Common CAHSS Returned This Year with New Changes
On the crisp fall morning of Oct. 17, more than fifty people from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the larger community gathered at the Sheboygan campus to cultivate community and talk about a deeply human topic: survival.
And much like how survival involves a capacity for change, this year’s Common CAHSS conference had a bit of an evolution of its own.
“We started this event six or so years ago, and the intent was to pull faculty, staff, and students together for a series of community-wide conversations around particular themes,” Ryan Martin, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UW-Green Bay said at the conference. “There’s extraordinary breadth in what is happening in our college, and we wanted to find a way to bring that together around particular themes to really find ways to acknowledge that we as a college and each of the disciplines within our college can contribute to broader and important conversations.”
Past conference themes included human rights, sustainability, information literacy, and loneliness.
This year’s theme focused on survival – one’s ability to live despite life-threatening conditions, to persevere through hopelessness and to manage mental and emotional strain.
October marked the return of the Common CAHSS Conference after a short hiatus; Martin said the idea to do some things differently stemmed from the college’s Giving Day donations this year, which surpassed $40,000.
“The success of our Giving Day allowed us to think about how we could get the community involved in a new way and bring people together for in-person engagement, which many students and faculty are clamoring for,” Martin said.
The conference featured the college’s first cohort of public scholars presenting on their areas of expertise.
The Public Scholarship Program, which launched last year, recruits and trains academics to share their work beyond the academy in a way that is sustainable and self-generating.
According to rhetoric professor Jennie Young, “The power of public scholarship is that it allows academics to share our research and expertise beyond the walls of the university in ways that are free and accesible to everyone.”
For the conference, each public scholar took their area of expertise and tied it to survival to share with participants in breakout sessions.
Those sessions covered a myriad of topics, such as tackling math anxiety, emotion management, emotional resilience in music, and creative nonfiction as a form of self-care.
Another one of those breakout sessions included a workshop for Young’s Burned Haystack Dating Method; a group that focuses on rhetorical analysis on dating apps to help women “burn the haystack, find the needle.”
“The Burned Haystack session, which was productive and strategic, focused on how to move the mission forward and provide new opportunities for engagement for everyone in the community,” Young said. “I’m extraordinarily grateful to the women who were able to come.”
One of those women, Marisa Casey, said, “Although I was attending to support Jennie and hopefully get to meet her, I was really excited about the other sessions as well. The day was a total delight! The sessions were interactive, also touched me personally, and provided me with loads of information and content. I want to thank… everyone involved for the opportunity to attend!”
By the end of the day, participants said they left the conference with new takeaways to apply to their daily lives, such as being more mindful of their social media consumption, wanting to be more involved in their communities, implementing self-regulation techniques, and writing more for self-care.
“The energy was palpable throughout the conference. Not only did participants learn new skills and information, they created their own community and enjoyed meaningful connections – something a lot of us are still yearning for in the post-COVID era,” Rachel Sankey, engagement coordinator for the college, said. “We couldn’t have asked for a better first year back for Common CAHSS and hope to keep the momentum going for next year.”