What If? An International Innovation Summit

In this track, you will enter an ongoing conversation about one of the social or cultural issues we have explored through our Socratic circles, and offer your perspective on the issue informed by evidence and sound reasoning. As you respond to the sources, you can build upon, extend, rebut, counter, or fill a gap in the conversation.

Possible Conversations:

Agnes Callard makes a case against travel. Create a rebuttal to this argument or build upon her perspective, offering your own nuanced take on travel.

Should effort be factored into the grading system? Why or why not? Engage with Adam Grant’s article and offer your own perspective on this debate. Feel free to extend your analysis beyond the central question of the article by staging an intervention into larger conversations about grading and assessment.

Markham Heid contends that requiring handwritten essays can help mitigate the threat of ChatGPT to the writing process. What do you make of this solution? Respond to Heid’s essay by engaging with his ideas and/or proposing an alternative solution to the problem of academic integrity in the age of AI.

Cal Newport urges people to quit using social media. Do you agree with his perspective? Offer a response to Newport’s argument that either builds upon his ideas or counters them. Consider taking a Rogerian approach to the debate.

Inspired by the tradition of the gadfly, this track asks you to think philosophically as you write with the goal of encouraging introspection in your readers.

Using Agnes Callard’s provocative case against travel as a model, take up her style of argument as provocation and play. Make a sophisticated argument that does not depend upon rage, shock, or sensationalism. Instead, push your audience toward critical inquiry.

Examples:

The case for or against productivity

The case for or against dorms

The case for or against procrastination

The case for or against attendance policies

The case for or against grades

The case for or against required writing classes

The case for or against penalizing late work

The case for or against technology in class

The case for or against majors or degrees

The case for or against pursuing your passion (over financial gain)

The case for or against love.

The case for or against wealth.

The case for or against success.

The case for or against overachieving

The Icelandic word for imagination is “hugmyndaflug,” which combines the words “hugmynd,” meaning thought, idea, or concept, and “flug,” which translates to flight. For this track, you will create your own “idea flight,“ as you use your imagination to solve a problem or create a vision for a project of your own design.

Being a leader means innovating and taking creative risks. This track encourages you to think about how you can solve problems, innovate, or create something new. Your essay will be assessed on the ambition and originality, as well as the feasibility of your proposed project. 

The possibilities are endless: you may want to invent a product, design a business, or create a plan for an innovative nonprofit like The Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA). You may also pitch a creative vision for this project as long as it links to a deeper issue. For instance, you can pitch a documentary film or the vision for a video game that encourages students to learn about how democracy works.

You do not actually have to create the end product. Instead, you have to make an argument for the vision and outline how you plan to make it happen. Consider the structure of this option as a pitch.

As you think about the kind of vision you would like to pitch, look to other innovative solutions-oriented approaches to problems, such as the scientist-artist Jill Pelto, whose paintings of glaciers incorporate scientific data, or Eric Klinenberg’s argument for naming heat waves.