2021 Conference: Toward the Antiracist Conference: Reckoning with the Past, Reimagining the Present

The thirteenth biennial Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition was held April 21–23, 2021, with a focus on policies and practices for planning and convening antiracist conferences. Inspired by the 2020 College Composition and Communication symposium "Enacting a Culture of Access in Our Conference Spaces" (Hubrig and Osorio), the conference served as a forum for interrogating existing conference policies and examining how conferences are conceived, organized, and staged — with particular attention to antiracist practice and the repair work of addressing the Watson Conference's own history.

Presenters engaged questions including how to combat the whiteness of conferences in the field, what systems should address microaggressions and hate speech, how conferences might engage local communities around literacy and writing, and what compensation structures could support BIPOC scholars' intellectual and emotional labor.

Conference Team Director: Andrea Olinger Assistant Directors: Caitlin Burns Allen and Alex Way

Publication Writers: Craft & Context (vol. 3, no. 1) Special Issue, 2022, edited by Andrea R. Olinger, Caitlin Burns Allen, Michael J. Benjamin, and Alex Way — Read the issue

Policy & Practice Archive The 2021 conference produced a public archive of resources for antiracist conference design.