This theme explores the role of images and visual forms in shaping perception, knowledge, memory, and cultural life. It invites work on photography, film, digital imaging, visual art, visual spectatorship, representation, and the politics of visibility.
It also welcomes inquiry into how images circulate across platforms, institutions, and publics, and how visual practices help construct social, aesthetic, and historical worlds.
This theme focuses on creative work as a process of making. It welcomes contributions on artistic practice, craft, design, experimentation, embodiment, technique, material form, and the relationship between ideas and production.
It invites discussion of how works are conceived, developed, revised, and realized, as well as how material choices, methods, tools, and forms of labor shape creative outcomes and meanings.
This theme considers the ways creative works are communicated, mediated, published, circulated, and received. It invites research on media ecologies, publishing, communication systems, narrative forms, platform cultures, audiences, authorship, and dissemination.
It also opens questions about how creative and cultural works move across public, scholarly, institutional, and commercial contexts, and how these movements shape meaning, access, and value.
This theme addresses the public life of culture through exhibition, curation, interpretation, collecting, and institutional framing. It welcomes work on museums, galleries, archives, heritage, audience engagement, public programming, and the politics of display.
It also invites reflection on how institutions shape cultural memory and public understanding, and how curatorial and interpretive practices create new relationships among objects, stories, communities, and shared worlds.
Imagining Creative Worlds brings together Common Ground Research Networks concerned with the making, circulation, interpretation, and public life of creative forms.
The participating Networks connect work across the arts, image-making, design, media, publishing, libraries, museums, and cultural practice. Together, they create a shared space for fields that often overlap in practice but are separated by professional, institutional, or disciplinary boundaries.
For 2026, The Arts in Society Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape this year’s emphasis while inviting exchange across the wider creative ecology of Common Ground