Presenting my paper, Worlds World Worlds, for the Imagining Creative Worlds Symposium, 11–12 November 2026, Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, Common Ground Research Networks, University of Illinois, IL
Imagining Creative Worlds Symposium, 11–12 November 2026, Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, Common Ground Research Networks, University of Illinois, IL
Worlds World Worlds takes its title and conceptual grounding from Donna Haraway’s passage: “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories” (35). I add, ‘It matters what Images Image Images’. Urgent political and ecological conditions demand renewed attention to how we collectively imagine possible futures. At the same time, visual culture has become increasingly saturated, with images consumed, circulated, and generated at speed through online platforms and AI image production. This paper explores collage as a way of collectively re-imagining relationships between images and the worlds they represent and construct. By overlapping popular knowledge source material, placing found images side by side, and cropping and fragmenting them, collages ask how images shape our understanding of reality, and how shifting those relationships may in turn shift perception itself. I will present a series of direct comparisons between historical and contemporary examples of collage, including my own practice, highlighting collage's distinctive capacity to imagine alternative worlds and more promising futures. The artistic spectrum will include Hannah Höch, Max Ernst, Toshiko Okanoue, Martha Rosler, Wangechi Mutu, and Shelly Niro— all artists who push the limits of how we think about and approach images and the worlds they build. As Anna Tsing asks: “What if we imagined landscapes not as backdrops for human action, but as active participants in shaping worlds?” Within this context, collage creates space for imagining more collective and hopeful futures for our world.
Imagining Creative Worlds creates a space for dialogue across artistic, visual, design, media, and curatorial practices. It is intended to bring together participants whose work engages the making, mediation, interpretation, and public circulation of cultural forms. Broad enough to connect multiple modes of creative inquiry, the symposium focuses on how worlds are represented, crafted, exhibited, communicated, and reimagined through aesthetic and cultural practice
Theme 1: Image, Representation, and Visual Culture
Theme 2: Creative Practice, Materiality, and Making
Theme 3: Media, Communication, and Cultural Form
Theme 4: Museums, Curation, and Public Culture
Research Networks: The Arts in Society; The Image; Design Principles & Practices; Communication & Media Studies; Information, Medium & Society – The Publishing Studies Research Network; The Inclusive Museum
Hosted by the Common Ground Media Lab
Imagining Creative Worlds is also part of Common Ground’s ongoing work in knowledge experience: exploring how research communities gather, exchange, document, publish, and extend their work through connected digital environments.
Hosted by the Common Ground Media Lab, the symposium is both an event and a practical experiment in scholarly communication. Using CGScholar, Common Ground’s in-house designed and built platform, the symposium brings together live sessions, asynchronous participation, presentation pages, discussion, publication pathways, and collective outcomes in one shared environment.
This technology is not simply a delivery tool. It is part of the intellectual and practical work of the symposium: testing how online formats can support deeper participation, make emerging scholarship more visible, and help research communities define new questions, build new fields, and sustain conversations beyond the dates of the event.