FINDING CENTER: LANDSCAPE & VALUES (conference theme)

From our vantage in the middle of the great North American continent, the theme Finding Center is easily understood as a multiple entendre. First and foremost, centering is a relational metaphor implying spatial, visual and phenomenal geographies. It can suggest moral, political, social, and economic centers, or "heartland" themes.  It captures the disciplinary sense of returning to core, to basics and fundamentals. Centering is also the place where we hope to find ourselves'to be centered means to be graceful, simple, and grounded.

With only a little effort, the conference theme can also imply a dialectic, back-and-forth dynamic between a center and its opposite dimension'the frontier' and all that is marginal, peripheral, innovative, and exciting.  'Center' may thus invoke the tensions between insiders and outsiders, between norms and deviations, and every sort of gradation to the edge.

The University itself is a type of center, a value-laden symbol of intellectual aspiration and community in a world that is rapidly changing.  Centers shift; politics shift.  Values that are possible to tolerate or even imagine today, may shift tomorrow.  Depending on what it is possible to measure, we may find multiple centers, each having an impact on all the others.

Participants in CELA 2012 are welcome to address the range of gradations and values inherent in the conference theme in a broad or focused fashion. The theme challenges us to provide non-traditional social metrics for what we do, or assess the values of pedagogy, research, service, and activism in higher education, yet may also accommodate time-honored and elemental values such as 'health, safety, and welfare."

In addition to the vibrant and informal networking that always takes place at CELA meetings, we anticipate a range of interpretations, perspectives, and debates in the form of posters, presentations, papers, and panel discussions.

With all this in mind, the purpose of the CELA 2012 annual meeting is to re-evaluate notions of what is 'central' for higher education, for landscape architecture, and for the direction of contemporary life.  There are interesting implications for CELA in resetting the margins of our field, of our influence, of our interests'as well as resetting our goals at several scales'local, regional, national and global. Whether from a central perspective looking at the horizon, or from a more liminal perspective peering in, we hope this conference will generate a critical and imaginative focus on the broad range of values expressed in our curricula, as well as in our various fields of practice. Come and join the conversation.

Registration Questions Only:
Michelle Chappell
Online & Continuing Education
University of Illinois
Ph: 217-244-7657
mchapp@illinois.edu

All Other Questions:
Lindsay Ennis
Dept. of Landscape Architecture
University of Illinois
Ph: 217-333-0176
ladept@illinois.edu