Conferences

Common Ground conferences are intellectually and discursively open places. They connect the global with the local. They encourage people to speak in as many ways as possible. They attempt to find ways to include people regardless of whether they can attend in person or not or can afford travel and registration or not. They turn otherwise ephemeral conversations into formal knowledge, leading to systematic refereeing by the peer community and publication in an academic journal.


Connecting the Global with the Local

Common Ground conferences connect with different host universities and local communities each year, seeking fresh perspectives on questions of global concern. In recent years, we have worked with a wide range of educational institutions including, to list just a few: Beijing Normal University; The Australian National University; The University of London; The Institute for Pedagogical Sciences, Cuba; University of California, Los Angeles; The University of Cambridge, UK; The University of Carthage, Tunisia; Columbia University, New York; Singapore Management University; McGill University, Montreal; The University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and New York University in New York City. At conference sites, we bring the global to the local—academics, researchers and practitioners from around the world gather to discuss conference topics. At the same time, we also bring the local to the global, as local academics and community leaders speak from the perspective of local knowledge and experience.


Ways of Speaking

Our conferences encourage people to converse in as many ways as possible.

    - Plenary presentations by some of the world’s leading thinkers are followed by ‘garden conversation’ sessions, a circle of chairs where an extended conversation can be had with plenary speakers.

    - Thematically defined ‘talking circles’ at the beginning the conference encourage people to meet each other and discuss their reasons for being at the conference. The group meets again at the end of the conference to reflect on the most striking ideas emerging from the discussions, and to report back, in the closing session, agenda items for future conferences in the closing session.

    - Thirty-minute paper sessions provide participants the opportunity to make a formal fifteen-minute presentation on their intellectual work, be that research, theory, practice or aesthetic work, followed by fifteen minutes of audience interaction.

    - Sixty-minute workshop sessions involve extensive interaction between presenter and participants around an idea or hands-on experience of a practice.

    - Ninety-minute colloquium sessions consist of five or more short presentations with audience interaction.

The range and breadth of conversational opportunities reflects our belief that each conference belongs ultimately to its participants.


Ways of Joining the Conversation

We try to make sure that our conferences do not exclude people who cannot afford to travel or who are unable to travel at the time of the conference. Virtual participation means that a participant can submit a paper for possible publication in the journal, take part in the peer referee process, and access the conference content, published at the journal website, through the journal subscription that comes with conference registration. For graduate students, we have a fee waiver arrangement in which they chair parallel sessions (and present a paper if they wish) in return for free registration at the conference. And for people without full time income or from developing countries, we offer a number of registration fee waivers.


Turning Conversations into Formal Knowledge

All too often, ideas circulating at conferences disappear into the ether once they have been uttered. People and their ideas are often hard to tie down during the conference, and to track down afterwards. For Common Ground, the conference is just one step in a formal knowledge-making process, from presentation proposal, to presentation and audience feedback, to submission and peer refereeing in a formal journal process. This is how the conference becomes an integral part of a systematic, dynamic and open academic knowledge-making ecology.