In addition to themed paper panels and workshops, the symposium includes a wider set of live online sessions that create opportunities for exchange across the event as a whole.
Live plenary sessions bring participants together around a shared theme or question of broad relevance to the symposium community.
Creating space for more open and reflective discussion among participants with the Plenary Speaker
Talking Circles provide a more dialogic format for collective reflection and exchange.
Dedicated live workshops will support PhD students and early career researchers, including sessions focused on research development, academic pathways, and participation in wider scholarly communities.
Live publication-focused sessions will offer practical guidance on developing work beyond the symposium, including advice on revision, submission, publication pathways, and presenting work to different scholarly and professional audiences.
The symposium will also include a working group convened to draft a “state of the field” statement. This group would bring participants into a more collaborative process of identifying key questions, emerging concerns, and future directions in the field.
The format of Imagining Creative Worlds is intended to support multiple modes of creative and scholarly exchange. Participants may engage through formal presentation, visual display, themed panel discussion, collaborative workshop, plenary dialogue, or working-group participation. Together, these formats create a symposium environment that is at once structured and open: structured enough to support focused exchange, and open enough to accommodate a range of disciplinary approaches, media forms, and creative practices.
Because the symposium is online, it also supports a more continuous mode of participation than a single scheduled session alone. Asynchronous contributions remain available for viewing and discussion, while live sessions create moments of shared attention and exchange. In this way, the symposium aims to connect immediacy and reflection within a single online environment.
20 minutes (Live): A focused research presentation organized with related papers into a live-themed panel session, followed by discussion. These sessions take place on Zoom in US Central Time and are designed to bring individual papers into conversation around a shared topic or question.
45 minutes (Live): A real-time online workshop designed for active participation, discussion, and exchange, including audience engagement and Q&A. This format is especially suited to collaborative, practice-based, pedagogical, or methods-oriented work.
20 minutes (On demand): A pre-recorded presentation with supporting digital media, made available on demand through the symposium platform and accompanied by an online discussion board for participant exchange.
On demand: A single-page digital poster designed for concise visual presentation of work in progress, emerging ideas, creative projects, or key findings, with opportunities for online discussion and feedback.
Audience Passes are designed for participants who wish to engage with the symposium without submitting a proposal. Audience members have access to live online sessions, available asynchronous presentations and posters, and discussion across the symposium platform, making it possible to participate in the wider exchange of the event without presenting work.