 Welcome to the first ever Virtual Global Outreach Conference hosted by the Society for the Study of Social Problems entitled, Reimagining Our Worlds from Below, Transnational Conversations on Resistance, Movements and Transformations. Hello, my name is Hector Delgado. As the Executive Officer of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and as a fellow scholar, I would like to welcome you to the Society's first Global Outreach Conference. We hope and trust that the conference will be an intellectually rewarding and personally satisfying experience for you. We are certain that your participation will contribute enormously to both. We also hope that the conference will lead to new collaborations and friendships across borders and that our work collectively will fulfill one of the Society's most important guiding principles, research and pursuit of social justice. As a social justice organization, the SSSP seeks to foster conversations between scholars from around the world and consequently a more concerted and coordinated effort to ensure social justice globally. This conference is one such attempt. Thank you so much for being a part of this effort and my thanks to our colleagues who organized this important event. Thank you. We'd like to take a moment to explain our conference model, answer some of your questions and help you get the most out of this conference. We are using the nearly carbon neutral model for this conference in order to not only reduce costs and impacts on the environment, but to facilitate engagement across all time zones. You can read about this model by clicking the link towards the bottom of the page below this video. Visit often during May 2022. There is no need to register. New things will be added during the month, so visiting more than once means you can make sure to see all the interesting presentations and opportunities to engage. Be sure to click on the links on this page to surf around the website and see all that is offered. There's a lot to take in, so revisiting will optimize your experience here. We have 10 panels with over 40 presentations and each panel has a discussion forum at the bottom of the session page. We encourage you to leave comments. You are asked to provide your name and email address, but that is to assist in keeping spammers away. Triple SP does not have access to that email information and your email address will not appear on the page. These discussion boards will provide presenters with feedback and encourage engagement between the presenters and audience. In addition, for nine of the panels, a live virtual discussion is planned and the discussion on the forum helps direct those live discussions. Also, if you can't make the live discussion, you can still participate in the session. So please consider leaving a comment and coming back to engage more in any discussions. From May 18th to the 21st, a number of live virtual discussions are planned. Zoom links will be available before then on the web pages. These include the nine panels, but also keynotes and conversations on important topics. Be sure to check out our keynote speaker, Swati Parashar, Professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and the keynote roundtable entitled Constructing Common Ground and Transformative Pathways through Decolonial Methodologies and Pedagogies. Schedules, descriptions, and Zoom information are available on the conference program page below this video. We also have transnational conversations planned. These sessions are also noted on the conference page below this video. All virtual live sessions will be recorded and the video will be available after May 21st. So if you can't make the discussion or you are seeing the website and video after May 21st, you can still benefit from the discussions and leave comments on the discussion forums. This conference model is designed to keep the conversation going. We are pleased to include an advanced screening of the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Climate Justice, a film by Dr. Richard Whittock. Be sure to follow the link on the page below this video to watch the film and join in a discussion about it. Also look for the link in the right sidebar on the film page to the Climate Justice Movement's resource page that has lots of information on how to get involved in global movements aimed at climate justice. This film is an important sociological ethnography of how these movements are growing throughout the world and becoming a truly transnational and multi-focused approach to addressing all the interconnected social problems that will arise as climate change continues to affect our planet. We hope that this conference will be more than an academic exercise for you. We encourage you to seek out others who leave comments or participate in the live virtual discussions so that we can continue to do more than talk. We need action. Triple SP has always been more than simply studying social problems. We want to engage in real efforts for social justice, and this conference is a recognition that social justice needs to be transnational and transformative in order to affect lasting social change in the 21st century. So we invite you to move beyond merely viewing these presentations to finding ways to act upon them together. In the spirit of this invitation, we will be providing a voluntary guest book. A link will be available on the page below. You can sign up to be on an email list dedicated to letting you know when triple SP offers opportunities for further conferences and activities related to this conference. We will seek to keep emails to a minimum, but we wanted to encourage connections and this is an opportunity to do so. This is not a registration requirement and is completely voluntary. You will be able to join this list at any time, even after May 2022. We also have available a link to an anonymous survey that you can take that will provide feedback about your conference experience. This is extremely useful to the conference planners and triple SP as it will help us improve our transnational initiatives in the future. We do hope that you will take the time to answer a few questions for us. All information will be confidential and will only be used by and for triple SP. Finally, we hope you will let others know about this conference and web page. Use our hashtag reimagining 2022 in any social media and feel free to share not only this program page link, but also any individual session page links. The more you share, the more the work will get out and the more potential this conference will have to fulfill its goals. We appreciate all who attend, contribute and share. Thank you for being here and being part of our conference events.