Local Events
As part of its commitment to supporting public scholarship and engaged creative practice at UC Davis and in the region, IA regularly organizes regional and local events. Past local events have included IA’s First Friday Writing Fellowships and Happenings, book talks, learning labs, and community meetings. All events are free and most are open to the general public.
Art, Ecology, and Belonging, an Imagining America Happening
Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | 3:00-4:30pm | Wyatt Deck, UC Davis Arboretum
IA Primary Day: Crafting and Connecting Across Generations
Wednesday, June 5, 2024 | 4:30-6:30pm | IA Offices (207 3rd St Davis, CA)
Join Imagining America (IA) in participating in a craft, music, and art making event at IA Primary Day: Crafting and Connection Across Generations. In alignment with the IA value that our most powerful work is intergenerational and incorporates multiple opportunities to learn from each other, this event invites community members of all ages to learn in a space of curiosity, care, compassion, and openness. Have you ever been afraid to ask a teacher a question? To build friendships across generational lines? The IA team welcomes you to a space where the feeling of intimidation in asking questions, learning from others, and sharing one’s own ideas is replaced by collective creativity, curiosity, and imaginative play. This event is inspired and organized by IA Student Intern Rosalie Mendoza; read her reflections from the event.
Artmaking Inspired by Radical Reckoning, an Imagining America Happening
Friday, February 9, 2024 | 4:30-7:00pm | IA Offices (207 3rd St Davis, CA)
Imagining America welcomes you to participate in an artmaking project on the theme of the 2023 IA National Gathering. Radical Reckoning: Invoking the Elements for Collective Change conjures the elements to guide the radical work of reckoning with the past to create a future of collective liberation.
As part of the downtown Davis ArtAbout, we will provide artmaking materials, a prompt with visuals from the IA National Gathering, as well as snacks and refreshments. Please join us anytime between 4:30 – 7:00pm to enjoy good company and creativity.
Crafting Community Ferment, an Imagining America Happening
Monday June 12, 2023 | 5:00-7:00pm | IA Offices (207 3rd St Davis, CA)
Join the Hyphae Collective to assemble a community-sourced quilt made of materials created over six months with different community members using fermented materials. Refreshments provided!
The Hypha Collective, a Davis-based collaboratory, brings together artists, thinkers, designers, and community members to explore cultural and artistic practices that involve fungi and fermentation. For Crafting Community Ferment, we will create a crowd-sourced quilt made of kombucha leather, sourdough hankies, and more. Through this project, we invite community members into the artistic process to co-create both the materials for the quilt and the quilt itself. In the process, we will engage in conversation and learn about fermentation and arts/crafts practices, and their local ecologies.
View more at tinyurl.com/ferment2023
Special thanks to the City of Davis Arts & Cultural Affairs and Yolo County Library – Mary L. Stephens branch.
Poetry Reading with Victor Hernández Cruz, an Imagining America Happening
Tuesday April 11, 2023 | 5:00-7:00pm | International House Davis (10 College Park, Davis, CA)
Join us for a book release party and reading with Puerto Rico born, Nuyorican raised, and Morocco based poet Victor Hernández Cruz. This event celebrates Cruz’s new book Guayacán (Ishmael Reed Publishing, 2022), a botanical historical search for the trees that once lined his Puerto Rican horizon and the music that shaped his life. The poems travel across languages, sounds, and perceptions; they escape ethnic confinement into the possibilities of international cultural fusion across the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas.
On Guayacán: “Improvisational, inspirational, sensational, international. Poetry delicious to the ears, infinitely pleasurable to pronounce.” -Sandra Cisneros, award winning poet and writer
Cruz will be introduced by long time family friends author and educator Herb Kohl and his daughter Erica Kohl-Arenas of Imagining America. Come prepared to enjoy good company, food and drink, and the renowned poetry of Victor Hernández Cruz.
At the event, enter our raffle for an original silk screen print by artist Elyse Doyle-Martinez interpreting the book cover art by Jose Arenas!
Please RSVP for planning purposes: bit.ly/3JsnAm1
This Imagining America event is generously co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement, and UC Davis Global Affairs.
“Navigating Graduate School as a Public Scholar While Building Supportive Structures and Culture,” Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana and Alana Haynes Stein
Wednesday March 15, 2023 | 2:00-3:30pm | Andrews Conference Room, 2203 Social Sciences and Humanities Building
In this in-person workshop, we will share findings from our research conducted as part of Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative with graduate public scholars at UC Davis. Using this research as a starting point, we will coordinate collaborative thinking on how graduate school can be navigated and reimagined to create an environment where graduate public scholars can thrive.
Our research report goes into depth about UC Davis graduate students’ experiences with public scholarship based on interviews with 31 graduate public scholars and recent UCD alumni. From this, we have outlined how graduate program structures, academic culture, and emotionality impact graduate students’ experiences with public scholarship.
Through this workshop, we hope to brainstorm how to collectively proceed in shifting the culture and structures of graduate school to better support public scholars. We will host a labeling activity envisioning the public scholar’s toolbox and invite participants to share (if they wish) their own experiences of navigating graduate school as public scholars. We will collaboratively outline a platform for renewing and repairing graduate school structures and culture. Information produced in this platform will be integrated into Imagining America’s ongoing efforts around shifting institutional culture to foster public scholarship. If you identify as a graduate public scholar, activist, or community-engaged researcher, then this workshop is for you!
About the Facilitators
Alana Haynes Stein is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on food security, nonprofit organizations, poverty, and political economy. Alana’s dissertation focuses on the resources, practices, and decision-making of U.S. food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research focuses on understanding how the privatization of food assistance and food bank networks impact access to resources. Alana has also worked with Imagining America to research graduate student experiences with publicly engaged scholarship.
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American Literatures and Cultures with a designated emphasis on Human Rights at the University of California, Davis. Her research project focuses on childhood arrival migrants to the United States. She is the recipient of a UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, Mellon Public Scholars Fellowships, the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory fellowship, and has received awards from Imagining America, the National Humanities Center, and the UC Humanities Research Initiative, among others. She is a researcher for the Humanizing Deportation project, a community-based digital storytelling project and the world’s most robust public qualitative archive that documents the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico. She is the coordinator of the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project, an interactive mural on the initial point of the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border, which documents the stories of (deported) childhood arrivals through portraiture and digital storytelling. Other digital humanities projects include the Leave No One Behind Mural project and DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders digital storytelling project. She has been published in The Humanizing Deportation Project: Building a Community Archive of Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge (2022), in Critical Storytelling from the Borderlands. En la linea (2022), and has a forthcoming chapter in Reflexiones coyunturales sobre migraciones contemporáneas en contextos de pandemia (2023).
Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
