Member safety at SHA Annual Meeting in Boston, January 2020
April 23, 2019
Member safety at SHA Annual Meeting in Boston, January 2020
Eight months from now we will convene for our 53rd annual meeting in Boston. As you make your preparations, we want to emphasize that SHA’s goal is to have professional meetings that are safe environments for our entire membership. As part of that process, we want to share with you some steps we will be taking leading up to the conference:
1) We will continue the process initiated last year of requiring all conference attendees to agree to both SHA’s Statement of Ethical Principles and our 2016 Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Policy. We will build on those steps to clearly articulate appropriate mechanisms for reporting actions at the conference that may violate the policies laid out in the two documents.
2) We will identify and communicate to all registrants the administrative structure that will be put in place to adjudicate any incidents that occur at the conference.
3) We will not allow individuals who, to our knowledge, have been sanctioned by other organizations for harassment, assault, or other overtly discriminatory behaviors to participate in our annual meeting.
4) Conference programming will again include sessions/forums that specifically explore harassment in archaeology and steps that can be taken to improve the culture of SHA.
5) Security personnel will be present at the meetings to check badges to prevent people who have not registered from attending.
Please see this communication as one step in our ongoing efforts to providing as safe a conference space for our members as possible. We recognize that there are other issues to consider as we move forward in planning the conference. Over the next several months, we will continue talking with our members and working together on this issue. We will post new information about additional measures that may be necessary as we continue researching and implementing best practices. As always, we welcome members’ input relating to conference safety.
Sincerely,
Mark Warner Barbara Heath
President President-Elect