Organizer Profile
Common Ground Research Networks (CGRN)

Common Ground Research Networks (CGRN)

Champaign, Illinois, United States of America

Founded in 1984, Common Ground is committed to building new kinds of knowledge communities, innovative in their media and forward thinking in their messages.

Heritage knowledge systems are characterized by vertical separations--of discipline, professional association, institution, and country. Common Ground Research Networks takes some of the pivotal challenges of Their time and curates research networks which cut horizontally across legacy knowledge structures. Sustainability, diversity, learning, the future of humanities, the nature of interdisciplinarity, the place of the arts in society, technology's connections with knowledge, the changing role of the university--these are deeply important questions of their time which require interdisciplinary thinking, global conversations, and cross-institutional intellectual collaborations.

Common Ground Research Networks are meeting places for people, ideas, and dialogue. However, the strength of ideas does not come from finding common denominators. Rather, the power and resilience of these ideas is that they are presented and tested in a shared space where differences can meet and safely connect--differences of perspective, experience, knowledge base, methodology, geographical or cultural origins, and institutional affiliation. These are the kinds of vigorous and sympathetic academic milieus in which the most productive deliberations about the future can be held. They strive to create places of intellectual interaction and imagination that their future deserves.
CONFERENCES AND COURSES