Camtastic Newsletter November 2025
CAM hosts Global Fusion 2025 Conference: The Critical Path In Disorienting Times: Explorations, Practices, and Solidarities
Lisa Brooten & Sarah Lewison
From October 16 to 19, 2025 CAM hosted the annual Global Fusion Conference, featuring two full days of invigorating plenaries, panels, book presentations, art and music. This year’s conference theme was “The Critical Path in Disorienting Times: Explorations, Practices and Solidarities,” drawing from R. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of Critical Path, which recognizes the symbiotic roles of innovation, complexity and interconnectivity in developing solutions to the intractable matters we currently face.
The conference focused on the turbulence of our time, while creating a bridge between the multiplicity of concerns and practices of Global Fusion presenters and Carbondale’s unique legacy in the name of Buckminster Fuller. Many of the conference presenters took inspiration from the framing offered by ‘the critical path,’ in papers that explored a plethora of communication topics, including journalism, grassroots activism, health communication, storytelling, cultural specificities in media communication and the arts, and more.
This year’s conference brought approximately 95 visitors to Carbondale from universities across the country, as well as many participants from SIU and from the Carbondale and surrounding communities. We even had two participants fly all the way from Africa for the conference – one from Nigeria and another from Ghana! Fourteen undergraduates from Augsburg University in Minneapolis came for the Interdisciplinary Arts Festival events and the conference opening plenary.
The plenary and keynote sessions were open to the public, as was the Interdisciplinary Arts Festival, which took place in parallel with the conference. Friday's opening plenary featured three talks exploring the Critical Path in various ways. Elizabeth Donaghue and Benjamin Lowder presented the work they are doing with the legacy of Buckminster Fuller. Game designer, storyteller, and DePaul University Professor Allen Turner took the audience on an inspiring journey through his body of game work, with an emphasis on questions of decolonization and liberation. Finally, Joe Underhill of Augsburg University expanded upon the themes of criticality and pattern making that were broached by the first two presenters through a presentation about embodied forms of education that suggest new avenues for reconnection and rebuilding.
For Global Fusion’s Saturday plenary, CAM faculty were thrilled to welcome back Dr. Dafna Lemish as the keynote speaker. Lemish was former Dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at SIUC before moving to her current position as Distinguished Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Dr. Lemish’s keynote presentation featured her research into the experiences of academic immigrants, scholars who find themselves teaching in countries far from where they were born. While the work looks upon the challenges of academic itinerancy, Lemish also positively compared the repercussions of this kind of global academic exchange to Fuller’s own “vision for global unity and shared humanity in the pursuit of a critical path for our future.”
Cultural programming played an important role in this year’s conference through an Interdisciplinary Arts Festival featuring presentations of music, art and dance as well as a fascinating installation of Adam Turl’s Born Again Labor Museum in the Music Room in Morris Library. The festival kicked off Friday morning with an enormous inflatable Earth on the library lawn installed by Steve Gariepy, an outdoor education specialist who works through the STEM Education Research Center. Steve used the inflatable Earth to demonstrate physical concepts regarding the planet’s rotation, a topic Buckminster Fuller lectured on. Also memorable was Dr. Jessica Butler’s (SIUC School of Music) rendition of a classical version of the Kaddish (a ritual Jewish song of mourning), translated for the trombone. The day ended with a durational performance about climate change by School of Media Arts (SoMA) MFA students Saba Rassian and Skyler Foy, and a sunset story circle in the forest with keynote speaker Allen Turner.
Many visitors from campuses around the country commented on the beauty of the library and its spaces, as well as the immediate library surroundings (which they could so wonderfully see through the library windows) and the rest of our SIUC campus! The Global Fusion Conference 2025 was so much more than an ordinary academic conference for its welcoming breadth, its intellectual contributions, and for the way it reflected the full range of possibilities and diversity of SIUC.
Truly a conference of ideas!
Lisa Brooten & Sarah Lewison
From October 16 to 19, 2025 CAM hosted the annual Global Fusion Conference, featuring two full days of invigorating plenaries, panels, book presentations, art and music. This year’s conference theme was “The Critical Path in Disorienting Times: Explorations, Practices and Solidarities,” drawing from R. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of Critical Path, which recognizes the symbiotic roles of innovation, complexity and interconnectivity in developing solutions to the intractable matters we currently face.
The conference focused on the turbulence of our time, while creating a bridge between the multiplicity of concerns and practices of Global Fusion presenters and Carbondale’s unique legacy in the name of Buckminster Fuller. Many of the conference presenters took inspiration from the framing offered by ‘the critical path,’ in papers that explored a plethora of communication topics, including journalism, grassroots activism, health communication, storytelling, cultural specificities in media communication and the arts, and more.
As an internationally-oriented gathering of scholars, the Global Fusion conference is organized annually by a consortium of institutions who rotate as host. The consortium is currently comprised of Ohio University, Southern Illinois University, Temple University, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia. The last time Southern Illinois University hosted Global Fusion was during the COVID pandemic in 2020, when the (pre-CAM) College of Mass Communication and Media Arts (MCMA) hosted Global Fusion’s first ever online conference.
This year’s conference brought approximately 95 visitors to Carbondale from universities across the country, as well as many participants from SIU and from the Carbondale and surrounding communities. We even had two participants fly all the way from Africa for the conference – one from Nigeria and another from Ghana! Fourteen undergraduates from Augsburg University in Minneapolis came for the Interdisciplinary Arts Festival events and the conference opening plenary.
The plenary and keynote sessions were open to the public, as was the Interdisciplinary Arts Festival, which took place in parallel with the conference. Friday's opening plenary featured three talks exploring the Critical Path in various ways. Elizabeth Donaghue and Benjamin Lowder presented the work they are doing with the legacy of Buckminster Fuller. Game designer, storyteller, and DePaul University Professor Allen Turner took the audience on an inspiring journey through his body of game work, with an emphasis on questions of decolonization and liberation. Finally, Joe Underhill of Augsburg University expanded upon the themes of criticality and pattern making that were broached by the first two presenters through a presentation about embodied forms of education that suggest new avenues for reconnection and rebuilding.
For Global Fusion’s Saturday plenary, CAM faculty were thrilled to welcome back Dr. Dafna Lemish as the keynote speaker. Lemish was former Dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at SIUC before moving to her current position as Distinguished Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Dr. Lemish’s keynote presentation featured her research into the experiences of academic immigrants, scholars who find themselves teaching in countries far from where they were born. While the work looks upon the challenges of academic itinerancy, Lemish also positively compared the repercussions of this kind of global academic exchange to Fuller’s own “vision for global unity and shared humanity in the pursuit of a critical path for our future.”
Cultural programming played an important role in this year’s conference through an Interdisciplinary Arts Festival featuring presentations of music, art and dance as well as a fascinating installation of Adam Turl’s Born Again Labor Museum in the Music Room in Morris Library. The festival kicked off Friday morning with an enormous inflatable Earth on the library lawn installed by Steve Gariepy, an outdoor education specialist who works through the STEM Education Research Center. Steve used the inflatable Earth to demonstrate physical concepts regarding the planet’s rotation, a topic Buckminster Fuller lectured on. Also memorable was Dr. Jessica Butler’s (SIUC School of Music) rendition of a classical version of the Kaddish (a ritual Jewish song of mourning), translated for the trombone. The day ended with a durational performance about climate change by School of Media Arts (SoMA) MFA students Saba Rassian and Skyler Foy, and a sunset story circle in the forest with keynote speaker Allen Turner.
Many visitors from campuses around the country commented on the beauty of the library and its spaces, as well as the immediate library surroundings (which they could so wonderfully see through the library windows) and the rest of our SIUC campus! The Global Fusion Conference 2025 was so much more than an ordinary academic conference for its welcoming breadth, its intellectual contributions, and for the way it reflected the full range of possibilities and diversity of SIUC.
Truly a conference of ideas!