Thursday, November 12 – Sunday, November 15
New Harmony Inn and Conference Center, New Harmony, Indiana
Proposal Deadline: Monday, June 1, 2026
This conference commemorates the bicentennial of the Community of Equality (1825–1827), the ambitious social experiment founded by Robert Owen and his partner, William Maclure, in New Harmony, Indiana. Owen envisioned a “New Moral World” where character was shaped by environment, and Maclure championed universal education as the foundation for social progress. Together, they sought to create a cooperative society grounded in education, equity, and shared prosperity.
What can we learn from the experience of past utopian communities? What efforts are currently being made to innovate communities in ways similar to and different from previous experiments? Where are community innovations heading in light of recent social, environmental, technological, and economic challenges?
For more information about the conference and bicentennial, please visit: https://www.owenmaclure200.com/
We welcome papers, panels, posters, and workshops that engage with the theme “Innovative Communities: Past, Present, and Future” and use Robert Owen’s Community of Equality and other historical intentional community experiments as a point of departure. We are interested in contributions discussing innovations that follow the tradition of intentional communities like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, but also those taking alternative approaches to innovation. Current community innovations that address both present and future challenges also align with the theme of this conference.
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
Historical perspectives: Utopian movements, cooperative societies, and reformist communities.
Contemporary innovations: Intentional communities, co-housing, maker spaces, and digital commons.
Future visions: Technological, ecological, and social innovations shaping community life.
Interdisciplinary approaches: Art, architecture, education, communications, economics, governance, and sustainability.
Global comparisons: How diverse cultures have imagined and implemented innovative communities.
Please include in your proposal:
Deadline for Proposals: Monday, June 1, 2026
For questions or submissions, please contact: Dr. Silvia Rode, Director, Center for Communal Studies at sarode@usi.edu.
The Center for Communal Studies promotes the study of contemporary and historic communal groups, intentional communities and utopias. Established in 1976 at USI (then Indiana State University-Evansville or ISUE), the Center encourages and facilitates meetings, classes, scholarship, networking and public interest in communal groups past and present, here and abroad.
The rich research resources of the Center are housed in the University Archives and Special Collections at Rice Library. The Center's Collections hold primary and secondary materials on more than one hundred historic communes and several hundred collective, cooperative and co-housing communities founded since 1965. Noted communal scholars have donated their private collections and their extensive research notes and papers to the Center archives.
In many ways, intentional communities are natural laboratories for understanding and addressing some of the contemporary challenges facing humanity: conflict, sustainable living, land reform, and relations between individuals and society. The Center For Communal Studies offers unmatched resources for literary scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and others, including active communitarians, interested in the lessons that intentional communities can offer to the larger world.
