ACUADS 2024 Conference
8 November
Art and Design serve as catalysts for revitalisation by stimulating economic development, engaging communities and preserving culture, renewing physical spaces, forstering innovation, promoting social cohesion, and supporting environmental sustainability. Art and Design are also imperative in connecting us with one another and the world around us, “with other species, with soil, water and event the universe” (Pestana, 2021). With this in mind, the 2024 ACUADS Conference is embracing the theme of Regeneration, Repair, and Care, as a guiding principle for our collective endeavours toawards resilience and revitalisation.
ACUADS 2023 Conference
2 November
In 2018, a study for the World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2020, projected that by 2022 ‘analytical thinking and innovation, active learning and learning strategies, creativity, originality and initiative’ would be three of the most important skills for the global workforce. This agenda has been highly influential for education policy in the intervening years, for example in the proliferation of STEAM approaches to teaching, learning and research. Understood as an interdisciplinary approach, a role of the creative arts and design was seemingly to bring ‘creativity’ to the wider tertiary sector through an ‘interdisciplinary imagination’ for the benefit of industry and, ultimately, society.
ACUADS 2022 Conference
28 October – 11 November
The pandemic has and continues to mark everything. How this time has played out, intervened, and transformed situated publics are starting points for collecting conversations across art and design contexts in Australia that reflect on public pedagogy. Projects undertaken through the pandemic are a way of speculating on what changes are inevitable in a COVID-19 context. Public is not one thing. Different publics exist in multiple and intersecting iterations, and each carry distinct pedagogical forms and potentials (Savage as cited in O’Malley et al., 2020).
2021 ACUADS/ DDCA Conference
29 October – 29 October
The 2021 ACUADS Conference, developed in partnership with the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA), explores the theme of networks to consider their possibilities in response to the challenges and future agendas of the Tertiary Art, Design and Creative Arts sector.
Past Conferences
2020 Conference
In light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the devastation of recent Australian bushfires, the 2020 ACUADS Conference explored the theme of crisis and resilience.
2019 Conference
The meaning of engagement for contemporary art and design schools: across disciplines, nationalities and cultures; but also with industries, communities and the world at large.
2018 Conference
Considered Art and Design in Transition.
Politics now struggles to keep pace with the social media revolution, and the aesthetic realm is now more politically charged than ever.