Global Fusion

Global Fusion 2025 | Oct 16–19, 2025 | Carbondale, IL

The Critical Path In Disorienting Times: Explorations, Practices, and Solidarities

The Critical Path in Disorienting Times will center on R. Buckminster Fuller’s notion of Critical Path as its starting point, focusing on Fuller’s understanding of the concept as a means of achieving social, ecological, economic, and technological unity. The conference will promote scholarship and enhance practice in media, arts, and design by investigating the current manifestations of this notion of the critical path, its historiography, and its use as a conceptual framework integrating social, spatial, technological, and ecological disciplines and discourses. 

About

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Global Fusion Conference, an annual event organized through a consortium of communication and journalism programs at universities around the United States. Global Fusion aims to promote academic and artistic excellence in global media and communications studies. Global Fusion consortium partners are Ohio University, Southern Illinois University, Temple University, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia.

Global Fusion brings together young and emerging scholars as well as established scholars to share and discuss their research. We invite original, non-published research submissions on any theme of global media and international aspects of mediated communication. We are particularly interested in research that addresses major issues related to sustainability, equity, diversity, class, and connectivity. 

The College of Arts and Media at Southern Illinois University Carbondale is proud to host the conference this year to help answer the call for global scholarship that addresses a disconnected world.