On each full day of the Annual Meeting, we will offer informal conversations facilitated by our members on topics of mutual interest. What are your programmatic priorities as a humanities center director or staff member? What attendees would you like to meet and form a connection with? What topics do you see underrepresented in our conference program?

These conversations will take place at the conference venue during either breakfast or lunch. We encourage you to view the conversation series from last year's Annual Meeting here. Also note that there will be sessions during the conference program devoted to humanities administration and best practices, as well as sessions from select CHCI Networks, including the CHCI Public Humanities Network and the CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network.

Proposal Submissions

Deadline: May 20, 2024

To submit a proposal for a Patio Conversation, please provide a title and a description of 200 words max along with the names, positions, and institutions of the facilitators. We recommend 1-2 facilitators per conversation. You are welcome to state your preference on the date and time of your conversation and we will try our best to accommodate. We envision this program as non-competitive and we will try and create the space for all who wish to facilitate a conversation. Please email your proposal to info@chcinetwork.org by May 20, 2024. We will update the schedule below with accepted proposals as we receive and schedule them.

Schedule

We will update the schedule as we receive proposals, and will include the full conversation descriptions below in chronological order. Please note that the schedule may shift after the proposal deadline of May 20.

Wednesday, May 29 breakfast

Wednesday, May 29 lunch

• Humanities Centers and Centering the Humanities, Paul Fleming and Carla Freeman
• LGBTQ+ Affinity Group, Dean Allbritton and Aaron Fai

Thursday, May 30 breakfast

• Reimagining the Western Humanities Alliance, Jim Ellis and Jena Turner
  

Thursday, May 30 lunch

• Health and Medical Humanities, CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network
• Critical Humanities Spaces Network

Humanities Centers and Centering the Humanities

Wednesday, May 29 lunch session

Paul Fleming, Cornell Society for the Humanities
Carla Freeman, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory

As the relevance of the humanities continues to be debated within universities and beyond, and enrollments, majors, and external research funding are at the forefront of most institutions' metrics, what role should humanities centers and institutes play in these discussions? The humanities are structured and supported in numerous ways across universities: within separate schools, departments, and programs, centers, institutes, etc. Faculty appointments and graduate and undergraduate curricula are most often the purview of deans, departments, and programs, while public outreach, fellowship programs, and interdisciplinary humanistic initiatives are anchored in centers and institutes. Whether budgets are administered centrally or independently poses differential challenges and affordances. What role can and should centers and institutes play to enhance the work of the humanities within departments and programs, and how can we also offer something altogether different—purposeful venues for interdisciplinary and collaborative research, new methodological innovations, etc.

This patio conversation is an effort to explore the challenges and highlight new models for fostering humanities research, collaborations, engagement, support, programming and outreach. We welcome your ideas and participation.

LGBTQ+ Affinity Group

Wednesday, May 29 lunch session

Dean Allbritton, Colby College
Aaron Fai, CHCI

Join us for casual conversation and the opportunity to make connections. We will additionally plan an informal evening outing during the conference, possibly to the nearby White Horse Inn, one of the oldest gay bars in the United States.

Reimagining the Western Humanities Alliance

Thursday, May 30 breakfast session

Jim Ellis, Director, Calgary Institute for the Humanities
Jena Turner, Associate Director, Oregon Humanities Center

The Western Humanities Alliance is a consortium of humanities centres and institutes in the western United States and Canada, founded in 1982 as a forum for interdisciplinary exchange. Over the years, member institutes have hosted the annual meeting and conference, and published a special issue of the conference proceedings in the Western Humanities Review. Given the changes in the past 40 years, the time has come to rethink the purpose of the organization, in order to better serve our member institutions. Is there a role for a regionally focussed organization, that might identify common research interests, establish research networks, serve as a platform for the discussion of administrative issues, or host conferences on issues of importance to the west: water, indigenous rights and sovereignty, resource-based economies, and so on.

Health and Medical Humanities

Thursday, May 30 lunch session

Kathryn A. Rhine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, CU-Anschutz Medical Campus
Director of Arts & Humanities in Healthcare, Center for Bioethics and Humanities, Associate Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine

Hester E. Oberman, University of Arizona; Lecturer and Fellow
Religious Studies and Classics; Religious Studies for Health Professionals
W. A. Franke Honors College; Health and Human Values Minor

The CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network enthusiastically invites directors, scholars, and professionals from diverse backgrounds to join us for an enriching patio conversation. We extend a warm welcome to those passionate about fostering interdisciplinary collaborations between the humanities and health sciences. Our global network fosters groundbreaking research and collaboration across over 30 member institutions, forging meaningful connections between the humanities, clinical and public health practice, and local communities worldwide. The field of health and medical humanities has grown rapidly in recent years, giving rise to new interdisciplinary programs at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as dedicated research centers. During our patio gathering, we will discuss models for and examples of cross-disciplinary research on the ways in which the humanities can inform and transform healthcare, health, and wellbeing. We will also explore innovative approaches to integrating the humanities and health sciences in teaching and practice. And collectively, we will identify opportunities for new partnerships that advance research and education. We warmly invite you to contribute your perspectives as we envision transformative ways to enrich healthcare and elevate community wellbeing through the lens of the humanities.

Critical Humanities Spaces Network

Thursday, May 30 lunch session

Prior to our session, please join us over lunch on 12:15-1:15, to learn about our network and to join us in a new initiative: the inauguration of an open ended conversation series across hemispheres and the varied natures of our institutions, on the creation of critical humanities spaces in our centers and institutes. In our lunch session, we would want to interact on exactly what such a conversation would look like. We will give details on our fall event, Rethinking Utopia: Spaces of Radical Reimagining, to be held at the Center for Research on the Arts and Languages at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), in person and online. To view recordings of our public conversations to date, please visit our webpage.