Hi poster presenters. I have heard that some people have not received the information about poster specifications. It is possible that some institutional email filters are a bit over-zealous. If this is you, read on. And if you haven’t submitted a poster, but would like to, you have until Sunday this week!

As this is a hybrid conference, we w ill be having posters both in digital format and as real-life posters present in Denver (even if you aren’t there with them).This does mean that if you are attending online-only, you will still need to arrange to have your poster be in Denver.

The posterboard dimensions are 4 ft x 4 ft, or approximately 1.21 x 1.21 metres. This means they can accommodate pretty much any standard size you want, in either portrait or landscape format. For more on standard sizes see https://www.papersizes.org/

See below for further information and tips:

Please email us your digital poster (PDF/PPT format) to the conference email address no later than 21st June. You may record a short talk to go with your poster if you would like to do that. This is not compulsory. If you want to do this, please send the talk to us when you send us your poster and we will upload them together.

If you are travelling with your poster, consider printing it on canvas and it can fold down into your hand luggage. If you are carrying a poster tube, label it with your name and your destination hotel/address in Denver, just in case.

If you are presenting your poster in absentia (i.e., attending online only), you have two options.
First, have your poster printed locally to you and mail it to us (address below).
Alternatively, you can arrange to have the poster printed at a Denver print shop and delivered to us (see below). This will likely be the easier (and cheaper) option. You must pay for your own poster printing. Your poster must arrive no later than 26th June. We will not be able to return posters unless you pay for shipping. Let us know if you want to do this.

Having your poster printed in Denver:

* FedEx office near the venue: Link A 24″ x 36″ poster on matte paper (just above A1 size https://www.papersizes.org/ costs $34.50. Other sizes and paper options available. They can also print on cloth but you’d have to get in touch with them for that. Let them know when you place your order that it is for the Weight Stigma Conference, 28th June, Embassy Suites Denver Downtown. If you arrange for your poster to be ready by 26th June, and notify us, we will collect it for you. Otherwise, you will have to arrange for it to be delivered to the venue ($20 fee). Obviously, feel free to use any printer, but we will only be collecting from this store, which is the closest to the venue.

* Alternatively, we have been told about this company: https://www.spoonflower.com/presentation-posters who have cheap printing on cloth and even with rush-delivery included, this is very economical. See below for delivery address.

If you are mailing your poster to us, or arranging it to be delivered by a printing company, please use the following address: (to arrive NOT EARLIER than 24th June)

c/o Angela Meadows, DOA 06/24/23
Weight Stigma Conference
C/O Embassy Suites Denver Downtown Convention Center
1420 Stout Street
Denver, CO 80202, USA

From 2023, the Weight Stigma Conference will be hybrid with both in-person and remote attendance available. Don’t miss out on our amazing line up. Live from Denver, Colorado and online on 28th and 29th June 2023. All sessions will be recorded and videos will be available for one month after the event.

Visit https://weightstigmaconference.com/registration-2023/ for more information and to register.

Programme: The full programme for this year’s Weight Stigma Conference is now available at https://weightstigmaconference.com/programme-2023/

Abstract submission: Last day to submit a poster abstract is Sunday 18th June. Don’t miss out: https://weightstigmaconference.com/abstract-submission/ Note, because we are hybrid this year, all posters have to be available both online and in person, even if the presenter is only attending remotely. If you intend to submit a poster this week, please bear in mind that you will still need to get your poster printed and sent to Denver. The easiest way to do this is likely to have it printed at a local print shop. We will send you more details if your abstract is accepted.

Conference registration: For registration (in-person and online-only) and conference details, visit https://weightstigmaconference.com/registration-2023/

Bursary Fund: Thanks to your generosity, we have raised over $3000 for our Bursary Fund, which has allowed us to provide 18 free registrations and one travel bursary for delegates who otherwise would not be able to attend. However, we are now at the limits of funding and bursary requests are still coming in. If you can afford to donate, every little helps. Please visit our Go Fund Me site to make a contribution: https://www.gofundme.com/f/weight-stigma-conference-2023-bursary-fund or if you are attending this year’s conference, you can make a donation during Registration. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far.

Airport travel: We apologise for an error in the hotel information on our website: There is no airport shuttle to the conference hotel and venue. Uber/Lyft is the easiest option for getting from the airport to the hotel and should cost about $50-65 each way. There is also the option of taking the train from Denver International Airport to Union Station and only costs about $12. It is a bit slower, but is most cost effective. Union Station  is at the heart of downtown and less than a mile from the hotel. There is a free mall ride shuttle that travels down 16th street, but due to construction, it has been diverted slightly and would still require walking about 3 blocks from where the mall shuttle would drop off. 

Room and ride share: We have created a FB group to help delegates find others to share rooms and airport transport. Join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1875678856146438

9th Annual Weight Stigma Conference, Denver, CO, USA, 28-29 June, 2023 [Hybrid]

Register now to get early-bird rates on in-person and online-only tickets. See our website for details of ticket pricing and financial support options.

The Annual International Weight Stigma Conference is an inter-disciplinary event that brings together scholars and practitioners from a range of backgrounds (e.g., public health, government and public policy, psychology, medicine, sociology, anthropology, allied health professions, education, sports and exercise science, social sciences, media studies, business, law, activism, and the lay public) to consider research, policy, rhetoric, and practice around the issue of weight stigma.

This year’s theme is Unintended Harms, Insidious Impact: The Need for Multi-Level Change. Abstract submission for oral presentations and conference sessions are now closed, but we are continuing to accept submissions for poster presentations. Submit your abstract here.

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Keynotes

Shilo George

Shilo George, MS (she/they) a Southern Cheyenne-Arapaho and Irish/Scottish international speaker and owner of Łush Kumtux Tumtum Consulting, which means “a great awakening of the heart and spirit” in the Chinuk Wawa trade language. Her consulting work covers trauma informed practices and how those practices align with and support anti-racist and anti-oppression work within organizations and communities.

Tigress Osborn

Tigress Osborn (she/her) is the Chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). Founded in 1969 in the US, NAAFA is the world’s oldest documented fat rights advocacy organization. Tigress has championed an intersectional approach to fighting anti-fatness through education, advocacy, and support, with work featured in USA Today, Huffington Post, and Newsweek, and heard on BBC AntiSocial and ABC News. They were pivotal in the Campaign for Size Freedom’s recent victory in helping NYC Council pass a new weight and height anti-discrimination bill last week!

Dr Joy Cox

Dr Joy Cox is an organizational communication scholar and social justice advocate. Her work has focused on matters of intersectionality addressing race, body size, accessibility, and “health” within the context of body acceptance and fat liberation. In 2020, Joy published her first memoir and love letter to the fat Black community entitled, “Fat Girls in Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Own via North Atlantic Books. She also hosted the Fresh Out the Cocoon podcast which showcases the lived experiences of fat Black womxn and femmes and was co-founder of Jabbie, an identity-inclusive, body affirming app that encourages people to move their bodies in their own way.

For more on our keynotes, visit https://weightstigmaconference.com/keynotes-2023/

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Bursary Fund – Supporting Accessibility

The Weight Stigma Conference is a not-for-profit event. Although we try and keep prices down, we realise that the conference will nevertheless be beyond some people’s means. Rather than raising the cost of tickets, we will make every effort to raise additional funding through donations and sponsorship to allow us to give bursaries to individuals who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend. A Donation option is available for both delegates and non-attendees who are in a position to contribute a little extra to help us provide financial assistance where needed. Donations can also be made through our Go Fund Me page – please share this page with your networks. Last year, individual donations allowed us to provide twelve full bursaries and we hope to at least match that again this year. Thank you so much for your generosity. If you are interested in formal sponsorship of the event, please email us: stigmaconf@gmail.com.

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The 2023 WSC is delighted to follow the 2023 Annual Conference of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). SPSSI is an amazing organisation with a strong focus on social justice and creating change. If you’re not familiar with SPSSI, do check out their website. For more information: SPSSI conference webpage

FYI.

Call for Proposals: Special Issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society on: 

Fat Social Justice Now!

Editor-in-Chief: Carla A. Pfeffer, Michigan State University, cpfeffer@msu.edu

A Time Magazine headline in 2023 shouts: “More Than Half of the World Will Be Obese By 2035.” For decades, fatness has been decried as a global public health scourge, a crisis, an epidemic. An array of dietary, exercise, surgical, behavioral, psychological, interpersonal, and pharmaceutical interventions have been amassed with the aim of diminishing bodily fat, to no long-term avail. Alongside this costly array of interventions are myriad empirical research studies demonstrating the profound consequences of anti-fat social stigma and bias across nearly every facet of social life today-employment, health and healthcare, romantic relationships, public access and accommodations, legal systems, housing, education, families, socioeconomic status, public transportation, politics, religion, and the media. Even as representation of some fat bodies slowly begins to expand, supersize and infinifat people experience increasing social isolation, broad lack of access, care refusals, and public ridicule. Fatness is intersectionally experienced, producing variable outcomes for individuals and groups of people who live at these intersections. Few legal protections exist for fat people and fatphobia, anti-fat stigma, and discrimination have emerged as equal-opportunity antipathies, as common among social and political liberals as they are among conservatives.      

In the context of these difficult social realities, I invite papers for a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, on Fat Social Justice Now! This special issue seeks to encompass a variety of topics around a broad definition of fat social justice. As such, I invite you to consider how fat social justice has been conceptualized in the past, its status today, and how we might more effectively envision and strategize around fat social justice for the future. To be considered for inclusion in this special issue, please send a tentative title, 200-250 word abstract, and current CV to: Carla A. Pfeffer, cpfeffer@msu.edu, by June 30, 2023. Any questions about the topic may also be directed to Carla A. Pfeffer at this e-mail address. Those invited to submit full papers (5,500 words or fewer, including references) will be notified by August 01, 2023 and will be required to submit a full paper by November 01, 2023.

Welcome topics include but are not limited to:

• Shifts in fat social justice tactics, strategies, and approaches over time
• Fat social justice manifestos for the twenty-first century
• The role of fat acceptance in fat social justice (provocations welcome)
• Access, accommodations, and the built environment
• Intersections of fat social justice theories, politics, and social movements with crip and disability studies
• The rise of bariatric surgeries and weight-loss pharmaceuticals in the context of fat social justice
• Fat social justice within or across particular social contexts (e.g., relationships, families, legal systems, health and medicine, employment, education, housing, religion, politics, media, etc.)
• Local and global fat social justice
• Bodily autonomy, boundary and bodily surveillance, and bodily transitions in the fight for fat social justice
• Barriers, challenges, and strategies for achieving inclusive and intersectional fat social justice
• The role of Health at Every Size in the fight for fat social justice
• Fat social justice-focused organizations, groups, and social movements
• Building and promoting solidarity for fat social justice
• The state of legal protections for weight, body size, and shape
• The role of resilience, resistance, and activism for fat social justice
• Necessary intersections, solidarity, and allies in the context of fat social justice (e.g., anti-racist, anti-sexist)
• Art for fat social justice
• Technologies for fat social justice

In addition to these topics, I also invite brief reflective essays on the outgoing and founding editor of Fat Studies, Esther Rothblum’s, many contributions to defining, nurturing, and elevating the field of fat studies. This special issue will contain a special section celebrating Dr. Rothblum’s scholarship, editorship, mentorship, and longstanding commitments to advancing social justice.

Fat Studies is the first academic journal to critically examine theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and society. Content includes original research and overviews exploring the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and socioeconomic status. Articles critically examine representations of fat in health and medical sciences, the Health at Every Size model, the pharmaceutical industry, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, legal issues, literature, pedagogy, art, theater, popular culture, media studies, and activism.

Congratulations to the Campaign for Size Freedom for driving this historic legislation! We look forward to hearing more about this and other policy work being done by NAAFA at this year’s WSC, from NAAFA Board Chair Tigress Osborn.

FYI.

Announcement by NAAFA:

We are delighted to announce that the New York City Council voted 44-5 to pass bill INT-0209, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of height and weight in housing, employment and public accommodation. This historic vote means New York City is set to become the biggest city in the world to protect people from size discrimination. The bill becomes law when Mayor Adams signs it or when 30 days have passed, whichever happens first. 

Thank YOU for your crucial support in this effort – we are so excited to celebrate this victory together!

If you’re in New York City, save the date for Sunday, June 4th for a celebration of this exciting news. Follow us on your favorite social media @naafaofficial for details coming soon. 

Our work doesn’t end when NYC’s law becomes official. NAAFA and our partners at the Campaign for Size Freedom are supporting similar legislation in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. Want to help bring this momentum to your state? If you haven’t already done so, sign the Size Freedom petition to tell lawmakers across the country that you want to see them follow NYC’s lead!

While we coordinate efforts to pass more bills protecting fat people and people of all sizes from height and weight discrimination, we remain committed to all the other important education and advocacy work.. At NAAFA, we fight for fat rights, oppose discrimination in all forms, invest in intersectional fat community, and brazenly celebrate fat joy. Thank you for helping us create more reasons to celebrate!

In solidarity,

Tigress Osborn, NAAFA Board Chair

FYI.

Influencer Jae’Lynn Chaney has started a petition to the Federal Aviation Administration demanding change in the U.S. airline industry to protect customers of size across all airlines. You can learn more and sign here: https://www.change.org/p/demand-for-the-faa-to-protect-plus-size-travelers

Registration for online and in-person tickets to WSC 2023 is now open! For more information and to register, please visit https://weightstigmaconference.com/registration-2023/ Early-bird rates available until 31st May.

Details of WSC 2023 location and accommodation block are now available on our website. Visit https://weightstigmaconference.com/information-for-delegates/ for more information.

Don’t forget that the submission deadline for oral presentations and conference sessions (e.g., seminars, workshops, roundtables, etc.) is today. Poster submissions will remain open until June. Submit your abstract at https://weightstigmaconference.com/abstract-submission/ #WSC2023 #WSC9