Convened by Heidi Schmalbach at University of Texas, Austin and Karolyn Andrews at Schreiner University

The Porchlight Collaboratory investigates imagination as a civic practice emerging through artistic  engagement, storytelling, and collaborative meaning-making in the context of immediate and long-term  disaster recovery. 

On July 4th, 2025, the Texas Hill country experienced devastating flooding that took the lives of at least  135 people, including 27 campers and counselors at a local summer camp. In the wake of this tragedy, community members have turned toward creative and relational practices to make sense of loss, sustain connection, and envision collective futures.Rather than treating imagination as abstract or symbolic, our proposed Collaboratory approaches imagination as an active methodology through which communities reorganize social relationships, reinterpret lived experience, and generate new institutional possibilities. 

In rural settings especially, these imaginative practices frequently arise in everyday spaces such as  porches, classrooms, cultural gatherings, and local storytelling initiatives. These spaces function as  informal sites of public scholarship where participants negotiate memory, responsibility, and hope while  rebuilding trust across institutions and communities. 

The Porchlight Collaboratory will examine imagination at three interconnected levels:

1. Imagination as recovery practice. Participants will explore how artistic and narrative practices  enable individuals and communities to reframe disruption, integrate grief, and imagine pathways  toward shared resilience. 

2. Imagination as relational infrastructure. The collaboratory itself becomes a site of  experimentation, bringing together a major research university, a regional undergraduate  institution, and community organizations to test new modes of collaboration grounded in  reciprocity and care. 

3. Imagination as institutional transformation. Through reflective dialogue, the collaboratory  investigates how universities and community partners can reimagine their roles in disaster  contexts, shifting from extractive research models toward co-creation and ethical engagement. 

Rather than launching a new program, the Porchlight Collaboratory provides a framework for collective  reflection around work already emerging through the Hill Country Porchlight initiative, which integrates  arts-based healing and ethical storytelling into non-clinical recovery infrastructure. We will also benefit  from a nascent collaboration between the primary institutions – UT Austin, the flagship university of the  UT system, and Schreiner University, a small, private institution in Kerrville, TX, and the only university in  the Texas Hill Country region.  

By centering imagination as both process and practice, the collaboratory activates regional engagement within the IA network while contributing to broader conversations about public scholarship, cultural  resilience, and collaborative futures.