Imagining Sustainable Worlds brings together several Common Ground Research Networks whose work intersects with questions of sustainability, environment, infrastructure, design, technology, food systems, mobility, and place.
Each year, one participating Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s particular emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Sustainable Worlds. For 2026, the On Sustainability Research Network is the host Network.
The symposium creates a shared online space where these related but distinct fields can meet in conversation, encouraging new connections across research areas that are often separated by discipline, profession, or institution.
Imagining Sustainable Worlds is one of four annual online symposia in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, alongside Imagining Creative Worlds, Imagining Human Worlds, and Imagining Social Worlds.
Each symposium is designed as a concentrated forum for emerging questions, interdisciplinary engagement, and sustained discussion around a unifying theme. The series also foregrounds emerging scholars, creating space for new voices to enter, shape, and redefine conversations within and across fields.
As part of Common Ground’s wider publishing and research ecosystem, the symposium connects dialogue with publication pathways. Presenters are invited to develop their work beyond the event through journals, books, and other scholarly outputs, supporting both individual research development and the broader formation of fields around urgent questions of sustainability, futures, and collective life.
Imagining Sustainable Worlds is also part of Common Ground’s ongoing work in knowledge experience: exploring how research communities gather, exchange, document, publish, and extend their work through connected digital environments.
Hosted by the Common Ground Media Lab, the symposium is both an event and a practical experiment in scholarly communication. Using CGScholar, Common Ground’s in-house designed and built platform, the symposium brings together live sessions, asynchronous participation, presentation pages, discussion, publication pathways, and collective outcomes in one shared environment.
This technology is not simply a delivery tool. It is part of the intellectual and practical work of the symposium: testing how online formats can support deeper participation, make emerging scholarship more visible, and help research communities define new questions, build new fields, and sustain conversations beyond the dates of the event.
