Dear ISHA members
We will be honest with you, ISHA is not doing great at the moment. In the past years, our well-known schedule of four seminars per year has not been as frequent as in pre-Covid times. We are remembering nostalgically the times when sections were even competing to organise seminars or were so motivated to host an extra seminar or a regional seminar. Those were some great times, we would love to go back.
That is exactly why we are contacting you today. As there are no concrete plans to organise seminars in the near future, we are calling an emergency meeting. We would love to have all our current section boards, previous members of local sections, past ISHA officials, ISHA members scattered across Europe, all that ever have been to an ISHA seminar, …basically everyone who cares about ISHA and wants to see our organisation live on for the future.
What will this meeting be about? First up, we would love to see who is still active and is capable of helping organise any sort of ISHA event in the future or connect us to those who are. Secondly, we want to brainstorm about what type of seminars and events ISHA can organise in the future. We have to look beyond the traditional seminar format that became standard in the past and look for new and more accessible formats for both organisers and participants. Thirdly, we want to explore how we can re-activate the project management committee (PMC) and how both the PMC and ISHA International can take on a more active role in the organisational process and responsibilities to facilitate local ISHA sections who are up for organising a seminar but lack experience and active members.
So, it is crucial that as many people join that are active, and want to share good practices and brainstorm about the future of ISHA be present at this meeting. Please share this message with your ISHA friends and local students that still need to discover ISHA. We are probably preaching to the choir here, but ISHA is a great opportunity for students to not only experience an academic, international environment, to foster your personal growth and language proficiency while seeing the world, but also to facilitate cultural exchange in Europe and beyond, to keep communication across borders alive and to create an international network with students and early career researchers of the historical sciences.
We hope to welcome you to this meeting in large numbers and to see many familiar faces, but possibly even some new ones that are motivated to write a new chapter in ISHA’s history.
The first meeting will take place on the 8th of June. The Zoom link can be found here:
https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/66756774628
Meeting ID: 667 5677 4628
If you cannot attend on the 8th, don’t you worry! Fill out this Doodle and we will set up another meeting later in June: https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/dRggvqEe
International Students of History Association 