UC to Host Imagining America's 2025 National Gathering

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world.

The IA consortium includes over 65 higher education members and longstanding cultural partners. At the critical intersections of public scholarship, cultural organizing, and institutional change in higher education, IA convenes this network to share knowledge and creative practice. By dreaming and building together in public, the IA consortium creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.

IA organizes the national consortium through three over-lapping modalities:

1. connecting and convening
2. organizing research and peer learning
3.  promoting and advocating for IA members and allies.

The IA National Gathering is an annual convening of public scholars, artists, students, designers, and cultural organizers who are addressing the nation’s most critical issues. The event offers participants a three-day immersive experience in which to connect, dialogue, learn, and strategize around the ways in which the arts, humanities, and design build public knowledge and collective imagination towards transformative action.

Organizers expect more than 600 individuals to attend the 2025 gathering. The organizing process unfolds over a year as IA and UC work to build connection and community with local institutions, leaders, and advocates to ensure that the IA National Gathering uplifts local organizing already underway on issues of local concern with national resonance.