Jolanta Aritz
Western U.S. Regional Vice President
Association for Business Communication
Dear ABC Western members,
We have an exciting year ahead of us! The ABC Annual conference in Detroit is rapidly approaching, and I look forward to seeing many ABC Western members sharing their teaching and research scholarship.
Our regional ABC Western meeting will take place on Friday, October 26, 2019. We moved our regional meeting from a 7am morning slot to a more time-friendly lunch hour in the afternoon. We will meet at 24grill, a conference hotel restaurant, from 12:00pm-1:15pm (pay for your own meal – https://24grille.com/). I will be sending an agenda shortly before the conference.
Our next event is the ABC Western region Baja cruise conference on March 1-5, 2020. We look forward to many stimulating conversations. As conference chair Pete Cardon put it, “Why a cruise? Yes, it will be fun. Yes, it will be affordable. But, those aren’t the primary reasons for a cruise conference. The main reasons for a cruise conference are to unplug ourselves to hold deeper and more meaningful conversations about our work in the business communication discipline and to build a stronger Western ABC community.” A teaser for those who are attending: We are bringing a virtual reality demo to teach diversity in the classroom onboard the ship. Yes, we will be using VR glasses to learn about Virtual and Augmented Reality for education and training and much more!
If you have not submitted a proposal for the Western ABC Conference but are interested in attending the conference, please register by October 15 to secure early bird discounted registration fees: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/2020-abc-western-u.s.-conference#Registration. The registration will stay open until October 25.
Thank you for responding to the ABC Western regional membership survey. Our regional membership committee is hard at work on this survey to learn how we can best serve the regional membership to build a regional professional network. We expect to release preliminary results from the survey at the ABC Conference in October; so, here is another reason to attend the Western Region meeting on Friday, October 26, at noon.
And finally, our Western ABC bulletin (https://abcwest.org/ ) Fall 2019 issue is online. Our editorial team, Sushil Oswal and Mikel Chertudi, has taken on an ambitious task to become an online platform to publish your teaching and research scholarship. Many thanks to them for spearheading this effort.
The Western ABC Bulletin is already in the process of planning their next issue for spring 2020. Please contact the editor directly (oswal@uw.edu) if you want to contribute to the spring issue of the Bulletin. Our editorial team works with authors closely in the development of the manuscripts and if you have an idea, now is the time to discuss it with them.
Jolanta Aritz
Western U.S. Regional Vice President, Association for Business Communication
October 14, 2019