2025 AICAD Symposium “Engaging Values”

What are the values inherent to an art and design education? How do we as educators engage with values in the classroom, including our own? How can we build and assess inclusive environments for student learning and support, especially in an art and design context? How do our choices around methods and materials impact the affordability of an art and design education and equity across student projects? How can our classrooms create space for difficult conversations, engaging with developing events in the world that we care about, and listening across differences? How can our pedagogy become more accessible, equitable, and responsive to the many challenges we face today? How do we prepare students to respond when their values are challenged? This track invites a variety of talks and interactive sessions that help advance our teaching practices in support of student success.

How can art and design engage the public in questions of value and place and embrace the current moment? What is the role of art and activism in democracy? What values support successful models of free speech, civic engagement, and conversation around contentious issues and complicated histories? How can we co-create and co-design sustainable, equitable, and mutually beneficial collaborations, external partnerships, and place-based programming with students and faculty? How do we know when we have succeeded? This track invites us to consider social justice, political engagement, cities, the role of our work in the world, and what models for all kinds of engagement might look like.

How does research reflect our values? What values do we prioritize as researchers, as educators, as creators? What assumptions and agendas—e.g., production, preservation, innovation, immaterial values—drive our research practices and means of discovery? What methods facilitate or foreclose exploration and evaluation of our values? What is the role of ethics in research? How does values-driven research square with expectations of objectivity, impartiality, transparency, and the like? How do we evaluate our findings? How do we understand impact and ways to measure it? How does storytelling and the narratives behind our research reflect values, and perpetuate or challenge existing conditions? How do our choices of what and how to research speak to issues of sustainability and emerging technology? This track invites reflection on our practices as researchers, as well as how that research speaks back into the world.

How are disciplines sites of values, and how might they come into conflict when they meet? How can they fuse or connect to engender new inter/multi/transdisciplinary formations and approaches to art and design that create and assess new forms, find solutions to problems, or generate new ways of thinking–and being? How do structures (e.g., departments, funding streams, tenure, and promotion) enable or constrain possibilities for work beyond single disciplines? How can inter/multi/transdisciplinarity help make the case for the necessary and unique contributions of artists and designers? This track invites us to consider values in our fields and what happens as those boundaries overlap, blur, and start to borrow from one another.