I found How to Organise Inclusive Conferences and Workshops to be less a conventional handbook than a serious, humane argument about what professional gatherings reveal about power, access, and belonging. Edited by William E. Donald, the book brings together voices from Canada, Australia, Asia, North America, and the UK to show how conferences shape careers while too often excluding the very people they claim to welcome. Its strongest throughline is simple but unsettling: inclusion is never finished, never clean, and never reducible to a checklist. Across chapters on access friction, hybrid participation, childcare, sensory design, transparent communication, and the politics of rest, the book keeps returning to one insistence: if events are meant to be sites of learning and exchange, then who can actually enter, remain, and contribute in those spaces matters profoundly.

What stayed with me most was the book’s moral clarity. It doesn’t flatter organisers with easy absolution. Donald’s opening claim that no conference can ever be fully inclusive could have become an excuse for resignation, but here it becomes the opposite: a reason to keep listening, adjusting, and refusing complacency. I was especially struck by the way the book exposes the quiet cruelties of “normal” professional practice, the reimbursement model that assumes financial slack, the fetish for in-person attendance, the blandly ableist notion that hybrid access is somehow second-rate, the casual expectation that attendees can absorb noise, travel, fatigue, bureaucracy, and social strain without cost. When the book moves into examples like all-inclusive washrooms, onsite childcare, text-for-service communication, asynchronous engagement, and designing with disabled people rather than merely for them, it doesn’t feel decorative. It feels corrective, almost bracingly so.

I also admired the writing, though not in a simple way. Because this is an edited collection, the prose varies in texture and force, and that variation sometimes makes the reading experience uneven. A few sections lean on frameworks and institutional language. But even there, the book is carried by something rarer than stylistic polish: conviction with substance behind it. At its best, the writing is lucid, grounded, and quietly moving, especially when experience presses against abstraction and wins. I liked that the book doesn’t romanticise inclusion. It acknowledges friction, competing needs, the invisible labour of advocacy, and the fact that “good intentions” often leave structures untouched. The idea of conferences as part of a broader sustainable career ecosystem is, in lesser hands, the sort of phrase that might feel airless. Here, it gives the book real shape. It helps explain why exclusion at an event isn’t a minor inconvenience but a career wound, one that accumulates over time in visibility lost, networks thinned, and confidence eroded.

I came away thinking this is an important book precisely because it refuses the comfort of tidy solutions. It’s practical, but it’s also ethically demanding, and that combination gives it weight. I’d recommend it most to academic organisers, professional associations, university leaders, and anyone who plans events. It would also mean a great deal, I think, to readers who’ve long felt the chill of spaces that were supposedly built for them but never quite made room. This is a thoughtful, candid, forceful book, and it deserves to be read by the people with the power to change how gathering works.

Pages: 156 | ISBN : 1035348497