URI Graduate Conference 2014
Saturday, March 29, 2014

Opening Spaces: Enabling Engagement with Complex Conversations
Conversation is difficult. With friends and family, colleagues and students, people we enjoy and those we must endure, conversation requires attention, precision, and energy that many of us wish we could expend but often can’t afford. Even simple encounters carry nuance, agenda, and power dynamics that make it easier to avoid than engage in crucial but complicated dialogues. In a time of political gridlock, economic uncertainty, and cultural chasm across the country and the globe, it is perhaps more important than ever to devote our skills and energy to having exactly these types of conversations.
The University of Rhode Island Graduate Conference intends to provide time and space for such complexity in 2014. Our intent is to bring together communities often divided, isolated, or ignored for conversations worth our attention, intellect, and energy, and crucial to our future. We include below suggestions for starting points of conversation, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. If we should be talking about something not listed here, please let us know by submitting your proposal.

Within These Ivy Walls
• What do different disciplines have in common? How and why should they work together?
• Interdisciplinary curriculum development
• Definitions / limitations / boundaries
• Building open and accessible frameworks within and between disciplines
• Conversation and communication of information within individual disciplines

Education as Conversation
• External and/or internal power dynamics and authority
• Frustrations/ tensions
• Why the arts and humanities matter, in STEM and beyond
• K-12 and higher education divide
• STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) to STEAM (Science Technology

Engineering Art&Design Math)
• Professionalization of Education / consultants / credentials
• Assessment and standardized testing
• How text / context informs education / learning

Beyond Bricks and Mortar
• Relevance, significance, and role of education beyond academia
• Engagement with a 2.0 generation
• Codeswitching and jargon in academia
• External pressures on the institution
• The place and practice of Writing Across the Curriculum
• The skills gap

Culture, Exigency, Engagement
• Globalization / homogenization
• Impact of local, national, and international cultures
• Meaning making in creative and/or scientific methods
• Why we educate at all? Why within discipline, community, institution?
• Why what we do matters, in the academy and beyond

Evolution
• What comes next? What should come next? Are we preparing for what lies ahead?


We invite proposals for all formats, including: individual papers, panels, roundtable discussion panels, creative submissions, multimedia presentations, workshops (lessons plans, etc.), and posters*.

Submission Directions: Please submit all abstracts and proposals via our website at www.urigradconference.org by clicking on the “Submit Your Abstract” link. Direct all questions regarding submissions and conference details to urigradconference2014@gmail.com. Visit our website for more information.

Submission Deadline: 15 January 2014