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 the ways people create, inherit, question, and transform meaning. It invites work across the humanities, including language, literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, memory, narrative, ethics, and interpretation.
It also welcomes inquiry into how human experience is represented, translated, remembered, contested, and reimagined across texts, traditions, communities, and cultural forms.
This theme focuses on learning as a central process through which human worlds are formed. It welcomes contributions on education, curriculum, teaching practice, learner experience, assessment, lifelong learning, educational equity, and the changing conditions of schools, universities, and learning communities.
It also invites reflection on how pedagogical practices shape identity, agency, belonging, knowledge, and participation across diverse contexts.
This theme considers how digital environments and emerging technologies are reshaping learning, knowledge, work, creativity, and human agency. It invites research on e-learning, innovative pedagogies, AI, platforms, learning design, data, ethics, accessibility, and technology-mediated participation.
It also opens questions about how technologies can be designed and governed in ways that support human flourishing, critical reflection, equity, and meaningful forms of engagement.
This theme addresses the values, beliefs, practices, and relationships through which people make sense of their lives and communities. It welcomes work on religion, spirituality, secularism, ethics, identity, care, belonging, ritual, difference, conflict, and coexistence.
It also invites reflection on how lived experience and systems of belief shape public life, social relations, education, moral imagination, and human futures.
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, religion, 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.