The 4th ALPSP University Press Redux 2022 will take place virtually in partnership with Cambridge University Press on 17-18 May. Redux 2022 will approach the pressing themes of diversity and sustainability from a practical angle, focus on implementation and not be afraid to ask the difficult questions.

The ALPSP University Press Redux Conference co-organised with Cambridge University Press is now just a few weeks away, and I’m getting excited about it. Through the enthusiasm of our super line-up of chairs and speakers and the lovely organising team working with me at CUP, the agenda has taken on a life of its own and is shaping up to be very different from any other conference I’ve seen in the publishing space, both in the targeted focus around EDIB and sustainability, and in the approach. We have panels for every session which put publishing experts alongside a wide range of other linked perspectives including first-hand experiences, voices from the wider Academy, supply chain expertise, recruitment expertise, related industry knowledge and perspectives on EDIB in the wider workplace.

My colleagues Andri and Val touched on this breadth of perspectives in their earlier blog posts around sustainability and diversity. Our closing panel for the session on Digital Accessibility takes the same approach, chaired by Huw Alexander from textBOX with a panel consisting of a PhD research student, a publishing expert and a middle-school music teacher tackling the question: How do we go from talking about accessibility to being accessible? Coming in the same week as Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the session will put this very practical question in the context of publishing and publishers, but take it wider, bringing in powerful first-hand experiences and perspectives about the question more generally.

The principles we started out with hold true. We want to run a conference with a practical focus, which asks tough questions. All our sessions are on topics where there is a genuine will for change, but they are also subjects which don’t offer easy answers and often get kicked down the road as a result. They are all subjects that people can get nervous discussing. We might fear judgement and we can be scared to say the wrong thing, and this makes constructive dialogue difficult. Constructive challenge without judgement is easy to profess but harder to enact. But nodding and smiling and appearing to open doors without substance to back it up won’t enable change. We need to spend less time worrying about getting it wrong, and more time talking about things that we can actually do.

With this in mind, my hope for the conference is that attendees come out of each session feeling less overwhelmed by these questions, and less intimidated by them. That they also come away with more of a sense of a shared problem and a shared will to address it. But most importantly with at least one thing (and it might be just one thing), however small, that they can start doing straight away. THAT would be a resounding success!

We can acknowledge that these are incredibly difficult questions without a single answer, and then we can get stuck in anyway, and we can make things better. After all, we’re publishers. Messy and complicated is what we do.

Join us at University Press Redux 2022

Find our full programme and list of speakers at Redux 2022, and register for your place by Sunday 24 April to benefit from the standard rate.

Don’t miss out!