2026 Emerging Creatives Student Summit: “Rewilding: New Stories of Collective Wellbeing”
March 5-8
Michigan State University
https://a2ru.org/event/2026-emerging-creatives-student-summit-rewilding/
As a member institution of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), UGA may nominate up to four student representatives. Please contact mark.callahan@uga.edu by October 24 for more information about how to participate.
Emerging Creatives is a three-day collaborative experience in which students form small cross-disciplinary teams to explore a specific area of the Summit’s theme. Over the course of the event, teams make something that represents their exploration: a syllabus, cookbook, podcast, app, opera, pair of shoes, urban blueprint, pop-up store, musical score, website… the list of possible outcomes is endless.
At Emerging Creatives, students not only envision and create their project; they also take field trips, meet extraordinary interdisciplinary thinkers, practice presenting their work, and exchange ideas about their project with peers and experts. Students also build collaboration skills in micro-workshops with a2ru staff.
Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration that asks us to reimagine — or, in some sense, rewind — the relationship between natural processes and human interventions into those processes, a relationship that has been fraught with conflict for centuries. “Rewilding” may suggest a nostalgic return to the past, but it can also help us reconsider how we understand the present. Taking it further, how might we leverage the ideas of interconnectedness, dynamic change, and sustainability, found at the core of rewilding, to develop new visions for the future — across many domains? How might this allow us to consider human and natural forces as working in tandem, rather than operating in conflict? How might models of balanced ecosystems transform our ideas of human community and collaboration? How might these concepts support increased wellbeing at the individual, group, and global level?
a2ru member institutions are eligible to nominate up to 4 students to attend the 2026 Emerging Creatives Student Summit. Graduate students and undergraduate students in their junior year or above are eligible. In order to maintain the interdisciplinary nature of Emerging Creatives, a2ru asks that the students nominated by each institution represent a broad range of disciplines both within and outside the arts. The contributions of students from disciplines in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, business and other fields are essential to the success of the Summit.
Image credit: Ethan Seelig, MSU ’24