50th ABS Annual Conference: Full Schedule

You will be able to validate your attendance (Check-In to sessions) using your personal schedule.

9:00am EDT

Art as a System of Knowledge: Arts-Integrated Inquiry in Scholarly and Professional Discourse

Saturday August 8, 2026 9:00am - 10:15am EDT

Limited Capacity seats available

The Bahá’í teachings affirm the harmony of science and religion as essential to humanity’s progress. Experience increasingly suggests that art also functions as a system of knowledge, generating insight through perception, imagination, embodiment, and collective meaning-making. This session explores how artistic inquiry contributes to scholarly, professional, and community learning. Using Arts-Integrated Creativity Training (ACT) as a conceptual framework, participants examine how artistic processes complement rational analysis and support rigorous, collaborative knowledge generation through active engagement and consultation.

Speakers

Amalia Giebitz

Teacher, The International School at Mesa del Sol

Amalia Giebitz is a practitioner and facilitator designing arts-integrated approaches to learning and organizational development. Her work helps teams and communities use creativity as a practical way to generate insight, strengthen collaboration, and align values with action in complex... Read More →

Kat Gullahorn

Kat Gullahorn, MLS is co‑founder of SPARK Anew, a librarian, educator, and artist whose work explores art as a system of knowledge. Guided by care and connection, she cultivates arts‑integrated practices that recognize knowledge as service—fostering unity, shared inquiry, and... Read More →

Stephen Morris

Stephen W. Morris is President of Stellar Science and co-founder of SparkAnew. His work integrates creativity, community building, and systems thinking to advance human-centered organizations. He has co-devrloped Arts-Integrated Creativity Training (ACT) to explore how artistic practice... Read More →

Saturday August 8, 2026 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
202

Arts, Breakout

10:30am EDT

Redefining the 'Fundamentals of Music Composition' for a Universal Cause

LIMITED

Saturday August 8, 2026 10:30am - 11:45am EDT

202

Limited Capacity seats available

When Shoghi Effendi provided guidance on music in the Baha’i community, he cautioned against the creation of any sort of aesthetically homogenous "Bahá’í music," and went on to say that “the further away the friends keep from any set forms, the better, for they must realize that the Cause is absolutely universal” (20 July 1946 to a National Spiritual Assembly). “What is music?” and “What does it mean to be a composer?” are questions whose answers often unconsciously influence how a community engages with music. If uninterrogated against the advancements of a rich theoretical discourse and the spirit of Shoghi Effendi’s guidance, our answers to these questions risk perpetuating limiting and eurocentric understandings of what music is, who gets to be composers and what becoming/being a composer looks like. Drawing from the fields of experimental composition, music theory, sound studies and ethnomusicology, I present a new set of "fundamentals of music composition" that seek to operationalize the spirit of Shoghi Effendi’s guidance, and open up a pathway towards a community that can make, meaningfully engage with and support music practices that are more diverse and innovative than we can imagine.

Speakers

Calla Paleczny

Calla Paleczny is a composer, musician and sound artist who explores the intersection of wilderness, mysticism, non-metered musical time and the materiality of sound. She builds richly textured multichannel sound installations and composes pieces for fixed media and ensembles using... Read More →

Saturday August 8, 2026 10:30am - 11:45am EDT
202