Before the conference, please familiarize yourself with the technical guidance page and the detailed technical guidance. They are both here.

Conference assistants and student ambassadors will be available in sessions and will be briefed on who to contact regarding technical queries.

Below we offer some thoughts on facilitating hybrid sessions effectively:

Check presentations: Work out a schedule for convenors/chairs to be online at least 15 mins before the start of the session to check that in person and online presentations can be seen/heard.

Online convenor: Assign one convenor or WG member to take responsibility for supporting online participation and presentations and manage contributions that come up through the chat function on Zoom.

Captions and Microphones: Remind online delegates and zoom hosts to turn on auto-generated captions on Zoom https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-auto-generated-captions/. For in-person delegates, ask them to speak clearly into the ceiling-mounted microphones provided as these are important for many colleagues with hearing impairments. Please use them yourself as well as during Q&As.

Visual Descriptions: Please start your introduction by offering a brief visual self-description, in order to make the session inclusive to blind and visually impaired participants. Ask all presenters to offer visual descriptions of themselves and the images they are presenting. Guidelines and resources for self-description are available https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/digital-accessibility-and-inclusion/self-description-for-inclusive-meetings/

Introductions: Brief biographies of all presenters can be read in Sched along with abstracts for most presentations. You should not read these out verbatim, but you may wish to ask presenters in advance if there’s anything they’d like you to highlight or if there’s something new they’d like said. Please always use preferred pronouns. Please also remind presenters to make a statement of consent to make it clear whether they are happy for some or all of the content of their papers to be shared (e.g. via screen shots, live-tweeting, etc). Please ensure that you are able pronounce all presenters’ names. If in doubt, please ask the presenter rather than guessing.

Timing and Time Notifications: Do consider how you want to let online and in person presenters know that they are reaching the end of their presentation time. If online delegates are screen sharing, they often won’t see a message in the chat or visual signal, so you may need to verbally let them know. Agree this with presenters in advance of the session.

Chairing with sensitivity: While it may seem ‘natural’ for people to introduce themselves with reference to their institutional affiliations, please remember that we are living in times of precarity and this can cause discomfort and anxiety for some of our colleagues. This is also the case for some ‘getting to know you’ exercises (e.g. those that involve look into people’s eyes, especially those who are not known or improvising without preparation), especially though not exclusively for neurodivergent scholars. Finally, please remember that there are a wide variety of reasons why participants may not want (or be able) to have their cameras or even their microphones on.

Q&As: We invite Chairs who are hosting Q&A sessions to consider the following points, which were first developed by Claire Hampton and Royona Mitra for TaPRA2019 to help make sessions as productive, generative and democratic as possible. In doing so, they referenced guidance provided by Eve Tuck (@tuckeve) in which she noted that it is ‘the audience’s responsibility to help craft a positive public speaking experience’ for all.

• If possible, invite the audience to take 5 minutes to talk to each other (perhaps via in person chat or Zoom break out rooms) or reflect before asking questions of the presenters, perhaps using this time to peer review any question.
• Make sure that your questions are actual questions and reflect on whether the question needs to be posed and answered in front of everyone in the room. If necessary, try to reframe comments as questions for presenters. Remind audience members that reflections and suggestions can be shared with presenters later, in person or via email.
• Try to be as inclusive and to enable as many voices as possible to be heard and responded to. This includes both audience members and presenters (ensuring that all questions aren’t directed to a single presenter, for instance).
• Please encourage attendees to be self-reflexive in moments of listening, and question the urge to be listened to, if it is not their turn to speak.