THE IA CLEARING: RESPONSES FROM THE 2025 IA NATIONAL GATHERING, Part 1

Weaving together lessons from Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sekou Sundiata’s The America Project, The IA Clearing was a special track at the 2025 IA National Gathering, activated through a series of spaces, activities, and ‘magical questions’. The IA Clearing invited participants to grapple with themes of critical civic engagement, self-care, and community dialogue, and featured an IA Makerspace, a listening station, a community mapping activity, and a series of ‘magical questions’ on paper airplanes (and other modes of engagement) to foster community dialogue.

Read on to learn more about different aspects of The IA Clearing:
• The IA Clearing: Call and Response
• Journey to The IA Clearing
• Practicing the World We Want
• Strengthening Our Web of Relations
• Listening to Stories of Our Community
• Answering the Magical Questions

The IA Clearing: Call and Response

Journey to The IA Clearing

At the 2025 IA National Gathering, a team of IA staff and National Advisory Board members organized a series of spaces and activities across the three days of the convening, under the umbrella of The IA Clearing. In the welcome letter in the gathering program book, IA Faculty Director Erica Kohl-Arenas and IA Managing Director Stephanie Maroney note how the IA Clearing came to be:

“In the fall of 2024, just before the presidential election, the IA National Advisory Board gathered at IA’s headquarters at University of California, Davis. During a difficult conversation about the road ahead, board members Milmon Harrison and Carlos Jackson compared IA to what Toni Morrison describes as a “clearing” in her 1987 novel Beloved. At the clearing, “a wide open place cut deep in the wood”, people come together out of harm’s way, laughing, dancing, crying, switching roles, trying on new ones, and becoming fully human. Beloved’s Baby Suggs tells the people in the clearing, sitting silently exhausted from their emotional exertions, that, “the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.

We could not have anticipated how much we would need an IA Clearing today. Over the spring and summer months, a board committee came together, including Faculty Director Erica Kohl-Arenas, Sylvia Gale, Lizzy Cooper Davis, David King, Judy Pryor Ramirez, and IA Communications Director Anuj Vaidya, to figure out how to simultaneously celebrate IA’s 25th anniversary and call the gathering community together to reflect on this moment and to make way for the road ahead. The work of cherished IA community member the late Sekou Sundiata came to us, and we conjoined Morrison’s clearing with lessons from Sundiata’s The America Project which called for us to explore, “what it means to be a critically engaged citizen in a time of intensifying imperial power and influence.” With Morrison answering Sundiata’s prescient call, The IA Clearing at the 25th Anniversary IA National Gathering was born: a place for us to reflect, plan, create, laugh, dance, cry, strengthen our relationships, experience the sounds of IA’s brilliant past (including Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state performance), and imagine and practice the future world we need and want.“

Practicing the World We Want

The IA Clearing invited participants to find their way through the spaces and activities distributed throughout the gathering, and add their voice to the chorus of responses to this 25th Anniversary call. The Clearing spaces included numerous interactive activities such as a makerspace where participants shared a glimpse into what they are imagining and practicing, and how they are making a more just, caring, and liberatory future using craft materials.

Strengthening Our Web of Relations

Another activity invited participants to use index cards and yarn to make their inter-connectedness visible by considering the following prompts: What people, ideas, places, actions brought you here? Who, what, where sustains you? What is emerging in our intersections?

IA NAB Member Sylvia Gale and Lizzy Davis worked together to synthesize learning from these multiple activities, which was then presented back to participants at the Closing Plenary. Participants were invited into an embodied activity to extend the web of relations beyond the wall and into the space.

Listening to Stories of Our Community

A third Clearing space offered audio selections for listening and reflection. Participants scanned QR codes to access links to recordings that provide passage into other ways of collective knowledge-making through poetry, music, and theater. The selections featured interviews with Sekou Sundiata and Toni Morrison, while also reaching back into the IA archives and into the wider community for inspiration. Scan the QR codes below, or click on the images, to access the audio archive.

Located right by the auditorium, the Listening Station also offered participants the opportunity to view Sekou Sundiata’s films from The America Project – the (51st) dreamstate and finding the (51st) dreamstate, which were showcased at the theater on Saturday morning.

NOTE: If you would like to screen these films at your institution or for your community, please reach out to us at connect@imaginingamerica.org, and we can connect you with the appropriate individuals for permissions.

Answering the Magical Questions

Another activity woven throughout the gathering was the Magical Questions – three prompts that opened up space for reflection and conversation, tension and grappling, as they invited us to move beyond habitual ways of thinking

These questions were posed from the Opening and Closing Plenaries, shared through the Gathering app, written on paper planes flying on the Imagination Runway (a hallway in the Corbett Center designated for this activity) and elsewhere throughout the Gathering spaces. We will share more about these modes of engagement and invite you to share your own responses to the questions in a companion blog post, coming soon.

THANK YOU

Imagining America thanks The IA Clearing Committee members for their creative contributions: Lizzy Cooper Davis, Sylvia Gale, David King, Erica Kohl-Arenas, Judy Pryor-Ramirez, and Anuj Vaidya. We thank Cathy Zimmerman, Maurine Knighton, and Gabrielle Beninder-Viani for the use of Sekou Sundiata’s curriculum, questions, and media.

_{^{* Illustrations by Stella Aude; photographs by Andrew Williams; Poster designs by Anuj Vaidya based on original art by Citlali Delgado}}