43rd Annual AIS Conference Report
Cynthia Kimball-Davis, Southern Utah University
Brandon Springer, Utah Valley University
Michael Cena, Weber State University
Southern Utah University, in partnership with Utah Valley University, Weber State University, Salt Lake Community College, and Brigham Young University—Idaho, was honored to host the 43rd Annual Conference of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. As past attendees of AIS conferences, our leadership team was excited to prepare a conference for our colleagues across the world with an interest in interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and scholarship. Our conference team worked together for the last two years to create a conference experience that could bring together the global community of AIS members.Â
With the advent of the COVID19 pandemic, we were faced with an unprecedented challenge for the 2021 conference. Having already planned many exciting opportunities for our in-person conference, we made the difficult decision to adapt to a fully virtual conference. In retrospect, we feel that this was the right decision made as travel restrictions embedded in the policies of nations, states, and universities would have made a successful in-person conference difficult—if not impossible.Â
Fortunately, our team was able to utilize the SWOOGO virtual platform to host the conference. SWOOGO enabled us to integrate a back-end suite of tools for conference tracking, planning, and development as well as a front-end web platform that was customizable. The only difficulty we encountered with SWOOGO involved conference registration and payments. We encourage other conference planners who may be considering a virtual platform to carefully address these issues to avoid any frustrations and confusions as participants register for future conferences.
A major benefit for hosting a virtual conference was the ability to record sessions so participants could participate in many different sessions (sometimes with overlapping time slots) for about three months after the live conference. This feature also enabled global participants with opportunities to participate in their respective time zones without inconvenience or fatigue.
Another benefit we experienced with a virtual conference was the ability to recruit student attendees. Many students expressed gratitude for the online platform—indicating that the virtual conference option enabled them to get involved, whereas the cost of conference registration, travel, and lodging was otherwise prohibitive. Our leadership team recommends that future conference planners consider the situation of student participants to provide ways for engagement with remote options. We also recommend that AIS continue to offer student scholarships for conference registrations and a free year for AIS student membership.
Conference registrations totaled 298 participants with 117 regular AIS members, 91 non-AIS members, and 90 student registrations. Seventeen nations across the globe were present for the conference. Participants were able to select from: 31 panel or roundtable sessions, 39 paper presentations, 6 creative showcases, 15 workshops, and 5 other sessions involving various types of creative presentations.
We look forward to future meetings with you, our colleagues, as we continue to explore, learn, and dialogue about the rich experience in our mutual interdisciplinary work.Â
