What is a Community Talk?

As people have started to fine-tune their proposals, we’ve been fielding a number of questions regarding what a community talk will look like.

We want to give a bit more background to how we are envisioning community talks. Because we are gearing this event to appeal to both scholars and the general public, we are eager to have 45 minute talks that examine fields of research within the topic of migration to North America.

We listed examples such as migration to Canada, Norwegian-language newspapers, and settler-colonial interactions. Others might be Norwegians in North America before 1825, Norwegian women, homesteading, return migration to Norway, Norway at the time of migration and the pushes of migration. These talks should feature multiple scholars, not limited to just your own research.

Yet another way to conceive of these is if you were to try to teach an introductory course on migration from Norway to North America, what would the 10 most core topics be to understand migration as a greater whole?

The 10 community talks that are chosen will all be filmed and available online after the conference. Individuals contributing to these will have their conference fees waived, and we are hopeful that they will also receive an honorarium, but funding is not yet secured for that.

Visit our Program page to find descriptions of each type of talk.

If you have already submitted a proposal for a community talk and it doesn’t fit into this description, no worries. We can easily consider your proposal for a different type of talk. And if you aren’t sure what yours might fit under, please reach out to someone on the committee.

A final note that if you have an idea that might need more time, you could also reach out, as next we will be planning pre-and post conference events. Some of those could certainly be half-day workshops or other opportunities.