Inviting Burned Haystack Community Members to an In-Person Conference*

*just sold out--thank you!

Happy Saturday, Friends! As many of you know, Burned Haystack is what we call a “public scholarship” project—non-monetized, grass-roots, and ideologically crowd-funded and supported. The goal here is to bring academic expertise beyond the walls of the academy in a way that’s accessible to everyone—financially, intellectually, and geographically.

Largely due to the engagement in this community, my university (University of Wisconsin-Green Bay) has now launched a larger Public Scholars program in which those of us who are already engaged in this work are mentoring colleagues who are interested in bringing their own academic labor into the public sphere. The program is led by Professor Ryan Martin (Emotion Hacks from the Anger Professor on Substack) and me, and we have a fantastic lineup of other scholars in the first cohort.

To showcase everyone’s work and to invite the larger community into academic dialogue about it, we are offering an in-person conference in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which you can read all about at this link.

The conference is free other than a $15 registration fee, but that covers your lunch. You can read all the session descriptions at the link above. Here’s a screenshot of my session description:

I do understand that this is not geographically-accessible to most members of the Burned Haystack community, but we only have 30 seats available anyway (for Burned Haystack; the conference total attendance is capped at 60), as it’s an intentionally-small meeting; we want to facilitate personal conversations in small group settings.

While this conference will not be streamed (it’s part of a larger initiative to focus on in-person interactions, which our students and faculty are clamoring for), there will be other opportunities for you to be part of conversations that drive the evolution of Burned Haystack going forward. This one is just the first (and perhaps the only IRL one like this, but we’ll see).

Sheboygan is an hour north of Milwaukee, 2 hours-ish north of Chicago, and one hour south of Green Bay. It’s an adorable lake resort town with excellent food and coffee, and there’s a plentiful selection of Air BnB’s and chain hotels.

I am over-the-moon excited about this because it’ll be the first time I’ll get to meet with a small group of you IN PERSON! I hope you’ll be able to join us!

Link again to view the conference schedule and to register is here. 🔥