How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences

The ultimate guide to creating welcoming, safe, and accessible gatherings for everyone. With detailed strategies and illustrative examples, How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences uses principles of design justice to share how to put on truly inclusive occasions built for the needs and abilities of all. If you attend or host conferences, organize events for fun or for a living, or if you have thought ＂I guess these spaces just aren’t made for me,＂ this book is written for you! Expert events organizer Alex D. Ketchum provides the ethical framework of what true inclusion in action means, considering a broad variety of identities and experiences such as economic hardship, childcare needs, racial and ethnic identities, disabilities, neurodivergence, and more. Whether you’re hosting an academic symposium, an activist meeting, a feminist zinefest, or a comics con, Ketchum offers a step-by-step guide through the planning and execution process, with useful tips and templates along the way. This book is an indispensable companion to building events and conferences from an ethic of care, allowing us to cultivate authentic community and to create the better world we desire--together.

Dr. Alex Ketchum is the Faculty Lecturer at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University. She received her doctorate from the Department of History at McGill University while focusing on feminist restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses in the United States and Canada from the 1972-1989. Her work integrates food, environmental, and gender history. She has a MA in History with the Option in Women and Gender Studies also from McGill University and a Honors BA in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Wesleyan University. Ketchum is committed to accessible publishing practices. She is the founder of The Feminist Restaurant Project (thefeministrestaurantproject.com); the co-founder and editor of The Historical Cooking Project (historicalcookingproject.com), a website dedicated to food studies scholarship; the co-founder of Food, Feminism, and Fermentation (foodfeminismfermentation.com); and the author of How to Start a Feminist Restaurant (Portland: Microcosm, 2018). She is currently working on a book about American feminist restaurant and literary culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. She was co-manager of an organic farm from 2008-2012 and has worked on organic farms in Ireland and France. In 2009, she founded Farm House in Middletown, Connecticut, a living community dedicated to food politics work that continues today. For a full list of her publications and projects, please visit alexketchum.ca.