The University of Kansas is convening a symposium that brings together internationally recognized thought leaders on the subject of critical engagement. This conference seeks opportunities to address the most pressing challenges of our time. These practitioners are being highlighted more and more at conferences, exhibits, and literature. These venues, however, serve little more than to catalogue pragmatic responses to an economically divisive world. There exist few attempts to investigate the theoretical underpinnings of such work. Our project seeks to translate these action-based community engagement efforts into interdisciplinary and theoretically-based scholarship.
 
This symposium hopes to bring together a group of scholars to establish a framework for the critical  inquiry and independent review of the public impact of socially engaged design. The objective of the symposium is to continue to shed new light on the  critical discussion around whether one is able to engage society/community/individual through the production of the built environment. The symposium will gather a group of scholars, practitioners, critics,  and historians to discuss different aspects, forms, and features of social engagement that have developed across time and regions.