Throughout its history, C21’s mission has focused on building a community of scholars to address the pressing issues of the time. Today, C21 works to bridge university and community scholars in this effort, with arts and humanities methodologies anchoring the projects coming out of these collaborations.
To do this effectively, C21 created a model to bring intentionality to the design, planning, and execution of what the Center calls the “Collaborative Knowledge Creation (CKC)” process. Community and university stakeholders take part in every step of it, which informs the creation of accessible programming that provides multiple points of access and honors multiple ways of knowing.
C21 utilizes the CKC process to devise themes that extend over time, drawing scholars into relationship and idea generation that might yield research proposals, publications in a wide range of forms, or curricular innovations. Building on C21’s rich traditions, we expect and celebrate work of the highest quality across fields of critical theory, public humanities, and digital humanities.
Current & Recent Themes
SLOW (2024-2027)
Slow movements—across food, cities, science, scholarship and beyond — call attention to embodied processes of building and maintaining collective life that resist the fast-paced efficiency models, rapid rewards, and short attention spans that increasingly seem to dominant human responses to 21st century social, political, and ecological challenges. SLOW will develop over three academic years, exploring three distinct aspects of slowness: slow knowing, slow democracy, and slow care.
Nourishing Democracy (2022-2024)
The goal of Nourishing Democracy was to discuss and document how isolation, food and land access, and skepticism about democratic processes have influenced the trust-building that is integral to the success of democratic processes like voting in the United States. Nourishing Democracy unfolded over the course of three academic years, exploring the sub-themes Lonely No More!, Nourishing Trust, and Trust the Vote.
Past Themes & Conferences
C21 has a long tradition of selecting an annual theme to guide its programming and the collaborations of its Fellows. This single theme culminated in an annual spring conference, and often the publication of a monograph of the conference proceedings. See this archive of past conference themes.