SER President’s Message

Greetings to all of you in the SER community. Each time I have settled in to write one of these messages, pandemic conditions have been drastically different. With the Omicron variant tearing through the world, things feel more unstable and uncertain than they have in a while. University teaching plans are shifting rapidly with reassurance only that we need to remain flexible to further changes. K-12 schools seem to be tenuously clinging to staying open, calling various closure days due to sick staff, need for testing, or a deep cleaning, but largely resisting a complete shift to remote learning thus far. But with every new message from my daughter’s school, I panic, worried the title will be “Covid is everywhere and we are closing.” So many families I know with small children have lost any sort of stability in their child care situation, and these most valuable and vulnerable members of our human community are home as office mates. It is truly impossible to work and care for an infant, toddler or preschooler at the same time. For those in this situation, I am thinking of you and wishing there were better support or solutions. The SER executive committee was recently observing that we all need a “time out” for a couple of months, but apparently this is not one of our choices.

So, we continue on. At SER, we in the thick of preparations for the mid-year and annual meetings.

The mid-year meeting, coming up soon on March 4, 2022, has the immensely timely theme of “Intersecting pandemics: COVID-19 + health disparities.” This will be a fully hybrid meeting, with the option to attend in person at Temple University or online. Notably, for SER members there is no cost to attend online. Please sign up and come check out as much of the program as you can fit in your schedule! Thank you to Neal Goldstein and Resa Jones for their excellent work as conference co-chairs. We greatly appreciate our colleagues at Drexel, Temple, Penn and Thomas Jefferson for collaborating to support this event, and an additional thank you to Temple University for hosting the in-person meeting.

For the annual meeting in June 2022, while it is impossible to forecast the pandemic conditions at that point, we are forging forward with planning. Know that as the time is closer, we will be carefully looking at conditions, safety considerations, and options. We appreciate your willingness to engage despite the uncertainty, as evidenced by the robust submissions we have received for abstracts, award nominations, and the dissertation workshop. If you were not able to pull together a submission, it is not too late! Latebreaker submissions will be accepted between February 8 – March 4.  Annual meeting registration is open, so sign up soon to take advantage of early registration rates. When you register, note that excellent pre-conference workshops are being offered both in person and virtually, building on the success of using the virtual modality last year.

Thank you all so much for being part of SER, and I look forward to connecting at the mid-year and annual meetings.