November 12–14, 2025
2025 AICAD Symposium—“Engaging Values”
November 12–14, 2025
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn
The AICAD Symposium is an annual gathering dedicated to advancing teaching and learning in art and design. Pratt Institute will host the 2025 symposium, bringing together educators, researchers, students, and thought leaders from the fields of art and design. AICAD welcomes participation in the Symposium and session proposals from members and non-members alike.
Call for proposals is now open: submit here.
The 2025 symposium considers the role of values in art and design education and practice. The word “value” can mean many things, from what is admired and prioritized individually and collectively to institutional values, financial values, the value of a college education, critical thinking, or media literacy. In all of these senses, values drive our decision-making as artists, creators, and educators. Students from around the world bring their own personal and cultural values as they enter our classrooms and institutions, and our teaching may present them with still more value systems. On a foundational level, in studios, instructors also describe value as the lightness or darkness of a color as one of the fundamental elements of art, along with color, line, shape, form, space, and texture. Values guide policies and decisions that facilitate or hinder access, affordability, and prospects following graduation. How do students, educators, and creators navigate these overlapping or conflicting values? Why and in what situations might we prioritize certain values, and what impacts can that have on the work we produce, the people we become, and the communities we are a part of?
Within the context of increasing social and political polarization, ecological catastrophe, technological disruption, and precarity of the arts and higher education, the conference organizers invite contributions that explore a range of sites and situations where art and design can affirm, challenge, contest, clarify, and/or reconstruct our notions of values.
What can art and design contribute to our world today? How can we engage students, collaborators, and the public through our work? How can art and design facilitate conversation and creative approaches to challenging perspectives, differences, or complex problems? What skills do we need to foster understanding, collaboration, and change across these environments? How can reflection on values help guide our use of new technologies and create a better, more sustainable world?
The conference organizers invite a wide range of proposals that engage with these and related questions through one or more of the following program tracks:
Pedagogy—What are the values inherent to an art and design education? This track invites a variety of talks and interactive sessions that help advance our teaching practices in support of student success.
Public—How can art and design engage the public in questions of value and place and embrace the current moment? This track invites us to consider social justice, political engagement, cities, the role of our work in the world, and what models for all kinds of engagement might look like.
Research – How does research reflect our values? This track invites reflection on our practices as researchers, as well as how that research speaks back into the world.
Inter / Multi / Transdisciplinarity – How are disciplines sites of values, and how might they come into conflict when they meet? This track invites us to consider values in our fields and what happens as those boundaries overlap, blur, and start to borrow from one another.
Proposals for sessions may take the form of:
–Talks and presentations (slots for 45 minutes or two 20-minute presentations)
–Roundtables and panels (60 minutes with multiple short presentations)
–Unpacking my course (syllabus slam) (30 minutes, multiple presenters)
–Interactive workshops (90 minutes, individual or co-presenters)
–Demonstrations (45 minutes, individual or co-presenters)
The deadline for submission is May 16, 2025. Proposers will be notified of their acceptance by June 15, 2025.
