Member Stories
IA Member campuses are carrying out creative, community-led projects across the country and world. Read on for a selection of IA Member institutions who have shared stories of public and engaged scholarship through the IA Member Spotlight feature.
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Community-Engaged Practice at James Madison University
December 9, 2025
James Madison University (JMU) has a long-standing commitment to community-engaged practice, and fosters opportunities for community and university collaborative engagement. In this month’s member spotlight, we learn about a few initiatives at JMU that advance these goals: the IA Open Forums, the JMU Arts Mobile, and the Community Engagement and Volunteer Center.
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Rooted in Justice, Reaching Out: Publicly Engaged Humanities at Southwestern University
November 5, 2025
At Southwestern University (SU), community engagement and publicly engaged humanities are not separate initiatives; they are interwoven threads in a broader tapestry of regional care, social justice, and liberal arts education. As a private, Hispanic Serving Institution with Methodist roots and a deep commitment to its core values of encouraging activism in the pursuit of justice and diverse perspectives, SU is reimagining its role in Central Texas through collaborative, justice-oriented scholarship.
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Spotlight on Healing and Refuge at Bates College
July 14, 2025
In this month’s spotlight, we turn to two projects at IA Member institution Bates College: one that focuses on Creating Refuge and the other, Ka Bogso: Be Healed, that celebrates healing and growth as a shared journey rooted in community. Both projects showcase the importance and the impact of community-engaged research and collaboration across institutions.
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IA HUBBUB, EP 3: Interdependence
May 16, 2025
In this episode of our podcast series, we travel to IA Member institutions: Michigan State University – where the HIVES Research Lab is located, and University of Southern California – where the Fifty One Miles project is housed. These projects exemplify IA’s focus on arts-oriented community-engaged scholarship that cuts across institutional hierarchies, and expands our understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence that drives our multispecies worlds.
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Spotlight on Emerson College’s Amplify & Ignite Symposium
April 14, 2025
In this month’s member spotlight, we report back from Emerson College’s Amplify & Ignite Symposium, which hosted three days of workshops, panel discussions, presentations, working groups, and dialogue about our questions, curiosities, and work at the intersection of performance, community building, education and justice.
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Spotlight on UC Santa Cruz’s Community of Practice
March 18, 2025
In this month’s member spotlight, we uplift a collaboration between institutes at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) that are prioritizing community-engaged scholarship, and we invite a close look at Watsonville is in the Heart – a community research and archive initiative undertaken in collaboration with UCSC faculty and graduate students, currently housed at The Humanities Institute.
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Spotlight on Reed College’s Arts-engaged Scholarship
February 28, 2025
In this month’s member spotlight, we focus on the ‘Desert Forest’ project from IA member Reed College, that centers the Joshua Tree. Co-conceived and co-directed by Prof. Juniper Harrower, this multidisciplinary project brings together natural history, Indigenous knowledge, public policy, conservation science, and creative works by historic and contemporary artists to spotlight the threatened tree and preservation efforts around it. And we bring you a sneak peek from Reed College’s collaboratory project!
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Spotlight on Michigan State University’s Creativity in the Time of COVID-19
January 21, 2025
In this month’s member spotlight, we take a look back at Michigan State University’s three year project at the intersections of public art and public health. The project documented how everyday people used creativity to cope with the pandemic by crowdsourcing contributions, undertaking public humanities collaborations, and highlighting art as a tool for combating inequity and injustice.
