Student organizers help bring JRP Canada conference to life

As soon as most classes are over each spring, many campuses fill back up with academics from around the world coming together to share their research at ‘academic conferences’. Where there is a research topic, there is also a group of passionate scholars willing to unpack and dissect it in depth, for hours on end. 

But despite their ubiquity and their potential to serve as  (PDF file) generative learning sites (external link)  for us, students aren’t always afforded a seat at the (conference) table. 

When students look at the conference fees and the promotional material, it seems aimed at a type of seniority students haven’t yet earned.

When we are included, organizers may assume that younger academics only want to dip their toes into the knowledge mobilized in these events. But what so many of us actually want is to jump head-first into an oceanic deepend of learning. 

The reality is that our identities as students are bound to our eagerness to know, and to know abundantly. That’s what the Between Ideals and Practices: Journalistic role performance in transformative times conference provided us.

The one-day international pre-conference to ICA 2023 (external link)  was an opportunity for us as student journalists and up-and-coming academics to delve into research-centred spaces, and be the ones shaping what the spaces can and should look like.  

Leading up to the conference, we took part in a planning process that began in summer 2022 and lasted until the morning of the event. This involved acquiring funding, developing a skeleton of the day, and, researching venues, caterers and accessibility services, under the guidance of associate professor and JRP Canada (external link) ’s lead investigator, Nicole Blanchett (external link) . 

Once academics sent in their pitches to present at the conference, (their abstracts) the JRP Canada team chose the research papers that best aligned with the conference’s theme. We had weekly meetings and daily conversations that brought this conference to life. 

As students, we had hands-on responsibilities throughout the planning process: keeping track of every decision, every agreement we reached, and every confirmation. We created social media posts to bridge the gap between the organizers and the presenters, panelists and participants. 

We created podcasts (external link)  with a number of presenters, which gave them space to talk about their research, and functioned as a marketing campaign to give visitors an idea of what to expect at the conference. We were able to virtually meet and establish a line of communication with researchers whose scholarship not only informed our work, but also our pedagogy. 

Accessibility and Community 

In the early planning days, we discussed how we could bring accessibility to the conference. We committed to anticipating, identifying and reducing barriers that so often make it difficult to access, understand or participate in knowledge mobilization processes in academic institutions. 

We made sure spaces were physically accessible and created virtual points of entry for international or immunocompromised attendees who couldn’t join us in person. 

This also meant ensuring all our digital content was informed by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) (external link)  and included hyperlinks, transcripts, image descriptions and alt-text where possible. There were, of course, financial, technical and logistical limitations, but in recognizing accessibility as a dynamic, ever-changing and community-rooted process, we were committed to always doing better when and where we could. 

And when we saw presenters use our AODA (external link) -friendly presentation templates or when we listened to presenters describe themselves for Blind or visually-impaired community members, we were nearly moved to tears. We learned then when given the space to, people want to do better by their peers. 

In reflecting on the conference, we were also reminded that accessibility is anchored equally by who we make space for. So more than anything, what made the opportunity to work on this project and conference so irresistible was its cross-nationality and commitment to community-building. 

Even within the energetic and frankly contagious bustle of the conference, we found time to slow down and talk to researchers from Egypt, South Africa, Singapore and Algeria, ones we recognized from a passing email correspondence, a social media follow or a paper of theirs we couldn’t help but read in its entirety.

Hierarchies, which sometimes feel unavoidable in academic environments like these, were flattened—we were all equally here to learn and to let the learning propel us forward in our journalism. And even as students, it felt like we had so much to contribute, our lack of seniority never holding us back from participating and asking questions. Everyone made space for us in their conversations and panel discussions. They met our truly insatiable hunger for the knowledge they offered with a proportional excitement. The kindness, care and collectivity in the room was almost palpable. 

As diasporic students, we hold an unrelenting yearning for beyond-border knowledge—the kind that transcends the Western lens and refuses to relegate the research of our countries of origin to an inferior rank. We are perpetually seeking stories and academia where our communities play the title roles and where the sources speak our mother tongues. 

It’s why, as we went around room to room photographing the event, we always eventually put our cameras down, stimulated by presentations that explored African communication ecologies or journalistic role performance in SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) countries or political polarization in East Asian media. It was a joy to see our homes light up screens and to hear about news organizations we recognized from our childhoods. Researchers would speak to us (often in Arabic) about politics and our studies, and even who we were beyond the walls of our school. 

By the end of the day, we were tired. But it was a fatigue we welcomed because of how deeply it was entangled with contentment, accomplishment and community. We got to see months of work materialize before us into an event that brought people and knowledge together into a single building. 

For a year, the JRP Canada team patiently explained all the different facets and functions of a conference, making sure that we felt comfortable with managerial, logistical and journalistic responsibilities. It never became a place that fostered “imposter syndrome,” rather it was a place for growth and learning. 

And while they anchored us, it really felt like we were anchoring them too. We were made to feel like our knowledge and ideas were valuable because students do indeed bring value to any and all institutions.