Hello all,

Further to yesterday’s discussion, and before any decisions are made, I would like to add a few points regarding my proposal that we offer to cover expenses for David Frank to attend the conference.  

I see now that I did not fully understand the financial, and perhaps status, implications involved when we created our three categories of conference speakers – the keynote, round table, and panelist speakers.

What we did was to create a hierarchy of participants. We are paying, and covering all expenses for our keynote speakers; and we are covering most expenses of our roundtable speakers.  We are not applying a ‘means’ test to these people, because their sessions are plenaries that we consider to be important, and we want these people to be there.

This implies that in providing a platform for our other speakers we are doing them a favour - rather than that they doing us a favour by adding valuable content and analysis to our conference. This may hold true for young academics who are trying to advance their careers, but it’s not true of everyone.

This takes me the role we have assigned to public and popular history in the conference. Perhaps I should have argued for a roundtable session on popular/public interpretations of the strike and its meaning today. Maybe we all should have thought about this. We have said that we want the conference to be meaningful to a broad audience and not just academics, but maybe we could have done more to structure it that way.

Perhaps because, initially, we had trouble getting people interested in participating in the conference, we did not really do much in the way of critically appraising the final content of the conference. We had last minute discussions about youth and workers with disabilities.

As David Camfield pointed out, we should be making decisions based on principles rather than personalities, and think about all our presenters. I would suggest an alternate means test. In the case of the public history session, we can have our three local artists – Danny Schur, Noam Gonick, and Tom Monteyne – speak quite eloquently about their projects. I’m sure they will all give interesting presentations. If we also want a respected labour historian who has also worked with the labour movement and published in the field of public history to add some analysis to this session, then we should ‘put our money where our mouths are’ – as Janis’ mother might say!

Thank you for considering these points. All that said, I will accept whatever decision is made.

Best wishes,

Sharon