Tides of Transition: Restoring Collective Spirit in Troubled Times

Reflecting on the importance of transitions – from political crises to global climate change, and personal identity to organizational transformation – this call for participation invites proposals that share stories, research, creative works, and community practices exploring the complex process of transitioning away from systems of fear and domination and towards restoring collective spirit. 

Tides of Transition: Restoring Collective Spirit in Troubled Times calls us to re-story and honor the places, knowledges, relationships, and ecologies that have been made broken through centuries of violence and abandonment, and the current intensifying fear and repression. We know that our communities are tired, and we know that being together revives our collective spirit, giving us the strength and inspiration we need in troubled times. In this moment of upheaval, the 2026 IA National Gathering draws participants to Davis, CA in the spirit of mending the roots of our connections, and to “awaken,” as Buddhist monk and activist Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches, “from the illusion of our separateness.” Transitions mark and name processes of change experienced individually, such as gender, career, or life and death transitions, and collectively during shifts in economic, ecological, political, and global systems. Transitions are experienced dynamically and cyclically; they ebb and flow like the tides, constantly changing and yet always returning. It is hard to see the end of a transition from the beginning or in the middle, and often this requires that we let go of control over perfect outcomes. Transitions invite us to embrace the unknown and accept that we will be changed in the process, while keeping a keen eye on how we organize that emergent change together.

In refusing and retreating from the extractive and violent imaginary that has birthed the dominant US political and social world, what other ways of being, thinking, and doing are we turning towards in our work and communities to restore collective spirit? Here in the region surrounding UC Davis, we feed our critical imaginations with a transition towards restored tule marshes in the Sacramento Delta, with cultural fires in grasslands, with salmon-rich waters no longer dammed, and through agricultural harvests that nourish us. Critically, how might we learn to live, love, and thrive in landscapes that might be beyond full repair? For Wintun/Maidu culture-bearer Diana Almendariz, who has been working to restore the lost wetlands in the Yolo bioregion where UC Davis is located, restoration is an impossibility given the levels of extraction that this epicenter of the gold rush, gravel rush, and industrial agriculture has seen in the last two centuries. She asks: how might we come together as allies to acknowledge past harms, and forge new futures by weaving together knowledges and traditions, old and new, for collective thriving? 

The 2026 IA National Gathering also marks a transition within Imagining America, as this occasion is the last gathering organized by the IA-UC Davis team before IA moves to a new home campus in July 2027 (host announcement in summer 2026). At this moment in a natural cycle of transition for IA, we will celebrate the good work we have done together over the past decade and join the new host in dreaming up the exciting possibilities to come.

Tides of Transition: Restoring Collective Spirit in Troubled Times seeks your stories of transition – the generative beginnings full of possibility, or the mucky middles where it is difficult to know what the future holds, or the places of arrival that are born of great collective change. This call for participation invites examples of critical imagination, collective care, intergenerational knowledges, creative practice and action, or other activities that demonstrate how the enduring spirit of the expansive Imagining America community (students, artists, educators, organizers and leaders, cultural workers, scholars) thrives through transition.