Very cool conference coming up:
Imagining America: What Sustains Us?
Macalester College and the University of Minnesota
September 22-24, 2011
I think I’ll be going. Some of the excellent sounding workshops include:
- Community Knowledge Collaboratory Workshop
- Sustaining Sustenance: Engaging Food in Community Design Collaboration
- Tertiary Artists Training and the Public Practice of Art for the 21st Century
- Sustaining Culture and Local Economies through Public Engagement in Rural Communities
My only quibble: As always, libraries appear to be left out of the mix. It’s frustrating that libraries are the forgotten institution. During the protests in Madison, the only people mentioning libraries were librarians. During exciting discussions of how civic engagement can be facilitated in our communities, libraries are rarely mentioned (with the exception of the fantastic Beyond Books summit at MIT this April, which I was thrilled to be able to attend–thanks IMLS fellowship!)
It’s our own stupid fault–as librarians we have latched so firmly onto the codex book as our raison d’être that other institutions and the public have a hard time seeing us in any other context. While librarians know how important civic engagement has been in the public library mission, guess how many people in the general populace know that? Or, if they’re teens, how many even know what civic engagement is (right now in my research the teens, ages 12-18 are 0 and 09 for even knowing the definition of civic engagement!)
