Join the Futures Initiative and PublicsLab of the Graduate Center, CUNY for a free two-day conference and workshop: Graduate Education at Work in the World. The conference will bring together practitioners, students, faculty, and administrators to collectively imagine and redesign graduate education to support students, scholarship, and the public good.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this conference will now take place VIRTUALLY on February 18-19, 2021. All are welcome!

Conference Schedule at a Glance

When you register, you'll be asked to indicate which sessions you plan to attend. You are welcome to attend as many or as few as you wish. Closed captioning will be provided at all session.

For full program details, please visit the conference website.

Thursday, 18 February 2021

• 12:00 – 1:15pm EST: Welcome and Plenary Session
• 2:00 – 2:30pm EST: Lightning talks
• 2:45 – 3:15pm EST: Lightning talks
• 3:30 – 4:00pm EST: Lightning talks + wrap up

Friday, 19 February 2021

• 12:00 – 1:00pm EST: Discussion groups
• 1:30 – 2:30pm EST: Discussion groups
• 3:00-4:00pm EST: Discussion groups; closing remarks
• 4:15 – 5:15pm EST: Networking/Social Event

About the Conference:

This conference will focus on new approaches to graduate education in support of the public good, without losing sight of other key elements of higher education reform—including labor practices, student debt, efforts toward improving diversity and inclusion, shared governance, pedagogical training, and more. Participants will generate ideas, share best practices, consider difficult questions, and work toward new models for graduate education that support an array of creative, flexible career paths.

Our premise is that graduate education can lead to engaging and often unexpected opportunities—but this should not be left entirely to chance and the initiative of individual students. Moreover, deep connections between scholars and society can be mutually beneficial, as scholars have much to learn from communities of practice and other knowledge sources while contributing their own expertise. However, for these relationships to grow and thrive, graduate education must shift from a reproductive model to a generative one. We ask: How can our institutions reshape graduate education to support different futures? How, in so doing, may we also serve multiple publics and communities and engage in the most pressing problems of our time?

We will be asking how, in any field, one learns to translate specialized skills and knowledge for different audiences—a skill vital to academe and beyond. How can scholarly research have an impact within the communities students care about? What forms of material and intellectual resources, institutional requirements, thoughtful mentorship, flexible curricular design, and co-curricular experiences help to shape future lives, at work and in communities? Together, we hope to envision and champion an academy that supports multiple futures and contributes to the development of meaningful relationships between scholars and society.

For more details, please visit https://futuresinitiative.org/graduate-education-at-work-in-the-world/.