2025 Imagining America National Gathering

View the Main Event Webpage here.

In partnership with New Mexico State University and a local Steering Committee, Imagining America (IA) invites participants to gather in Las Cruces, New Mexico for the 2025 IA National Gathering. Marking the 25th anniversary of Imagining America, this gathering celebrates and conjures passages: of time, texts, pathways, and portals that IA has created for public and engaged scholars in the past, present, and imaginable future; and of the life-sustaining ecological, physical, intellectual, and spiritual passages that artists, organizers, and scholars provide as a way forward in the turbulent currents of our time.

The 2025 IA National Gathering invites participants to reflect on the ways we provide passage for one another, create havens for safety, and practice connective ways of being together that fortify us for the journey ahead. We especially welcome attention to how art making, creative culture, performance, storytelling, and testimonios provide passage for mutual understanding and collective liberation and make it possible to move towards the seemingly impossible. We invite you to consider the tensions between safe passage and forced passage, passages of birth and death, and to consider what we must disavow and leave behind so that we do not reproduce troubled pasts and presents. The work of providing passage is not easy and none of it is guaranteed – havens sometimes only provide temporary refuge, belonging is often determined by othering, movements seldom see the full realization of the worlds they helped bring into being. Yet, a proliferation of creative, caring passages is necessary in envisioning and making a different world.

Please select the registration type that best matches your professional and financial situation. Being honest in this selection allows us to subsidize reduced rates for students, community members, and independent creatives and organizers.

• IA Member: You are faculty or staff at an IA member higher education institution. Not sure if your institution is a member? Find out here.
• Non-Member Higher Education: You are faculty or staff at a non-IA-member higher education institution, or you work in a higher education adjacent professional organization. If you would like to join IA now to receive discounted member registration please email us at [email protected].
• Sustainer: You work at a private business or foundation. Or, you are an individual who can afford the full sustainer rate.

If the registration types listed above do not apply, please select from the following reduced registration rates that are designed to support participation from our diverse network of collaborators.

• Advocate: You work at an organization, governmental body, non-profit, or independently with resources to attend conferences.
• Friend: You are an independent creative or organizer, or you work at a small, grassroots organization with limited resources to attend conferences.
• Student: You are an enrolled student at any educational institution.

This year, you can add an optional event on Sunday October 5 available for up to 50 IA National Gathering registrants at an additional cost. Please add the Sunday Detour ticket to your Eventbrite purchase along with your registration ticket.

“Along the River and to the Wall Detour” is a special post-IA National Gathering experience offered at an additional $120 fee for 50 participants (first-come, first-served), with lunch and dinner provided. Please add the Sunday Detour ticket to your Eventbrite purchase along with your registration ticket. This experience, organized by Dr. Cynthia Bejarano at New Mexico State University, will depart from the NMSU campus after the closing plenary on Sunday October 5 and return that evening at approximately 7:00pm. The route will follow historic highway 28 along critical agricultural landscapes and the Camino Real Route to the Doña Ana Community College (DACC) branch campus at Sunland Park, New Mexico. Participants will meet and listen to community members and educators discussing their lived experiences near the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The Detour continues at the unique Ardovino’s Desert Crossing Italian family restaurant for dinner and an open, creative reflection moment to “speak to the wall” before the chartered bus returns to Las Cruces.

Host or Publisher Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life