At the heart of each symposium is live, face-to-face online exchange. Through Zoom-based sessions, participants gather in real time for themed paper panels, plenaries, workshops, and shared conversation. These encounters create space for immediate response, intellectual connection, and the kinds of human-scale interaction that are often most generative in scholarly and professional life.
All live sessions are held in US Central Time, providing a common temporal anchor for the symposium as a whole.
Alongside live exchange, each symposium includes asynchronous formats that widen access across time zones, schedules, and modes of engagement. Asynchronous online presentations and asynchronous online posters can be viewed on demand, while discussion spaces allow conversation to continue before, during, and after live sessions.
Together, the asynchronous and live formats support different ways of contributing: presenting research, sharing practice, joining discussion, receiving feedback, and engaging wider thematic conversation. This asynchronous dimension does more than add flexibility. It supports broader international participation, creates a more reflective pace of engagement, and allows the symposium to function as a continuing digital environment rather than a series of scheduled sessions alone.
Each symposium will include Talking Circles: thematic spaces of meeting and encounter, designed to support attentive listening, open exchange, and shared reflection. Distinct from formal presentation, they create room for dialogue, reciprocity, and a more human-scale mode of conversation across the symposium.
Each symposium will also include a Virtual Garden Conversation with plenary speakers. Rather than functioning as a conventional Q&A, this session will offer a smaller breakout setting for those who wish to continue the conversation in a more informal and reflective way.
Each symposium will include learning and service sessions that support participants in practical and developmental ways. This is a key feature of the symposium model and part of its commitment to fostering not only presentation and discussion, but also mentoring, research development, and wider field participation.
These sessions will include publication advice sessions, PhD and early career scholar sessions, and related formats focused on scholarly communication, professional growth, and contribution to wider research communities.
The symposia are also designed to support more collective forms of scholarly development. Beyond individual presentations, they create opportunities for participants to work toward shared outcomes that strengthen research communities and contribute to the ongoing life of related Research Networks.
These outcomes may include symposium proceedings, journal pathways, curated book volumes, and the development of field statements. Collaborative sessions and working groups help articulate shared concerns, identify emerging questions, and frame future directions across a field.