Dear SSS Members:
Happy Monday! We hope your weekend was restful and rejuvenating.
A quick reminder that TODAY is the deadline to submit papers, sessions, and posters for the Southern Sociological Society’s annual meeting. We will gather, April 6-9, 2022 at the Sheraton Birmingham in Birmingham, AL to engage with the conference theme of “Invisibility” and to share scholarship across the broad range of substantive interests in the discipline. We hope you will join us for our first meeting back in person in a couple of years!
We are pleased to update everyone on the meeting space as well. Indeed, this weekend, those SSS members responsible for planning the meeting met in Birmingham to see the layout of the meeting space, plan special events, and discuss the meeting with the hotel staff. We are delighted to report that the meeting spaces are quite large—allowing for social distancing—and we feel very comfortable that we will meet our goal of providing a safe face-to-face experience for our vaccinated members.
Due to the reopening schedule of the Sheraton after their own challenges with the pandemic, we will have sleeping rooms in both the Sheraton and the connected Westin. Our larger meetings rooms, registration desks, and exhibits will be in the Sheraton proper, with about a dozen other breakout rooms in the neighboring (and connected) BJCC. Getting back and forth between sessions is quite easy and we will have signage throughout the complex, directing the way.
After meeting with hotel staff and members of another regional professional society meeting at the site, it is also now quite clear that we will not have any way to provide a hybrid experience, as all of the hybrid options we were pitched would be cost prohibitive to the organization.
We hope you will make plans to attend our upcoming meeting. Our last annual meeting in Birmingham was in 1936 – it is way past time to go back to this deeply important city in the collective life of the South and the nation as a whole. We can both say that we ate many great meals in the surrounding restaurants, visited some great museums, and are very excited about the many options that Birmingham has to offer.
#SSS2022 here we come!
Sincerely,
Stephanie Bohon, SSS President
David L. Brunsma, SSS Executive Officer
Stephanie Bohon, SSS President
David L. Brunsma, SSS Executive Officer