Center for Critical Inquiry: Overview of CCI Workshops and Panels

The CCI’s mission is to advance interdisciplinary inquiry, community, and scholarship in the liberal arts at UNCG. To do so we have designed several program structures that fuse on line and real life cross-disciplinary scholarship. The Summer Fellowships are intended to stimulate the planning of two of the CCI’s main program structures: Workshops and Panels. Please refer to them in your Summer Fellowship proposal. Summer Fellowship funding will usually not involve all of the participants in planned programs. Rather, two or three people who receive funding during the summer will define the topic, gather materials, shape the interdisciplinary character of the program, and identify a larger group of interested colleagues who they encourage to participate during the regular term. Below is a description of the CCI’s theme for the 2009-2010 academic year and of the formats of Workshops and Panels.

“Individuality, Community, Sustainability, and Democracy”

We hope to initiate a collection of interdisciplinary dialogs among scholars interested in the problem of sustaining our fragile democracy and our planet in the complex world of global decision-making. Healthy democracy requires a social, cultural and physical environment, an ecological, interpersonal, and discursive field that supports and sustains life as well as patience and intellectual vitality. This requires achieving a balance between the individual and the collective, but Unfortunately, what we do as collectives and as individuals sometimes puts this field at risk. If modern democracy is to be sustained, citizens must engage in meaningful discourse about just solutions to the conflict between communal values supported by the majority and the free and vocal defense of individual rights. In today’s world, these tensions are aggravated by the voracious appetite of global capital accumulation. No longer just the responsibility of individual nations, modern democracy’s goal of human freedom and freedom of the market now meet on a global field. Fundamental questions of individual health, education, prosperity and well-being are influenced by multicultural forces that complicate our notion of a communal good. Can citizenship, civil society and respect for the dignity of the individual be sustained in multicultural communities on a changing planet whose societies are driven by global economic forces? These issues can be approached best through the convergence of many disciplines. Please join us in addressing them in ways framed by your own interests and expertise and those of your collegues in other disciplines. Though we are open to all topics, funding priority will be given to proposals that bring an interdisciplinary perspective to the problems of sustaining democracy and our planet in an era of global citizenship.

Though we are open to all topics, funding priority will be given to proposals that bring an interdisciplinary perspective to an exploration of the legacies of Lincoln and Darwin.

1. Workshops:

Workshops usually involve three to six scholars engaged in extended collaborative scholarship focused on a specific topic and organized by a Coordinator. Each scholar addresses a particular dimension of the topic from a distinct disciplinary perspective. The Workshop’s coordinator will gather the interested group, and work with the CCI administration to implement the program’s on line interface. The group may invite off campus visiting scholars to participate in the Workshop online. Most Workshop last semester, though projects may be extended in subsequent semesters. Workshop groups “meet” regularly online and in person at intervals determined by the participants. Various works (films, readings, artwork, photographs, source documents) relevant to the topic are gathered on line, along with other tools for collaborative work, and these eventually become a multimedia library maintained on the CCI web pages. This can be used as an archive or for continued collaboration among Workshop participants.

2. Panels:

Panels are roundtable discussions that are moderated by one member and that present the perspectives of a number of distinct disciplines on a selected topic. Panels usually involve six to ten scholars, who meet for a shorter period than Workshops. They function much like symposia at professional meetings, except that in CCI Panels scholars bring distinct disciplinary perspectives to bear on their topic. We encourage Panels that focus on topics of current social import. Panels will usually begin with an open discussion (a face to face lunch or a debate), which then continues in a more structured fashion. As programs, Panels are of shorter duration than Workshops, typically occurring over a period of two to three days, and they are open to the entire university community. Summer Fellowships may support the planning of Panels by two or three people who then organize the event for a larger group.

Other Program Formats

The CCI also supports the development of reading groups and informal discussions. However, Summer Fellowships will only be awarded to groups interested in developing Workshops or Panels.