Organizing a Virtual Workshop
with an Eye to Community Building
and Equitable Participation
by Jess Beck and Laura Heath-Stout, April 2024
Over the course of planning, applying for, and organizing this workshop, we’ve learned a lot about what it means to hold a virtual meeting while trying to make it as equitable and inclusive as possible. One of our goals was for this workshop to “serve as a model for equitable virtual meetings in the future, within and outside of anthropology.” With that in mind, we outline our strategies regarding timing and preparing a funding application, distributing organizational labor, scheduling the workshop and building a budget, and assessing participants’ access needs. Our hope is that this discussion will be useful for other scholars who are planning their first workshops, as well as for scholars who are looking for strategies for making their own meetings more inclusive and equitable.
Timing Your Application
Putting together this workshop took longer than we expected. We first discussed submitting a Wenner-Gren symposium application in August 2021, at a time when we were just getting to know each other as colleagues and collaborators. We assembled the application in the late summer and early fall of 2021, with plans to submit for an October 1st deadline… only to learn that WG would not accept applications until April 2022 because of the time lag in symposia scheduling imposed by the pandemic.
Accordingly, we delayed submission of our symposium application until April 2022, and received a rejection notice in May 2022. The rejection, however, also came with an offer to “explore any possibilities for figuring out how we might support the conversations you proposed via one of our other programs.” We met with Wenner-Gren Senior Program Officer Donna Auston in mid-July 2022 to talk through possibilities, and decide to reapply, but this time for a Workshop Grant. We submitted the revised workshop application for the December 1, 2022 deadline, received news of our acceptance on March 10, 2023, and held the workshop itself in October 2023.
All told, it took us 20 months to achieve a successful application, and a little over two years to hold a version of the meeting that we had initially envisioned. For early career researchers, these extended time frames can be tricky. During this period, Jess and Laura were each affiliated with three different institutions—Vassar, Harvard, and UCD for Jess, and UMass Boston, Brandeis and Stanford for Laura. As a result, the process of workshop organization unfolded across six different email addresses, four changes of address, and the birth of one child.
We were not the only people who had a lot going on; our participants also had many professional, family, and personal commitments, so when we needed information from them, they understandably could not always reply immediately. Building in time to wait for responses and send reminders was also part of the pacing of the process.
As of April 2024, we’re still working on outcomes from the workshop, including this very website and a Vital Topics Forum that we plan to submit to American Anthropologist, which will stretch the total time frame for this collaboration to over three years. That’s a significant investment! When planning your own workshop, it’s important to realize that the schedule and participant list you had initially envisioned will shift, especially if you don’t receive funding on the first round. The process will most likely take a lot longer than you anticipate.
Preparing a Strong Application
At the advice of a friend and colleague, we met with Senior Program Officer Donna Auston on Zoom in September 2021 to discuss the application process. Donna gave us very useful advice about framing, requirements, schedules, and clarified lingering questions we could not find answers to on the Wenner-Gren website. Without the urging of our colleague, however, we would not have realized that such a meeting was possible. Given how helpful we found this targeted institutional guidance, we wanted to make this part of the “hidden curriculum” explicit for other early career scholars. While funding bodies often seem like faceless institutions, they are staffed by actual humans and you are allowed to (and in fact often encouraged to!), reach out to them. Before applying, we recommend that you contact the funding body with initial questions and ask if it is possible to set up a meeting to discuss the process.
Sharing the Work
Not all of the two year planning period entailed intensive daily work. Instead, there were fallow periods followed by active stretches. Co-organizing the workshop, even during periods of personal and professional flux, meant someone was always able to keep a hand on the rudder. We were able to maintain momentum because the person who had more time and energy to spare was always willing to keep pushing the workshop forward. This meant that some months Laura did more work and other months Jess took the lead.
We were also fortunate in that we are both relatively organized and logistically oriented, though we did not know this when we first began collaborating. We are also at the same career stage, meaning that power imbalances that can characterize partnerships that include one senior and one junior colleague were not at play. Be aware that planning a multi-day online workshop will require at least one logistics person, who can keep an eye on both minor details (Zoom links, setting deadlines for participants, keeping track of accepts and declines) and major milestones (hiring a transcriber, building a website, laying out the schedule).
One way to facilitate this type of collaboration is to commit to meeting once a month, even for fifteen minutes, to check in on the other person’s schedule and capacity and figure out the most equitable ways to divide up labor, recognizing that your energy budgets will shift over time.
The Nitty Gritty of Workshop Scheduling
The workshop schedule can be accessed here: Wenner-Gren Workshop Schedule.
We decided to hold a virtual workshop because it meant that our participants did not have to weigh the costs and benefits of travel during an ongoing pandemic, and we would not require long-distance air travel of sixteen participants during a time of climate crisis. Though an in-person workshop would have allowed for more organic connections between participants and would have facilitated focus uninterrupted by the obligations of participants’ home institutions, not all of our participants would have been able to commit to spending four days (six with travel) away from their homes. Though a virtual format is not perfect and has its own attendant trade-offs, it was the format that best balanced our need for equity and inclusivity.
We were also adamant that the daily workshop itinerary underscore our respect of work-life balance, so we deliberately scheduled our meeting for weekdays during normal working hours. This meant that no one had to carve space out of personal or family time in order to participate, and people’s customary childcare and eldercare schedules were already in place. The downside was that not everyone could participate in all sessions, because weekday schedules at one’s home institution come with teaching and service obligations that cannot always be moved or cancelled. We also tried to balance the four different time zones in operation (Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern) by meeting every day for five hours in the morning Pacific Time and the afternoon Eastern time.
If you make the choice to host a virtual workshop, expect that not everyone will be able to be there for all sessions. One way to facilitate inclusion despite conflicting professional demands is to record the workshop sessions and then share them only among participants afterwards, so that participants can catch up when their daily schedules permit. For our workshop, we recorded every session of presentations to be posted publicly, and then recorded all Q&As, panels, and resultant discussions to share among participants. In the end, we felt this was a fair trade-off.
When planning the workshop, we mapped out deadlines and milestones about six months in advance of the meeting. We used Google Forms to solicit titles, abstracts, and preferred topics (i.e. recruitment and pedagogy, data collection, and data dissemination) one month before the workshop, so that we had sufficient time to plan out the four-day schedule.
We opened the first session with a 20-minute introduction period, where we spoke briefly about the inspiration for the workshop and outlined guidelines for presentations and Q&A.
Then, we asked all participants to briefly introduce themselves and share:
Name
Pronouns
Access needs (Note: Access needs represent anything the organizers or other participants can do to make the workshop space accessible for you; if you do not have any, you can just say “My access needs are met”).
One non-academic thing that you’re particularly passionate about right now
The first three days of the workshop were organized by the major themes that animated participants’ research. Day 1 was Recruitment and Participation, Day 2 was Data Collection, and Day 3 was Data Dissemination. For each of the first three days, time was divided between two sessions of individual presentations of 15–20 minutes each, followed by a joint question period, which Laura and Jess traded off on moderating. Each of the first three days closed with an hour-long panel focused on major questions pertaining to the day’s theme that the organizers had circulated in advance.
This pacing—one question period after sessions of 2–3 back-to-back talks—worked well and allowed us to stay on schedule; combininging papers on similar themes into small groups allowed for a manageable balance of presentations and conversations and interaction between participants. Each panel was led by a moderator who had not presented that day; we solicited moderators in advance. The use of moderators meant that work was more evenly distributed among session participants, and ensured that Laura and Jess were not dominating every session. We also were deliberate about building in short breaks of 15-minutes in between presentations sessions, and a longer, 45-minute break before the closing panel.
We reserved the last day of the workshop for structured breakout rooms during the morning and a group discussion of intended outcomes and takeaways during the afternoon.
We circulated a formal schedule one week in advance of the workshop, which emphasized to our participants the importance of keeping talks to time. We also, however, recommend building in a three-five minute buffer around each talk in case participants go over time or have technical issues. This also provides a built-in buffer for transitioning between speakers and introducing talks.
Building your Budget while Keeping Equitable Participation at the Fore
One of our main goals was to host a workshop that was equitable for participants. Equity is often confused with equality, the idea that all participants should be treated the same way. What equity means, however, is giving all participants the support they need to participate in the session. Keeping that principle at the fore, in our application we explicitly earmarked the bulk of our budget for “flexible funding to support participation,” explaining:
Our goal is to make this workshop as equitable as possible through flexible budgeting that meets the varied needs of participants coming from a range of professional backgrounds. Our aim is to build a budget that will allow all participants to fully engage in all four days of the session. Well in advance of hosting the workshop, we will circulate a survey that asks participants how we could best support their participation within the remainder of the current budget. At 20 participants, this works out to roughly $170/participant, though we anticipate that some individuals will have less expensive needs. We envision this funding being used for stipends for childcare, honoraria to cover class lectures, small stipends to cover AV equipment or wifi connections if necessary, and stipends for food. We believe that a successful virtual workshop requires a more flexible approach to budgeting that acknowledges the varied needs of participants and can be tailored to researchers with different professional and personal requirements.
After receiving funding, we circulated a survey 5.5 months in advance of the workshop (May 2023), asking participants about their pronouns, time zone, willingness to moderate a panel, availability during the proposed workshop dates, and access and funding needs. We were clear in the survey about our ability to provide support for honoraria (for class coverages), child/eldercare, and tech upgrades (webcam or microphone) given the virtual nature of the workshop. Asking participants about these requirements explicitly in advance of the workshop—rather than waiting for people to contact us disclosing their needs—was a more equitable strategy. A link to the survey is provided below should you wish to use it as a template for your own workshop.
Wenner-Gren Workshop 2023 Participant Survey
Our goals for this early participant survey were threefold. First, to be explicit about our support for participants with varied access needs; second, to remind all participants that their colleagues were facing a range of personal and professional demands on their time and energy, and third, to develop a holistic understanding of participants’ access needs sufficiently in advance of the workshop so that we could plan out our budget.
After incorporating survey results into planning our budget, we decided to give participants as much agency as possible when it came to financial supports by using online Visa gift cards as participation stipends. The rest of our budget was dedicated to paying for transcription and the website.
Transcription
The other major expense in our budget was a stipend for Samantha Henry, an anthropology Ph.D. student who we hired to take notes throughout the workshop and to edit the transcriptions of Zoom recordings for our website. This served several purposes: transcription made the videos on our website more accessible; Sam’s note-taking meant that we and others could be present in the moment while knowing that we would have notes to refer back to; and we gave a graduate student both some money and an opportunity to learn about this research, network, and experience a professional workshop.
Reflections from Participants
After the workshop, we circulated a short survey to get feedback on our strategies for attempting to make a virtual workshop accessible and equitable. We asked two simple questions:
What worked for you about the workshop?
What did not work about the workshop?
The things that worked well for participants included:
Range of topics and diversity of formats covered in presentations
Use of core themes to link presentations and panels
Pacing of sessions (2-3 talks followed by discussion)
Time and space for discussion
Flexible schedule
Attention to detail regarding format and accessibility
Diversity and leadership represented in participants
The things that did not work for participants or could be modified included:
Relevance of presentations to workshop themes varied
Separate Zoom links for each day were clunky
Not everyone was equally able to make time and space to attend workshop
More inventive formats—i.e. book club style where participants prepared in advance might have worked better to facilitate attendance
Panel discussions less well attended/lively than post-presentation discussions
Scheduling workshop throughout semester (rather than during one week) to facilitate attendance
Virtual format made it harder to block out time to attend/participate
Check in with participants prior to the workshop to see if people have requests about sharing in certain spaces, helping to address issues of power imbalance between colleagues, and establish guidelines for sharing difficult topics such as experiencing/responding to racism and harassment in the field, and/or reduce potential for retaliation.
Our ethos
In our feedback survey, multiple participants referenced thoughtfulness, attention, or care when describing the things that worked for them about the workshop:
“I also appreciated the care that you went to in planning around everyone's needs and availability, that was incredible and very touching.”
“All of the thought and attention put into the format, accessibility, basic human needs, and stipend system”
“The organizers' attention to accessibility was refreshing and set an important tone for the workshop, modeling for us what an inclusive space should offer and thinking intentionally about how the conditions can be met.”
“The organizers were also incredibly helpful and patient which is honestly rare these days.”
“I really appreciated the care and thought that went into creating the space.”
We were pleased not only by the kindness of these comments, but by the way our ethos of care and community had clearly come through in the experiences of the participants. One of the main purposes of workshops and symposia is to build and strengthen professional communities. When people’s needs are not met, they cannot participate fully in that community building. We saw little point in holding a workshop that would be difficult or inaccessible to participate in. While care work is not the kind of labor that is often acknowledged or celebrated in academia, it is what allows us to do the rest of our work well.
Many of the strategies we have shared here may not apply to every workshop, but we feel that this ethos of community-building will lead any workshop organizer in the right direction.