I hope this email finds you well in your respective parts of the world. As communicated last year, in the lead up to the main ISPI conference in Cape Town in 2022, we will host a series of webinars this year. The virtual webinars will not be in the usual conference style (i.e. we ask for abstracts and then plan several sessions around those contributions). That will happen next year.
Our intention with the virtual webinars is to create an opportunity for us to come together, to introduce new poets and scholars to the field of poetic inquiry, to introduce you to South African poets and researchers, to stimulate curiosity and interest in those old and new to poetic inquiry and generally to use the webinars to whet the appetite and encourage submissions for the main ISPI conference in May 2022 in Cape Town, South Africa.
The webinars are free - so please feel free to circulate widely among your networks. We are mindful that the poetic inquiry community spans the globe. We have tried, as much as possible to accommodate the bulk of you, with the 19h00-21h00, SAST (GMT+2) time slot for the webinars over the 3 days. The hardest to accommodate - are our lovely colleagues in New Zealand! We hope that all of you can free up the time to join us for at least one of these events.
Please save the details - Zoom registration details will be available soon. Regards Heidi, Yvonne, Mari, Dudu, Angela, Bridgette and Raphael (the SA ISPI Conference Planning Committee)
2020 Announcement
Dear friends and colleagues,
So much has changed in our world. We kept on waiting for things to settle around COVID-19. We thought that would give us the space to figure out what to do about hosting ISPI in 2021 in South Africa.
But, we are all still waiting for that moment, and living with that uncertainty is what we have to work with. Following consultations with our local steering committee and also John and Natalie who hosted the last ISPI in Halifax, we have decided to cancel ISPI for 2021. We will then host it (hopefully) in person in South Africa from 23-27th May 2022. We all felt that there was something special about having the conference for the first time on African soil and doing so in person and not remotely.
We acknowledge that pushing it out by another year does make it an incredibly long time before we are able to come together as a community. To address this, the SA steering committee will host a poetry/poetic experience that will speak to the conference theme. This will be avirtualZoom Webinar on Friday, the 28th May 2021. We hope this will allow us to do several things: 1) come together as a community of poetic inquirers around the world and 2) introduce you to South African poets and poetry so you have a taste of what's to come in 2022. We will send details about the Webinar towards the end of this year. Until then stay safe and well.
Warm regards
Heidi on behalf of the SA Steering Committee
Professor Heidi van Rooyen Group Executive The Impact Centre Human Sciences Research Council Honorary Professor: University of the Witwatersrand
