Common Ground is committed to building new kinds of knowledge communities, innovative in their messages and their media.
Our messages
Heritage knowledge systems are characterised by vertical separations—of discipline, professional association, institution and country. Common Ground takes some of the pivotal ideas and challenges of our time and builds knowledge communities which cut horizontally across legacy knowledge structures. Sustainability, diversity, learning, the future of the humanities, the nature of interdisciplinarity, the place of the arts in society, technology’s connections with knowledge, the changing role of the university—these are deeply important questions of our time which require interdisciplinary thinking, global conversations and cross-institutional intellectual collaborations.
Common Ground is a meeting place for ideas. But the strength of these does not come from finding common denominators. Rather, the power and resilience of these ideas is that they are presented and tested in a shared space where differences can meet and safely connect—differences of perspective, experience, knowledge base, methodology, geographical or cultural origins and institutional affiliation. These are the kinds of vigorous and sympathetic academic milieus in which productive deliberations about the future can be held. These are the places of intellectual interaction and imagination that our future deserves.
Our media
Common Ground creates knowledge communities which meet in person at annual conferences. Community members stay connected virtually during the year between conferences through formal, academic publishing processes (peer review journal publishing and books), and informal conversations which continue though blogs and monthly email newsletters. The conferences create as many ways of speaking as possible, encouraging every participant to contribute their knowledge and perspectives. The journal and book publishing processes, enlist the peer community as arbiter of quality, and use Common Ground’s own, pathbreaking social networking software.