Common Ground Research Networks

How can cities and communities shape more sustainable futures on their own terms?

We are pleased to welcome Geci Karuri-Sebina as a Plenary Speaker at the Twenty-Third International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability.

Karuri-Sebina is a scholar-practitioner whose work brings together urban planning, governance, innovation, and futures thinking. Her research asks how communities—particularly across Africa—can move beyond inherited models to imagine and create more inclusive, locally grounded futures.

Join us at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 20–22 January 2027.

Learn more through the link in our bio.

SPATIAL REPRESENTATION AS RESEARCH: Producing, Interpreting, and Circulating Knowledge

📍 Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
🗓 14–15 April 2027
🌐 Hybrid participation via CGScholar Event (KX)

The Seventeenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment invites researchers, designers, architects, planners, and artists to explore how spatial representation operates not simply as illustration—but as research.

Drawings, models, diagrams, maps, simulations, and digital visualizations are powerful tools for generating, interpreting, and communicating knowledge about the built environment. They shape how we imagine cities, design infrastructures, and understand spatial futures.

Join an international community examining how representation itself becomes a form of inquiry across architecture, planning, design, and spatial practice.

🔗 Submit your proposal; link in bio:

Congratulations to Dongniya Xiu, Connie Dyar, Gabriela Fonseca Pereira, and Dana Vaux, recipients of the 2025 International Award for Excellence from The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design.

Their award-winning article, “Multigenerational Living: Designing for Chinese Immigrant Families in the United States,” examines how culturally responsive design can better support the relationships, routines, and evolving needs of multigenerational households.

The International Award for Excellence recognizes the highest-ranked article published in the journal during the preceding year, as selected through the peer-review process.

Mountains are more than landmarks. They hold histories: geological, ecological, cultural, and political.

In “Six Peaks Speak: Unsettling Legacies in Southern Dja Dja Wurrung Country”, Barry Golding, with Clive Willman, traces the stories of six iconic peaks in Central Victoria, Australia. Bringing together First Nations knowledge, historical archives, geology, ecology, and community experience, the book asks how these mountains—and the Country surrounding them—have been understood, altered, and managed.

At its heart is a larger question: how might confronting unsettled histories help us build more respectful relationships with Country, landscape, and one another?

Discover the book through the link in our bio.

A look back at the Twenty-First International Conference on the Arts in Society in Athens, Greece.

Hosted by the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the conference brought together artists, researchers, educators, and cultural practitioners from around the world. Across plenary sessions, performances, presentations, and shared encounters, participants explored how the arts respond to—and actively reshape—the social, ecological, and technological conditions of our time.

Our sincere thanks to our host institution, plenary speakers, conference chairs and committees, Emerging Scholars, presenters, and all who contributed to this vibrant international gathering.

Explore the 2026 conference: https://artsinsociety.com/about/history/2026-conference

Who is welcomed into sport—and who is still required to fight for a place?

Across playing fields, governing bodies, media, and supporter cultures, sport can challenge social divisions while also reproducing inequalities of gender and race.

The Eighteenth International Conference on Sport & Society invites proposals addressing “Gender, Race, and Inclusion in Sports.”

Join the Knowledge Experience at Federal Fluminense University in Niterói, Brazil, 17–18 June 2027.

Learn more and submit through the link in bio.

Aging is reshaping how we think about care, work, health, community, identity, and belonging.

The Journal of Aging and Social Change is a recognized international forum for aging research, bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives on how longer lives are transforming families, institutions, communities, and public policy.

Indexed in the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, EBSCO’s SocINDEX and Sociology Source International, and the Australian Research Council journal list.

Explore the journal and join the conversation.

Football is never only a game. It can become a language of identity, political power, collective memory, and national belonging.

In “Valeriy Lobanovskyi: Ukrainian Football between Empire and Nationhood”, Kateryna Chernii examines one of football’s most influential coaches as both a sporting revolutionary and a nation-building figure in modern Ukrainian history.

Tracing Lobanovskyi’s life from Soviet Kyiv through the emergence of an independent Ukraine, the book reveals how football can illuminate the enduring legacies of empire—and Ukraine’s struggle to define its own future.

Discover the book through the link in bio.

Images from the combined Interdisciplinary Social Sciences and Global Studies conferences at the University of Galway.

Guided by the theme “Bridging Boundaries: Collaborative Solutions to Complex Social Issues in an Interconnected World”, the conferences brought researchers and practitioners together across disciplines and borders to consider collaborative responses to complex social challenges.

Organizations no longer operate within clear boundaries. People, technologies, institutions, and cultures increasingly overlap—creating new possibilities for collaboration, but also new tensions around power, knowledge, and responsibility.

The Twenty-Seventh International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations invites proposals addressing “Entangling Worlds: Connection, Coordination, Collaboration in Organization Research and Practice.”

Join the Knowledge Experience in Berlin or online, 31 May–1 June 2027.

Learn more and submit through the link in bio.