Would you help us make some hard decisions about hybrid accessibility at our annual conference?

Paying for tech is incredibly expensive. We have to pay for microphones in rooms (otherwise many of us will struggle to hear), and many of our presenters also prefer to show slides, which adds to the cost—but these forms of tech are so important that we feel it’s worth it. But just to be clear: even after Erika Huckestein negotiated a significant discount, SHEAR will still pay $20,000 for basic tech for our three-day conference.

Adding a hybrid option balloons that expense. Having a single room with setup for hybrid attendance costs $5,000 per day. It also requires hiring a student to admit people into the Zoom room, allow a remote speaker or commentator to deliver their work, and monitor questions. (And this rate is actually cheaper than it has been in the past!)

Those of us who keep an eye on the bottom line as well as SHEAR’s dedication to accessibility struggle with the obvious tensions. We know that some people cannot attend the conference in person for all kinds of reasons (travel expenses, health and family reasons, disabilities, conflicting schedules)—and we want to be inclusive. But the costs become exorbitant quickly. During previous conferences it has sometimes felt as if despite paying for these costs, we couldn’t please anyone. Perhaps because they assumed that this kind of technology didn’t cost anything, hybrid attendees refused to pay the conference registration fee, complained that not all sessions were accessible, and often only attended a single session. As a result, we often found ourselves paying exorbitant bills for hybrid for a total of perhaps only ten or twelve people.

This year we have received two generous donations from the History MA and PhD programs at the University of Texas at Dallas and the Virginia Military Institute Department of History’s Program in Constitutional History to pay for hybrid accessibility for a single room on Friday and Saturday for the sessions we expect will be popular. Those donations allow us to skip charging the conference registration fee to hybrid attendees, which I hope will eliminate some of the unfounded complaints we’ve received in the past.

We want to know your thoughts. Please fill out this Google Form and let us know how much we should continue to privilege this effort. Also let us know if you have ideas about donors who might be able to help in the future, and whether you’d like to be more involved in helping us weigh these matters.