November 2, 2015
University Auditorium
Timothy Eatman and Scott Peters (Co-Directors, Imagining America)
How can universities and community organizations advance democracy in the work of imagining? In this interactive talk, Timothy Eatman and Scott Peters discussed their work with a broad alliance of organizations — including the White House Office of Public Engagement and the U.S. Department of Education — to promote higher education as an agent of democracy. In particular, they will discuss how the arts, humanities, and design disciplines offer methods, approaches, and knowledge to build lasting partnerships with community organizations. Though their backgrounds are in educational sociology, Eatman and Peters are co-Directors of Imagining America, a national consortium of universities (including UF) dedicated to publicly engaged scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design. This lecture relates to the modules Sharing and Governing the Good Life in the UF freshman shared experience: What is the Good Life?
Speaker Bios
Tim Eatman has provided leadership on key research and action initiatives that have shaped regional, national and global conversations about publicly engaged scholarship. As co-principal investigator of the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, he co-wrote its seminal report, “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University” (2008) with IA’s founding director, Julie Ellison, and organized a series of regional meetings with Campus Compact that involved more than 60 higher education institutions. This work on faculty rewards developed into a second national study by Eatman on the career aspirations and decisions of graduate students and early-career academic professionals who identify as publicly engaged scholar. This summer for a second consecutive year he was a faculty member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success. He serves on the leadership team of IA’s collaborative action-research project with Columbia University Law School’s Center for Institutional and Social Change on diversity and engagement, and will soon begin a two-year appointment as an Honorary Professor at the University of South Africa.
As a professor in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University, Scott Peters has established an innovative teaching and research program that interweaves democratic theory and political and educational philosophy with historical and narrative methods. His research agenda centers on a critical study of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of higher education’s off-campus engagement work. His most recent book, Democracy and Higher Education: Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement (Michigan State University Press, 2010), contributes to a new line of research on the task of strengthening and defending higher education’s positive roles in and for a democratic society. An internationally recognized scholar, Peters has designed and pursued independent research projects with significant support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Kettering Foundation. He is on the leadership team of a national five-year initiative, funded with a $5 million grant from USDA, called “Food Dignity: Action Research on Engaging Food Insecure Communities and Universities in Building Sustainable Community Food Systems.”
This visit was organized by the UF Imagining America Working Group in collaboration with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of the Arts, College of Design, Construction and Planning, UF Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) Extension, and IUF1000 What is the Good Life?.