaged cultural work on campus.  In this second year of the awards, Imagining America is supporting a graduate student-led initiative for an urban design project, a symposium on public humanities leading to a publication of essays, a workshop to strategize on raising funds for a pilot project, and enhancements of IA Regional Meetings.

The following six institutions received Critical Exchange Grants:

  • The University of Alabama’s Creative Campus Initiative, for its exchange with Ohio State University’s Humanities Institute.  Leaders from the two campuses, will visit each other to learn more about each other’s large-scale projects on community engagement and curricular innovation.  The University of Alabama plans to use the knowledge acquired to advance and modify an emerging cultural arts plan for downtown Tuscaloosa.
  • The University of Albany, for its continued work on the Institute on Critical Climate Change (IC3), a collaboration with the University at Buffalo.  The award will support a one-day joint workshop with teams from the two universities to map out a fundraising plan to endow a permanent Institute with public funds and private foundation money.
  • The University at Buffalo’s Interdisciplinary Group for Social Engagement, a graduate student association, for its production of a video documenting the Connective Corridor project at Syracuse University.  The group will show the video at a community symposium they will host in Buffalo, and will invite leaders from the Syracuse Connective Corridor project to give a joint presentation there as well.
  • The University of Iowa, to bring University of Michigan faculty members Julie Ellison and Matthew Countryman to campus to participate in the 2008-09 Obermann Humanities Symposium, “Minding the Gap: ‘Private’ Scholars and Public Scholarship.”  Ellison and Countryman will speak at the symposium and serve as consultants at an internal structural planning meeting for public scholarship with senior University leadership.
  • The University of Pennsylvania, to support visits to local sites of public practice and public art by participants in an Imagining America Regional Meeting.  Their visits around Philadelphia will be part of their discussion of the academic integration and use of public space. 
  • The University of Washington, Bothell, and the University of Oregon, to support travel for a meeting of regional IA member institutions in Portland.  Their participation is intended to establish a framework to explore the development of regional collaboration in the Northwest, to be launched during the 2008/2009 academic year.

“I am particularly excited to see how the ideas behind these grants have taken roots,” says IA Associate Director, Juliet Feibel.  “Seeds that were planted a year or two ago, at an IA conference or during a previous IA exchange, are beginning to bear fruit, and we’re proud to support that growth.”

The Selection Committee for the Critical Exchange Grant Program included Dave Berry, Executive Director, Community College Humanities Association (CCHA), and professor of history, Essex County College, Newark, NJ.; Ellen Kraly, Director, Upstate Institute, Colgate University; and Jan Cohen-Cruz, Director, Imagining America.

The Critical Exchange Grants will be offered again next year.  Applicants must be from current member institutions to be eligible for these funds.  Independent of this grant program, all member campuses continue to be eligible for site visits from Imagining America leadership.