Dear Members of the Society for Socialist Studies:
Greetings from the Left Coast, here in Victoria, BC! I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to remind you about our upcoming special Membership Meeting on June 8, 2020, and to urge you to sign up and attend. It will be our regular General Assembly Membership Meeting (GAMM, or AGM to most of us).
The meeting will happen online at 11 am Pacific, 12 Mountain, 1 pm Central, 2 pm Eastern, 3 pm Atlantic, and 3:30 pm Newfoundland. As you all know, we had to cancel the regular annual Membership Meeting we had scheduled for Congress, along with an impressive SSS conference. Most member-associations of Congress did the same. We hope that you can participate in the rescheduled Membership Meeting, and encourage other members as well.
Why meet this year? First, we have to. The Society needs to renew our executive ranks and pass a budget each year. We on the executive have also proposed a number of constitutional amendments. Their purposes are to adapt Society meetings to online participation, to make meeting arrangements more flexible in emergencies, and to enhance representation on the executive.
But there are some additional reasons to meet that we executive members think are positive in their own right. We will discuss local chapter creation for the coming year, and our plans for the next annual conference (the University of Alberta in Edmonton). Exciting developments have marked this year, and our journal and website have been highly active. The conference planning process that Jamie Magnusson nearly completed with her committee have opened doors to new activists and scholars. The book prize committee led by Meg Luxton will announce and present the annual Errol Sharpe book prize winner.
Remember that for security reasons, you have to take several steps to participate: 1) register with us for the meeting, at least three days before the meeting time on June 8, 2) make sure your membership dues are up to date before the meeting, and 3) use a special access code we will send you one day before the meeting. If you have not used Zoom before, you must also 4) download the free software for participants. Those of you with university or college jobs may already have corporate access to this e-meeting software.
All that is simpler than it might sound. Detailed instructions guide you through the steps here. You can also reach the guide via https://socialiststudies.ca, clicking the “Conference” tab on our main webpage there, and then clicking “2020 GAMM/AGM materials”.
That website location also provides the key documents for the meeting. You can access those documents electronically, of course, or print them off in advance of the meeting. Some are well worth considering beforehand. They include the agenda, last year’s draft minutes, the draft budget and treasurer’s report, constitutional proposals, and biographies of nominees already received by the executive. (Additional nominations are allowed, both in advance of the meeting and from the “floor”.)
Thanks for your attention, and see you at our virtual meeting.
Yours,
Jamie Lawson
Secretary, Society for Socialist Studies
PS: If for some reason, you cannot attend on June 8, please renew your membership dues anyway, if you possibly can. This has wound up being an important transition year, with challenges and dislocations. But it also offers us exciting new prospects. Those new initiatives, along with our existing mandates, take both money and your active participation.