Chaos, catering, and conferences

There’s a reason I haven’t posted here in a while and I’d like to tell you about it. I’d also like to ask for your help.

It all started in December 2012, just after Christmas. I was a about a month and a half into my PhD studies, reading my university emails over the holiday period, and I came across a notice about some funding that was available to PhD students to help them put on a conference. It was part of a skills development fund, the intended skill being for students to learn how to put on a conference.

As regular readers may know, I am studying weight stigma. This is a fast growing academic field, but the vast majority of the literature in the area comes out of two research centres in the US. I figured, I was new at this, nobody at my university was studying weight stigma, perhaps me and the other six people in the UK who give a damn about weight stigma ought to get to know each other. So I decided to apply. I mean, how hard can it be? Reserve a room, order some catering, invite people to speak — and I already knew a few from the Health at Every Size^® (HAES) and Size Acceptance circuit in the UK already — and put out some advertising. I figured if I was organised, it wouldn’t be that much work and it would fit easily into my studies.

The main problem was the deadline. I remember it — it was 7th of January. So I had about 10 days to put together an application. I waxed lyrical about the importance of such an event and made sure to throw in some keywords that funding bodies seemed to like. I also needed a “name” speaker who had agreed to talk if the funding were granted. I had a very tenuous connection to a professor of health psychology — I’d emailed her during my masters and she’d sent me copies of a couple of her papers that I was having trouble sourcing. I knew she’d done some of the early work on communication between doctors and fat patients. I also knew she’d written a book on the Psychology of Food and Eating. I hadn’t read it, but I’d flipped through it and there was a whole chapter on whether or not “obesity” actually needed treating at all. She seemed like a good choice. Given the short time frame, I dropped her a line and she said she’d love to speak. So I submitted my application.

I also remember the date that I found out I’d been awarded the money — it was the 14th of February. I’d asked if they’d consider moving the meeting to the morning so that I could get home in time to have a Valentine’s dinner with my husband. (They did, and we did. It was nice.) So, I had £1,000 to play with, and just over three months in which to organise my conference. Because of the academic year in the UK, all accounts had to be finalised by the end of June, which meant I kind of needed to get everything submitted by the beginning of June.

This gave me another problem (apart from it being a ridiculously short time to organise a conference). Ideally, I would have liked as much time as possible to organise, holding the conference at the end of May or first week in June. But in the middle of May there was a big European “obesity” conference being held in the UK. I thought some people might like to attend both, but if they were coming from far away, they wouldn’t be likely to fly to the UK for one, leave, then come back again. So I decided to make the best of it. I scheduled my event for the day after that one finished, and planned to ask the Association for the Study of Obesity (the UK organisation that was supposed to represent people in this field and co-organisers of the conference with the European Association for the Study of Obesity) to share information about my event to their lists. That way, I figured, people could easily stick around an extra day and come to the stigma conference also.

They refused. Point blank. That’s a whole other story, but by this point, the wheels were in motion.

The next three months were a bit of a blur. How hard can it be? Um, pretty damn hard. You would not believe how much organisation goes into this kind of thing. The big stuff — the venue, the catering — that’s easy. It’s the details, the things nobody thinks of that are a nightmare. We need a room where the chairs don’t have arms or bench seating so that big people can sit easily and without embarrassment. We needed to source kettles so we could provide our own tea and coffee because the caterers charged £1.50 per cup, or about £600 ($900) for coffee at registration and during the morning, lunch, afternoon, and we didn’t have access to a fridge for the milk. Things like that.

But some of the big stuff was pretty fun too. My big name speaker, an absolutely lovely lady,  proposed to talk about how weight stigma can help promote behaviour change, despite the fact that almost all of the evidence suggested that the opposite was true. I’ve spent the last few years learning how much of obesity rhetoric comes from the “well, it’s obvious” school of science. Like the recent national report by the UK’s leading lobbyists, where their spokesperson admitted to making up the supposed soaring obesity rates despite the government’s own evidence not supporting this at all, because, well, there were fat people being fat in the street, where he could see them, and Something Must Be Done™. Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid.

I had another speaker, who I shall call The Activist, complaining about the lack of diversity on the panel of invited speakers. This was with about six weeks to go. The speakers were mostly white and female, she pointed out, and The Activist was the “token fatty.” She noted that my university and venue of the conference was in an area with a lot of ethnic diversity. All of this was true, apart from the “token fatty” part. But with only weeks to pull this together, I had gone with names I knew, rather than making an effort to show this kind of diversity. With the exception of herself and another UK activist, I had never met the people I’d invited, but was simply familiar with their work. I had no idea of their ethnicity, sexuality or BMI. And surely that would also be tokenism. I have to be honest though - this aspect hadn’t even crossed my mind, and her words certainly made me think. I still struggle with this idea though if we are railing against tokenism. I’m not sure how I would handle this next time, but I would certainly put a lot more consideration into it. Having said that, I didn’t really see the significance of the multiculturalism of the host city. Was I supposed to go out and pull speakers off the street?

I had an anti-obesity charity set up by a major name researcher (a different one) wanting to sponsor the event and a supervisor who didn’t want me to charge because it might put people off (although I must point out that she was incredibly supportive throughout and her experience and advice were invaluable). Plus, there were a series of other logistical problems ranging from niggling to “waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night wondering what the hell I’d been thinking when I took this on” problems.

Somehow, I got through all this. I did charge, but kept it ridiculously cheap. The base registration rate was just enough to cover catering costs. So if I got an extra 50 people, I wouldn’t suddenly find myself unable to feed them. I didn’t hear any more from The Activist so assumed she had accepted my points as reasonable. The Big Name speaker modified her talk title by making it the “possible” role of stigma in promoting behaviour change. And I decided against hiring security to keep The Activist away from TBN.

On the day, just over 100 people crammed into a room that was too small for them — more than double the number I’d hoped for, making me very glad that catering was covered! They had come from all over the UK, flown in from Ireland and Scandinavia. One from the US. It was rowdy, controversial, there were arguments, but no bloodshed. The Activist used her talk, amongst other things, to have a go at the sponsors and the organisers (me). As with many things, she wasn’t wrong in what she was saying, but it’s an approach to activism I’m not comfortable with. Still, we all do activism in our own way. And the speech was pretty funny. In a good way. If you weren’t on the receiving end of some of the humour.  The Activist also left before the TBN, who she disapproved of, gave her presentation, making an excuse about having to get a return train. In retrospect, that was probably for the best. A health sciences obesity researcher stood up after one of the talks and said even if people do “healthy things,” “obesity” is still a disease risk and people need to be told to lose weight. I’d been keeping my mouth closed so far, thinking it rude to invite people to a conference and then argue with them in public, but I couldn’t let that pass. I stood up and attempted to summarise the entirety of the evidence suggesting this was not in fact true, in under 60 seconds. I sat down to a round of applause. This didn’t go down well with some of the scientists in the room. I remember thinking that normally it would be the “obesity-mongers” who would be in the majority and the HAES people would be the unpopular “crazy” contingent. This time the shoe was on the other foot and they didn’t like it. When disciplines collide. And here I was, slap bang in the middle, studying a subject that really does cross these boundaries, and trying to bring the two sides together.

Deb Burgard. Photo by Andy Berry, PurkinjeBlue.com

But apart from some start-up problems (the poster boards hadn’t been delivered; we couldn’t find the velcro dots; there weren’t enough chairs and we were told we weren’t allowed to move them from another room; one of the two hot water kettles didn’t work; there was no outlet socket for them; and people I didn’t even know were jumping in to help register people and make tea and coffee (thank you so much if you’re reading this)), the day was a huge success. From the time of my welcome speech (during which I did all the health and safety announcements and pointed out that we had already broken every H&S rule in the book by the time we got going that morning) to the thanks at the end of the day, it was wonderful.

I had a lot of great feedback (as well as a couple of complaints — especially about the clapping!). People talked about how it had really made them think about things in a different way. One person I met at a wedding who didn’t know I was involved said it was the best conference she’d ever been to. And then, while I was still glowing with satisfaction, she added, “Yes, I was waiting for them to get up and start hitting each other.”And within a week, two people offered to host the conference in subsequent years.

Now it’s that time again, and this is where you come in.

I am tasked with raising the funding for this year’s conference. I have been approaching publishers, academic institutions, plus-size clothing companies, and HAES and SA organisations. Many of them are helping to sponsor the event, but I still don’t have enough. Last  year, I raised enough money to provide travel assistance to every student who needed it. I’d like to do the same this year, but it’s pretty hard going.

I have been offering sponsors the option of purchasing a named student bursary at £100 each. So they’d get something like “Publishing Company Inc Student Travel Bursary” in the programme. So far, I only have two takers. I would love to have some “Fatosphere Student Travel Bursaries.” If you are able to make even a small donation, this would be a huge help. All donations will go towards providing assistance to unfunded students who would otherwise not be able to attend and present their work – I promise, you won’t be paying for our cheese and wine reception!

If you’d like to make a donation, this is the link. It’s also the link to buy tickets if you want to attend. Instructions on how to donate are near the bottom of the page.

Six weeks to go. Wish me luck!

Note: Edited slightly by author because, well, it’s The Internet, y’all. And I do at some point want to have a career.