A Culture of Care and Collaboration
Common Ground conferences have featured renowned thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Juliet Mitchell, Tariq Ali, Jack Goody, and Graça Machel alongside early-career researchers who bring new energy and ideas. This intergenerational mix defines our ethos: the strength of an idea lies not in its prestige but in its capacity to inspire exchange. Our gatherings cultivate productive dialogue between experience and innovation.
Each conference is designed to accommodate multiple ways of presenting knowledge—traditional papers, workshops, colloquia, creative showcases, and innovation sessions—encouraging experimentation and collaboration. Talking Circles open every event, setting a tone of shared inquiry that continues through plenaries, discussions, and informal encounters. Many conferences are bilingual in English and Spanish, reflecting our commitment to linguistic diversity and accessibility, while the structure and atmosphere promote warmth, respect, and sustained collegiality.
Our hybrid model, developed in the 2020s integrates in-person and asynchronous online participation, ensuring that our conferences remain accessible and resilient while preserving the immediacy of human connection. Through digital microsites, every presentation—onsite or online—becomes part of a lasting archive where delegates can revisit sessions, exchange ideas, and extend collaborations. Each conference now lives on as part of the broader Knowledge Experience, transforming an event into a continuous, collective resource.
Our conferences are built on the belief that scholarship is sustained not only by ideas but by relationships. We value the informal moments—the conversations between sessions, the shared meals, the sense of belonging to a community of thinkers—as much as the formal presentations. These encounters create the human fabric that endures beyond the event itself and anchors our work in empathy, respect, and shared purpose.