Judy Baca Speaks at USC's 2008 National "Imagining America" Conference
About Imagining America
Imagining America is a national consortium of colleges and universities
committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design.
Public scholarship joins serious intellectual endeavor with a
commitment to public practice and public consequence. It includes:
•Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;
•Intellectual work that produces a public good;
•Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;
Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself,
including the development of new programs and research on the successes
of such efforts.
Imagining America (IA) recognizes the reciprocal
benefits of community-based scholarship and practice. Communities
benefit from the engagement of faculty and students whose research and
participation support their efforts.
Annual conferences are crucial to the work that Imagining
America does. These events allow public scholars in the cultural
disciplines to form a network, to share best practices, to visit
project sites, and to gain inspiration and motivation for their work.
The conferences take place in a workshop format.
These conferences are also the site where the network outside IA’s consortium comes to gather and work.
Judy Baca’s Keynote Address
On Friday, October 3rd 2008 Judy Baca delivered the Imagining America Keynote Address, entitled “La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Creating Sites of Public Memory.” In it she discussed her legacy; the half-mile Great Wall of Los Angeles, “the tattoo on the scar where the river once ran,” as well as SPARC’s additional plethora of projects both past and future. The video of her address is available below.
Questions and Answers from the Conference: