For 2019, the ACMHE conference will share how contemplative practices, including mindfulness practices, can support and sustain learning communities that engage multiple ways of knowing and foster a more just, inclusive, sustainable, and compassionate world. In academia, this can function as a form of radical well-being, as contemplative approaches offer means of sustaining ourselves through institutional and societal challenges. In this way, the goals of the 2019 ACMHE conference are to explore the importance of self-care, to emphasize the importance of expanding our sense of care itself, and to learn how this is demonstrated in the field of higher education in ways that lead to more caring, compassionate campuses and communities.

Photo: Karl Rabe / Vassar College

The 2019 ACMHE Conference keynote will be delivered by Dr. Jasmine K. Syedullah, co-author of Radical Dharma and Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Vassar College.

Presentations at the conference might explore topics including, but not limited to:

• How are we creating learning environments that engage multiple perspectives, understandings, needs, and ways of knowing?
• How can a praxis of care in the academy bolster our understanding of ourselves, our relations, the structures we live and work in, and our conditioned and learned patterns of behavior?
• What practices, strategies, or research has been done?
• How do these approaches promote respect, cooperation, and justice? How can that understanding lead us towards making change, if necessary, towards conditions of greater equity?
• How do these approaches help us move through feelings of loneliness and isolation in our institutions?
• Why is a conference such as this needed now? How do topics such as well-being and self-care, within and beyond educational institutions, speak more broadly to the tensions in today’s world?

We hope that this year’s conference will seed new connections and friendships to facilitate a community of well-being and care in academia, and that through attending, you will be supported in addressing this work in your own communities.

The ACMHE—the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education—is an interdisciplinary academic association and an initiative of The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. ACMHE members receive a $50 reduction in the conference registration fees as well as other benefits; learn more and become a member.