Critical Exchange Grants

Critical Exchange Grants support visits between member institutions. They may be used by a campus to support regional meetings; to send a team to another member institution to learn more about some of its programs and collaborations; to host the leaders or team members of innovative programs or projects as consultants and guest speakers; to plan or hold joint workshops; or to develop regional collaborations.
 
For reference, more information about the application process can be found here.
 
For more information, contact Juliet Feibel, Associate Director, at jufeibel@syr.edu or at 315-416-2929.

2009 Critical Exchange Grants Winners

Imagining America is proud to announce the winners of 2009 Critical Exchange Grants. These grants support visits between Imagining America member institutions, and are intended to enhance the exchange of knowledge and ideas between IA campuses, and to nourish the development of new partnerships and programs in keeping with IA’s mission and research initiatives.

The following six institutions were awarded Critical Exchange Grants, ranging from $1,000 to $2,500:

Columbia College Chicago. The Center for Community Arts Partnerships will use their Critical Exchange grant to enhance an IA Midwest Regional Meeting focused on the issues of tenure and promotion, using the TTI report as the basis for a panel and a discussion. The grant will provide four Midwest Exchange Fellowships to support the travel of Imagining America member institution faculty who might otherwise not be able to travel to Chicago for the meeting.

The Pennsylvania State University. Penn State has invited the leadership of the S.I. Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University to address a colloquium on the future of arts journalism at Penn State. This colloquium is part of the Arts in Public Life Project, and forms a node of a larger curricular effort to develop the critical, creative, and writing skills necessary to write about the arts in a rapidly changing media environment. The visit is also intended to provide the basis for future faculty exchanges between Penn State and Syracuse University.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at RPI is working to establish a group of faculty and students that are testing the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities, arts, and social sciences by exploring the relationships between communication, technology, and activism. To help inform this new research group, RPI has proposed a workshop with the Institute on Critical Climate Change (IC3), a joint project of the University of Albany and the University of Buffalo, which works across disciplines on climate change in social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic realms. The grant will be spent on bringing the leaders of the IC3 to RPI for a workshop focused on establishing vocabularies for cross-disciplinary exchange, the potential output of such research, and the role of this research within academic institutions.

University of California, Davis. The Art of Regional Change initiative at UC Davis is launching a community-focused artist-in-residence program in the fall of 2010. Their Critical Exchange Grant will be used to convene IA colleagues from five Northern California and the Pacific Northwest institutions with a range of backgrounds in artist-in-residence programs for a day and a half meeting. They will also be joined by the leadership of the California Council of Humanities. The meeting is intended to generate a framework that will lay the ground work for the UC Davis initiative and inform a similar project in the works at the University of Washington Seattle.

The University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Washington, Bothell. Faculty from these two institutions will use their grant to support the continued development of regional collaborations through the “West by Northwest” Imagining America region. A two-day meeting will be held to continue the work begun at a 2008 convening and continued during the IA National Conference. The primary goal is to develop practices and paradigms to help understand a continuum of scholarship that encompasses curriculum, research, and creative work productive of public goods and debates. In order to accomplish this as a network, participants will explore the mechanisms and structures of “open source” development, with the goal of generating a new method of working with each other and producing tangible artifacts/documents that can be returned to each respective campus and reported on at the IA National Conference.

Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech is hosting an IA Regional Meeting on the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship (TTI). The funds will be used to assist regional member teams to attend the meeting, and to support a graduate student whose efforts will be focused on the TTI. The student will help produce a post-meeting report, arrange follow-up with member institutions, and to assist with the ongoing tenure and promotion work on the Virginia Tech campus.

We wish to thank Kim Yasuda, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Rick Livingston, The Ohio State University, for serving on the Selection Committee for the Critical Exchange Grants. The awards will be offered again next year, with the Call for Proposals issued in October and an application deadline in December. Independent of this grant program, all member campuses continue to be eligible for site visits from Imagining America leadership and participation in regional meetings. For more information about the Critical Exchange Grant program, please contact Juliet Feibel at jufeibel@syr.edu or 315.416.2929.