2024–25 lectures focus on the theme “Reimagine”

The Oregon Humanities Center’s (OHC) 2024-25 endowed lectureship series will focus on the theme of “Reimagine.” This series will highlight the original human superpower: our mind’s capacity to transform the world around us via imaginative thought.  

To reimagine is to reconceive. Starting from the most basic, established principles and distinctions, reimaginers set their intelligence, their experiences, their histories, and the fruits of their research free to play, turning dilemmas and situations we think we know over and around, probing their crevices, their sticky points, and their soft spots, tugging at their loose ends. The mindset of reimagine opens alternatives, options, and possibilities that may have been overlooked. It prompts new questions and spawns new approaches to the now, the yesterday, the tomorrow. 

The speakers in this series will represent a range of disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds, but what they will have in common is a commitment to engaging problems, challenges, and obstacles as generative prompts to creativity: to re-envisioning and reimagining.  

At this crucial moment in our history, we need to ask: How might we use the power of human imagination—and reimagination—to engage creatively and critically with the circumstances of our lives? What new insights or research will be uncovered in the reimagining process? And, what new, more equitable and nourishing pathways can be forged?