Call for Papers
We invite you to join us for the Twenty-third International Conference on The Arts in Society, the annual meeting of The Arts in Society Research Network, hosted by the University of Galway, taking place in Galway, Ireland, and online, 19–21 July 2028.
Founded in 2000, The Arts in Society Research Network is a leading international meeting place for artists, scholars, educators, curators, cultural workers, policymakers, and community practitioners working across the arts as cultural practice, public inquiry, and social transformation. The Conference welcomes proposals that address the arts not only as forms of creative expression, but as ways of making knowledge, shaping public life, engaging communities, and imagining collective futures. The Network brings together artists, scholars, educators, curators, and cultural workers to examine the role of the arts in human understanding, social life, and innovation.</p>
Across the world, the arts are being called upon to respond to changing civic, cultural, technological, ecological, and political conditions. Key issues include public culture, cultural policy, community arts, creative participation, place-making, artistic research, performance, visual culture, arts education, cultural heritage, social justice, digital media, and the role of imagination in public life. We welcome interdisciplinary proposals that engage these questions through research, practice, pedagogy, policy, curatorial work, creative production, and community-based knowledge.
Special Focus and Themes
The 2028 special focus, The Arts in Public Life: Place, Participation, and Collective Imagination, invites participants to examine how the arts shape the spaces, relationships, memories, and possibilities through which communities understand themselves and imagine shared futures. Public life is not formed only through institutions, policies, or formal civic structures. It is also made through performance, image, sound, gesture, ritual, storytelling, design, architecture, public space, and collective experience. The arts help people gather, remember, contest, mourn, celebrate, and imagine. They create forms of participation that are aesthetic, social, political, and deeply place-based.
Galway offers a particularly meaningful setting for these conversations. The conference takes place during the city’s summer arts season, when Galway becomes an international gathering place for performance, visual art, music, theatre, spectacle, talks, and public cultural life. Galway International Arts Festival presents one of Europe’s leading international arts festivals for two weeks each July, and the Festival’s programme brings artistic practice into theatres, galleries, streets, public spaces, and civic life across the city.</p>
In this context, the conference theme is not simply a topic for discussion, but something participants will encounter in the life of the city itself. Galway’s festival culture offers a living example of how the arts animate place, invite participation, gather publics, and create spaces for collective imagination. The timing of the conference allows participants to think with Galway as both host city and case study: a place where artistic practice, civic life, tourism, community identity, and public imagination meet.
This special focus invites critical and practical conversations about the role of the arts in public life. How do artistic practices shape places and communities? What forms of participation do the arts make possible? How can public art, performance, festivals, exhibitions, and cultural institutions create spaces for dialogue and collective imagination? How do the arts respond to social conflict, ecological uncertainty, displacement, inequality, and political change? What responsibilities do artists, educators, curators, cultural organizations, and public institutions have in sustaining inclusive cultural life?
We welcome theoretical, empirical, professional, creative, and practice-based contributions addressing the arts as forms of public knowledge, civic participation, cultural memory, place-making, social critique, and collective imagination.
Themes
- Public Art, Place, and Cultural Memory: This theme explores how the arts shape relationships to place, landscape, public space, and collective memory. It invites work on public art, site-specific practice, cultural heritage, monuments and memorials, urban and rural place-making, festivals, architecture, landscape, local knowledge, migration, belonging, and the ways artistic practices help communities remember, reinterpret, and inhabit shared places.
- Participation, Community, and Civic Life: This theme explores the arts as forms of participation, dialogue, and civic engagement. It invites work on community arts, socially engaged practice, participatory performance, arts organizations, cultural policy, public programming, museums, galleries, education, creative citizenship, audience engagement, and the role of artistic practice in strengthening public culture and democratic life.
- Creative Practice, Performance, and Collective Imagination: This theme explores how artistic forms generate new ways of seeing, feeling, knowing, and imagining together. It invites work on visual arts, performance, music, theatre, dance, literature, film, photography, design, digital arts, interdisciplinary practice, artistic research, curatorial practice, creative methods, and the relationship between artistic experimentation and social possibility.
- The Arts, Justice, and Social Transformation: This theme explores how the arts respond to social, political, ecological, and institutional change. It invites work on activism, representation, inequality, cultural rights, Indigenous and local knowledge, environmental arts, decolonial practice, gender and identity, public pedagogy, cultural labor, institutional critique, and the arts as catalysts for social transformation.
We also welcome proposals addressing the core themes of The Arts in Society Research Network, including pedagogies of the arts, arts histories and theories, new media, technology, and the arts, and the arts in social, political, and community life.
Knowledge Experience and Format
The conference is organized as a hybrid knowledge experience, integrating in-person and online participation within a unified scholarly environment.
For in-person delegates in Galway, the conference is designed as a human-scale gathering shaped by conversation, shared inquiry, and place-based exchange. Sessions, talking circles, breaks, and informal encounters create opportunities to connect arts research with creative practice, pedagogy, cultural policy, public culture, community knowledge, and the real-world systems that shape artistic and civic life.
For online delegates, the conference is more than a remote viewing option. Accepted proposals become Presentation Pages where presenters share abstracts, media, and supporting materials. Delegates participate through live online sessions, asynchronous engagement, and discussion spaces that remain available before, during, and after the event.
Across both formats, the emphasis is on reciprocal exchange rather than one-way presentation. Whether joining in Galway or online, participants are part of a shared knowledge environment where ideas can be presented, discussed, revisited, and developed into future collaborations, publications, exhibitions, performances, teaching practices, cultural initiatives, and community projects.
Publication Pathways
Presenters are invited to further develop their conference work for possible publication in the journals of The Arts in Society Research Network, including The International Journal of the Arts in Society and The International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts.
Participants may also propose longer-form projects for The Arts in Society Book Imprint, which publishes monographs and edited collections focused on artistic practice, arts education, cultural policy, creative research, public culture, community engagement, and social change.
All accepted proposals are included in the conference proceedings, providing a formal record of the conference program and presentation abstracts. Proceedings help make presenters’ work discoverable as part of the annual knowledge record of the Research Network.
A Membership-Based Research Community
The Arts in Society Research Network is a member-based international research community connecting people who work across artistic practice, arts education, cultural policy, creative research, public culture, and social transformation.
Membership provides year-round opportunities to participate in the life of the Research Network through conferences, publications, digital resources, and the CGScholar Community. Members receive access to Research Network content and publications, conference registration benefits, opportunities for continued learning and exchange, and pathways for developing and sharing their work.</p>
The Community provides a space for members to maintain profiles, share projects, engage with other participants, revisit conference programs and recordings, and contribute to continuing conversations across the Research Network.
Membership in The Arts in Society Research Network is included in all conference Presenter Passes.
Join Us
We warmly invite you to submit a proposal and join us, either in Galway or online, for the Twenty-third International Conference on The Arts in Society.
Galway offers an exceptional setting for this conference. Taking place during the city’s summer arts season, the conference invites participants to engage the special focus not only through presentations and discussion, but also through the cultural life of the city itself. Together, we will examine how the arts shape public life — creating places of participation, sustaining cultural memory, and opening forms of collective imagination for more connected and creative futures.
Sincerely,
Daniel Tucker, Research Network Chair, Independent Scholar, United States of America
Dr. Pilar Irala-Hortal, Research Network Chair, Universidad San Jorge, Zaragoza, Spain
Dr. Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, Chief Social Scientist, Common Ground Research Networks, United States of America