The four themes below offer different ways into the symposium’s central question: how human worlds are interpreted, taught, mediated, inhabited, and transformed.
They move from culture and meaning, to learning and pedagogy, to digital and human-centered technologies, to belief, ethics, and lived experience. Together, they invite participants to think across the systems of knowledge, education, value, identity, and community through which human life is shaped.
The themes are not intended as fixed boundaries. We welcome proposals that sit between them, challenge them, or use them as starting points for emerging questions, experimental methods, and new forms of human-centered research and practice.
This theme explores how people make meaning through culture, language, history, creativity, interpretation, and shared human experience. It invites work on the humanities, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, communication, memory, identity, ethics, and the changing role of humanistic inquiry in contemporary life.
It also welcomes inquiry into how culture and the humanities help us understand crisis, imagination, belonging, difference, technology, and the possibilities of human futures.
This theme focuses on the practices, environments, and systems through which learning takes place. It invites contributions on teaching, curriculum, assessment, learner experience, educational access, innovative pedagogies, online learning, professional learning, and the transformation of education across settings.
It also welcomes work on how educators and learners respond to changing technologies, institutions, cultures, and expectations for participation, inclusion, and success.
This theme considers learners as people shaped by social, cultural, institutional, and technological contexts. It invites work on learner identity, motivation, access, inclusion, multilingualism, developmental pathways, community learning, informal learning, and lifelong education.
It also opens questions about how learners build knowledge, confidence, connection, and agency across changing educational and social worlds.
This theme examines the technologies, knowledge systems, and digital infrastructures that shape contemporary learning and human life. It invites work on educational technologies, digital culture, knowledge production, platforms, media, information systems, human-centered AI, automation, data, and the social impacts of technological change.
It also welcomes inquiry into how technologies and AI shape learning, creativity, authority, trust, access, agency, and the future of knowledge in society.
Taken together, these themes position Imagining Human Worlds as a forum for work that is interpretive, educational, ethical, technological, and deeply concerned with lived experience. The symposium is intended to support dialogue across fields that often share questions about meaning, learning, identity, and human futures, but approach them through different methods and traditions
Imagining Human Worlds brings together Common Ground Research Networks concerned with how people learn, interpret, believe, communicate, create meaning, and develop human-centered futures.
The participating Networks connect work across the humanities, education, digital pedagogy, ethics, and human-centered AI. Together, they create a shared space for fields that often overlap in questions of human life and meaning, but are separated by professional, institutional, or disciplinary boundaries.
For 2027, New Directions in the Humanities Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape this year’s emphasis while inviting exchange across the wider human ecology of Common Ground.