Virtual line up announced

Online format allowing for over 80 speakers

University of Colorado Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs will occur virtually this spring with fewer events than a typical year, but organizers are taking advantage of the online format to expand the conference from five to seven days and will still feature more than 80 speakers.

The 73rd CWA will take place from April 5-11, with seven performances and 22 panel discussions scheduled throughout the week.

Planning a vir tual event of this size was a challenge, organizers said, and not just because students, staff and community members couldn’t meet in person.

“Going from an event that’s live to an event that’s online of this magnitude is pretty unprecedented, so while maybe we’d become habituated to how we put a conference together, in many ways we had to think every step of the way to make sure we weren’t overlooking something,” said Professor John Griffin, faculty director of CWA.

But the core of the conference remains the same — recruiting speakers and designing an event that informs and inspires the campus and Boulder community.

This year’s conference themes are racism in the U.S., healthcare and Generation Z, though organizers said they expect the events of the past year will also be

prominent — social unrest, the pandemic, politics and the vir tual world.

CU Boulder senior Hanna Skuladottir, who served on the keynote and Generation Z organizing committees, said she wanted to bring in speakers who would talk about issues that mattered to students. She’s looking forward to panel discussions about art as social activism and technologies of the future.

“We’re finding a lot of ways to get students involved in the conference,” she said. “That can include getting student producers on each panel that will have an opportunity to engage with speakers, having students on panels and then having panels geared toward students.”

The 2020 Conference on World Affairs had to shift online abruptly because of the coronavirus pandemic and only had five panels, but still plenty of interest and par ticipation, CWA Community Chair Laurie Leinonen said.

While it was clear that 2021 would not be at the same scale as a typical inperson conference, which can feature 200 events over five days, Leinonen said organizers started looking at ways to use the virtual format to their advantage.

“Asking folks to donate 2-3 hours of their time instead of traveling to Boulder for 5 days is a much easier ask and has been well received,” Leinonen wrote in an email. “With fewer panels, our guest speakers were invited specifically for one panel so while it is considerably smaller in scale there are still almost 80 speakers involved and sought for specific topics.”

The vir tual event will also bring back the CWA jazz concert and Ebert Interruptus film series, with all events free and open to the public. Sessions will be held over Zoom and livestreamed on CWA’S Youtube channel.

The full schedule will be available in the coming weeks, and people can register to participate at colorado.edu/cwa.