Our commitments

ABER Submissions for AERA Annual Meeting (Deadline: for 2026 meeting has already passed):

Preconference Activities:

• We invite you to participate in the 2026 Biannual Pre-Conference convening of the Arts-Based Educational Research Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association, centered around the powerful theme of Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures. This event promises to be a dynamic platform for creativity, collaboration, and intellectual exploration. We are currently accepting proposals for our Pre Conference session to be held April 7, 2026.
  Click here for more info and to submit. For questions, email Rhianna [email protected]

Awards:

• We will update our awards to include a focus on the intersection of anti-racist, anti-oppressionist perspectives and arts-based educational research. While we have never been opposed to nominations with this focus, we have also never actively and transparently centered these agendas.

Mentoring:

• We will reach out to our membership for volunteering to be a part of a mentoring committee, a new initiative that we are launching. We are looking at possibilities of mentoring graduate students, early-career scholars, minoritized scholars, and anyone else who would find this offering valuable. As much as possible, we would provide opportunities for meeting virtually rather than in-person in order to expand the limits of in-person mentoring at AERA annual meeting, which is costly for both domestic and international members.
• We are currently convening a monthly arts-based research study group that provides a platform for students and faculty alike to come together and share processes, works in progress, and resources. the ABER SIG Study Group meets on the first Friday of each month. Email Rhianna [email protected] for more info and to join the list. 

Digital Presence:

• We are working to update our website and create spaces in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We will share these spaces once we prepare them. Our goal is to use these spaces to build community, share work from diverse perspectives, encourage participation from the entire globe, and cultivate inclusive, representational dialogic spaces. This statement will be hosted in all of our digital spaces.

Spotlight Workshops/Talks:

• We will offer online workshops/talks open to everyone on relevant topics two to three times a year. The workshops/talks will spotlight our colleagues’ work and offer ways in which we can continue to be in dialogue with each other while honoring diverse voices and approaches of doing art-based educational research. We also hope that these workshops will demonstrate our invitational stance and allow more people to see ABER SIG as one where they belong.

Membership, Graduate Student Support: 

• We will work on enhancing and increasing our membership and graduate student support. We encourage all of you to please invite graduate students and other colleagues who would benefit from the activities of ABER. We need your support to grow our membership, and with the growth we would like to extend more graduate student travel awards to the conference. We believe that as a community we can focus on creativity, criticality, and contemplation simultaneously as we hold ourselves firm in our anti-racist and anti-oppressionist commitments.