Rooting in Relationship: Growing and Sustaining Ethical Partnerships
July 25-27, 2026
“An aspen grove, though it appears as a series of distinct trees, is united by a rhizomatic root system. The trees appear to be separate but are integrally linked in a tight relation with each other. In the same way, we aspire toward a vision of engaged scholarship rooted in profound relationality with each other in this scholarly community and with our partners on and beyond our campuses.”
(Aspen Collective Statement, 2025, p. 587)
Please save the date for the 2026 Engaged Communication Scholarship Conference, scheduled for July 25-27 in Fort Collins, Colorado. As noted in the Aspen Collective Statement (2025), what unites the practitioners and scholars who gather at this conference is a shared commitment to “doing collaborative work with (not on or about) communities and organizations to build trust across lines of difference, bridge theory and practice, and address situated problems to co-create better social worlds” (pp. 581-582). Join us this summer to contribute to these conversations.
As institutions of higher education face heightened scrutiny and intensified public skepticism about the value of academic work, and as political polarization reshapes the conditions of civic life, engaged communication scholarship confronts both profound challenges and urgent possibilities. This year’s theme, Rooting in relationship: Growing and sustaining ethical partnerships, centers the tensions of doing publicly accountable, community-grounded, and collaborative scholarship in a climate increasingly marked by distrust, constraint, and ideological division. Together, we will examine how engaged scholars can grow and sustain ethical partnerships and do meaningful work under these conditions. The conference provides a space not only to analyze current pressures, but to imagine strategies of resilience, reciprocity, solidarity, and trust.
We welcome the submission of projects-in-progress at http://www.aspenengaged.org/submit by April 15, 2026. At the Conference, selected projects will be presented in a highly interactive discussion format in small table settings. These proposals should raise problems, questions, dilemmas, and tensions that we can wrestle with together. We welcome projects at all stages of development, as we hope to center ongoing challenges related to engaged work, including but not limited to: entering the field, relationship building, creating participative spaces, disseminating engaged products, and measuring impacts. In previous conferences, the most interesting conversations have seemed to center on problems that people have encountered or are encountering in their work.
We also welcome participation without a formal submission. Check the conference website for registration details in the coming months: https://www.aspenengaged.org/
