 Welcome, everyone. Wonderful to have everyone join this session called ABS, Fresh Perspectives and Emerging Initiatives. We hope that in the past 12 days, you've had a very engaging and wonderful experience at the conference. And we're happy to have you in this session here to share with you a little bit more about the Association for Baha'i Studies and its evolution over the past several years and looking into the future. My name is Shabnam Koirala Azad. I have the privilege of serving on the executive committee of the Association for Baha'i Studies. And I'm joined with several wonderful colleagues here today to speak more specifically about several wonderful initiatives underway. I'll start by introducing you to Julia Berger, who serves as the secretary of the executive committee of the Association for Baha'i Studies. We also have several members here of the ABS Committee for Collaborative Initiatives, lovingly called the CCI. And serving on the ABS Committee for Collaborative Initiatives, we have Selvi Adaykallam, Eric Farr, Michael Carlberg, and Jeffrey Cameron. And last but certainly not least, we have our current assistant editor for the Journal of Baha'i Studies, Michael Sabet, who is here to speak more about the focus of the journal itself and future conversations about the journal. But we also have had John Hatcher serve in that role for many, many years now. John has been a tremendous force, and John will be transitioning from the editor role. And we look forward to Michael transitioning into that editor role very soon. So it's wonderful to have everyone here. And we hope that there will be some time for each member present here to share a little bit about the work currently underway and plans for the future. But we really hope there will be questions from the audience, any questions, curiosities, ideas that you may have relevant to the work of the Association for Baha'i Studies. And we'll try to have ample time for that as well. For the past few years, the Association for Baha'i Studies has been very intentional about making plans for this association that are in line with the vision of the Universal House of Justice. We have been very fortunate to have the close and loving guidance of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada and the wonderful support of the National Assembly of the United States as well. And we've tried to rethink everything from our in-person conference that happened annually, some of the other initiatives of the Association for Baha'i Studies, the sustainability of these activities involving a larger group of young people and its activities, et cetera. But as we were kind of putting a lot of intention in thinking about these future directions, none of us planned for this global pandemic to take control of our reality as we know it currently. And in many ways, this current context has forced us into new areas and trying new things, this first virtual conference being one of those. And we are taking every day of this conference really looking at it in a spirit of learning. And we hope to learn more from your questions and curiosities today as well. So the aim of this session is really to share with you the thinking, the plans, and the emerging initiatives of the Association as it tries to implement this vision laid out by the Universal House of Justice. And we thought this would be helpful as the past several years have been a period of accelerated development and evolution of the work of ABS. This is very much connected to other elements of Baha'i community life and to the framework of the current plan. Many different facets to the work of the Association. There are many different facets. And we wanted to share with you insights from these different but interrelated areas of activity. And so again, throughout this presentation and conversation, please feel free to add comments. I'll take note of the questions coming in. And we'll make sure that we can respond to as many questions as possible. Julia? So warm welcome again to everyone. Thank you, Shabnam, for that wonderful introduction to this evening's session. I also just want to give a shout out to the other members of the Executive Committee who have helped to prepare this conference and who we've been working very closely with to put this together. So I want to also mention Martha Schweitz, Derek Smith, Mehran Ki'ai, and Mariam Ashtiani, all of whom you've seen at various times throughout this conference. So we also send you warm greetings on behalf of the Association. At the outset of this presentation, I also want to recognize two incredible people who, in the span of just a couple of months, made it possible to transition a conference that had taken place in person for over 40 years to an online space that you've experienced in the past two weeks. Just wouldn't be right to not put them at the center of these appreciations. And that is Niloufar Gordon, our conference coordinator, and Ben Altair, our IT director. They've really been at the heart of this experience and have probably interacted in some way with every single one of you, which is really incredible because there are 3,200 of us all gathered and registered for this conference. They've really made this new reality come to life. And we are grateful. And we are learning as fast as we can so that we can keep up with them. I also want to appreciate all the teams of people who came together to help us organize all the different parts of this conference who made the film festival possible, the roundtables, the poster sessions, volunteers who came together to support IT, the artistic presentations. All of you have brought so many ideas to the table and so many skills and so much enthusiasm. It has just made this an experience beyond anything we could have ever planned for. And you also consulted with us and helped us as we were planning. And of course, in addition to that, we've been receiving guidance as a global community from the House of Justice so frequently during these intense times. And then most recently, the Baha'is of the US received a letter from the House of Justice. So it's been a time when really you can feel the communities, the institution, and individuals coming together to work our way through these unprecedented times and to have things emerge from our efforts that I think some of us didn't think were possible. So in my brief remarks today, I wanted to focus on the work of ABS from the perspective of three elements of a conceptual framework that informs the work of the association. And as many of you have heard and as we study together in the workshops in the first week, the House of Justice tells us that a framework is like a matrix that organizes thought, it shapes our activities, and that it evolves as we gain experience. So I just wanted to share with you three elements of this evolving framework for Baha'i studies that are guiding our work and that hopefully are helping us to do better over time. And those three elements are knowledge, participation, and learning, and action. So first, I mean, we hear this word knowledge all the time. And I think it's Baha'is maybe we even get a little bit spoiled because it's so much a part of our lexicon. We're thinking about it all the time. We're receiving guidance. But I think it's important to just even pause for a moment and appreciate the central role that the application and generation of knowledge plays in the understanding of what it means to lead to a religious life from the Baha'i perspective. The Baha'i writings are really explicit in describing the importance of the mind and the acquisition of the knowledge and the contribution that individuals with expertise and diverse fields will make to the betterment of society. And Abdul Baha'i explains this by saying that there are certain pillars which have been established as the unshakable supports of the faith of God. The mightiest of these is learning and the use of the mind, the expansion of consciousness and insight into the realities of the universe and the hidden mysteries of Almighty God. To promote knowledge is thus an inescapable duty composed on every one of the friends of God. And of course, when we speak about knowledge, we are talking about knowledge that comes from religion, from science, it's illuminated by experience, by our understanding of both material and spiritual reality that are needed for human flourishing. And so as we progress in these efforts within our respective academic and professional fields of service, there are these questions that we have to consider. As we participate in these discourses and share insights from the revelation, how do we try to resist the tendency on insisting on our personal understanding or taking sides? Or how do we avoid absorbing tendencies and habits that we see perhaps in other settings that are in contrast to Baha'i principles and approaches which try to move us in the direction of the independent investigation of reality, of the attainment of unity of thought and action, the constructive resolution of challenges. How do we also avoid criticism of prevalent approaches and insights that offer, and rather offer insight about what could be and try to help co-imagine with others a world that doesn't yet exist? And so returning to this question of the work of ABS, so we're trying to respond to our understanding of our framework then and create materials and spaces in which we can support the community's ability then to shine the light of the revelation on the issues of the day in a way that's coherent with Baha'i approaches towards the generation of knowledge. And in a way that is both humble, but at the same time courageous, that's collaborative, that is timely, that responds to the needs of our time that is informed and that proceeds in a mode that is dynamic and in a learning mode. And so you'll hear from the members of the committee for collaborative initiatives more about concretely what are some of these new initiatives and how are we trying new things and experimenting really because so much of this is piloted, a piloting new approaches. So the second element is participation and I think perhaps this is foremost on a lot of our minds as we see how this conference is unfolding and what it's making possible. So we know well this excerpt from the House of Justice 2010 Rizvan message where the House of Justice says that access to knowledge is a right of every human being and participation in its generation, application and diffusion are responsibility that all must shoulder. And then we are all very familiar with the words that complete this excerpt, which are that justice demands universal participation. So what does that mean? And of course, how do we do it most importantly? So this transition as Shabnam mentioned to a virtual conference has forced us, we wish we could do it all ourselves but we were forced into it. So has forced us and prompted us to rethink our approach entirely to creating spaces where everyone feels welcome, which is not to say we didn't wanna have these approaches it's just that thinking about a virtual reality makes new things possible but then it also forces us to relearn a lot of the ways in which we approach things. So this is the sense of kind of being forced to relearn everything we knew that was familiar to us. So we were thinking about, how do you create a space where everybody feels welcome where people feel that they have the tools and the resources to access this space where they feel that their contribution is valued, where that sense is felt by everybody. And so typically, most ABS activities have traditionally taken place in person because there's a very special quality to being together in person and it allows for a particular quality of interaction. So I think that that can't be denied and we certainly want to keep that quality as much as possible. But then there are these other challenges that we had to recognize that we're keeping people from participating. Challenges that had to do with schedules around school, work, family life, financial, geographic, all sorts of things. And so then this transition really opened our eyes to the possibilities of an online space and it challenged us to think about what were the structural elements that might have been in place that may have served as obstacles to some parts of the Baha'i community and how could we then look at that on the basis of this experience that we're having right now. So really then we're trying to have this coherence between this understanding of the role of knowledge in the betterment of society and the structures that we put into place and the manner in which people are welcomed and supported in these particular structures. We also hope that the experience of this conference is also expanding this understanding of what is Baha'i scholarship. I think there's been a long time when maybe parts of our community or many of us held more narrow conceptions of what is Baha'i scholarship. Maybe it was something that theologians did. Maybe it was something that people did in like closed rooms, far away from everybody. Maybe you had to have post-graduate degrees. But I think what we're really trying to do is to demonstrate and to encourage and to again create processes that convey that this is something that belongs to all of us and that it involves this deep exploration of all these various disciplines in light of the revelation. And it's something that all of us it's a responsibility that we shoulder. And so ABS is trying to support Baha'i's and carrying out that responsibility. And then finally learning and action. And so again, thinking about this most recent experience of us coming together in this virtual space with 3,200 people registered. You know, one thing we learned is that it's completely flipped the demographics of the conference participation on its head. So now half of the registrants in this conference are under 40. So a lot of them between the ages of 25 and 35. So we've had the youngest cohort of participants in the history of the ABS conference. We've also seen that people from rural communities and remote locations were able to join for the first time and we're hearing these wonderful heartfelt messages from people expressing their appreciation of being able to be in this space connected to others being part of the conversation. So it's been really exciting to see new voices, new questions, new comments. And this is all something that we're gonna be taking into consideration as we plan for, you know, life after the pandemic, which we hope that after will come very soon. And we hope we'll have a lot of kind of new insights to bring. The other thing I think we've learned is just as an organization, what does it mean to be agile? You know, what does it mean to work in this way? Whereas normally we have 11 months to plan this time we had about three and a half. So what does it mean to move, you know, swiftly, but not haphazardly, creatively, but coherently maintaining unity of vision. It's sort of like an expansion phase that lasts for three months and it just keeps going. But I think one of also one of the most heartwarming, a heartwarming element of this was at the early stage looking to other organizations and really reaching out to them and seeing how they did it and looking and seeing the generosity of spirit with which other organizations were taking initiative to share their experiences and sort of seeing this whole new discourse forming and people like really joining hands to say, okay, we're all in this together. Let's each help our communities come online and connect more effectively. So this is just a brief kind of 10,000 foot overview to give you a sense of how the ABS is also grappling with a framework, working within a framework, understanding a framework, implementing it, deepening our understanding of these elements and taking a really honest, hard look at some of the ways that we've done things that we might wanna set aside and that really need to evolve and we're doing it. And so we're trying and as I said, there are so many lessons that have come to us through this conference. Hard lessons, good lessons as some of us like to call it good trouble and it's just helping us to do things better. I wanna end with also a very happy announcement as we transition to the committee for collaborative initiatives, which is to say that today we've officially launched our new website, the new redesigned ABS website. Many of you might have already seen this as an announcement went out by email. So you will, I don't have on my disposal the actual URL because I haven't memorized it because I have it saved as a bookmark, but it's launched and it's beautiful and I'm gonna ask Ben to, and I'm gonna ask Ben to show us just an image so that you could just see a quick snapshot of it. Ben is telling me that URL is behiestudys.ca. So one word behiestudys.ca. And so it's our hope that the website will assist you to take initiative, will inspire you, will help connect you to ongoing processes and will connect you to all the resources that we have and it helps to mark this new chapter in the life and work of ABS. And I also wanna express all of our collective gratitude to the graphic design and programming team that really pulled this off also in a very short time span so that we could share it with all of you during our conference. So happily share that with you and turn it over now to the Committee for Collaborative Initiatives. Thank you for those sharing those reflections. I hope that now speaking a little bit more concretely, it'll be clear that there's quite a resonance between the ideas that Julia shared and the work of the Committee for Collaborative Initiatives. My name is Selviaday Kalamzebihi and I serve on that committee together with other members who were introduced here. The Committee for Collaborative Initiatives pursues lines of action and learning that are focused on fostering the capacity of members of the Baha'i community and their friends and collaborators to contribute to professional and academic discourses from a Baha'i perspective. And this focus was set for the association through guidance from the Universal House of Justice which is the International Governing Council of the Baha'i Faith in 2013. This focus builds on long-standing efforts of the association to enrich the intellectual life of the Baha'i community. And at the same time, it is drawing the association into closer alignment with important processes in the faith in the last couple of decades. These processes include learning around community building, around the empowerment of individuals to arise in service and take collective action, around social action directed at addressing the material and social needs of communities and populations and then most closely related to efforts to contribute to the evolution of thoughts who participate in the discourses of society. The Baha'i community is engaging on many levels in different discourses from the neighborhood level to the international stage. And I won't be able to go into all of that now, but within that context, the association as we've mentioned is focusing specifically on supporting the efforts of the friends to contribute within their own fields, within their professional and academic fields to the discourses that they're involved with. The House of Justice didn't give the association a recipe for how to approach this work, but it shared ideas about some fresh approaches, hence the title and simple steps that we've been able to take that we anticipate will grow gradually in complexity over time. And it's been a process of really just learning our way forward. The ABS has taken some initial steps, learned from them, identified objects of learning, taken more steps, and sort of in this way gradually moved forward. And what we're seeing is that there are elements of this work that are emerging that together form an approach. And this is an approach within which there's scope, there's wide scope for individuals and groups who wish to join in to take initiative. So this work is the focus of the Committee for Collaborative Initiatives. It was formally known as the Working Group's Task Force and the change in the name reflects partly the ongoing nature of these efforts and then partly a widening understanding of these different elements that I mentioned. Initially, the association brought together small groups of people in a few fields to begin thinking about how to engage in the discourses. And these working groups, as we called them, generated the initial experiences on which the subsequent efforts have been building. A number of working groups held seminars that brought people together within the discipline to think together about engaging in fields and to share efforts and to maybe delve into the Baha'i perspective on discourses and so on to plan activities or efforts that they could continue with. And then based on the experiences with these seminars, the association has also explored thematic seminars that have a sharper focus on very particular questions that we feel will advance this work. So in addition to the periodic gatherings and then the way that the Working Group provides a space for connections to be made among people within a discipline or professional field who may have a wide range of interests and also have varying levels at which they're able to engage at any given time. In addition to that, there was a need to foster processes that were more focused and intensive and sustained in order to advance thought. And just to try to give a sense of why this is necessary, I'd like to describe a few requirements of this work as I see them so far. So the objective of engaging in a discourse is to help that discourse and maybe that discipline more generally move towards a greater understanding of truth, move towards the production of knowledge that benefits mankind that addresses the needs of society. And so it's necessary on the one hand to understand these discourses very thoroughly within their own framings, but then also necessary to understand them from the perspective of a Baha'i lens, to understand them in the context of an understanding of the importance of spiritual reality, of the oneness of humanity, of the operation of forces, historical forces and the direction of their trajectory, of the role of knowledge in human advancement and so on. Abdul Baha, the son of Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i faith, writes that every community in the world find us in these divine teachings the realization of its highest aspirations. And so one of the tasks is to use to draw on the teachings and identify the highest aspirations within these different fields in ways that may be not clear within this given body of knowledge or to those who participate in it in a way sort of a reinterpretation or a mining of these aspirations within these fields. And also to find within discourses the blind spots or the underlying assumptions that limit thinking or perpetuate injustice. And then to identify offerings from a Baha'i perspective that address weaknesses or that can contribute to advancing lines of exploration within these disciplines. And then having done that to translate these insights into a language that's intelligible within these discourses and that connects and engages with existing thought. Meanwhile, we need to be able to appreciate the dynamics of any given discourse at any given time to understand whether there is receptivity and the opportunity to contribute or not. And all of this and more we have to do in a spirit of humble and genuine engagement. So it's a very rich and nuanced undertaking with a wide scope, an undertaking of great scope. And so hence the need to foster more intensive effort, more focus and sustained efforts while at the same time continuing to have spaces that draw people in and accommodate different levels of participation in a wide range of interests. And so the Committee for Collaborative Initiatives has been in recent years exploring the kinds of activities and spaces that can do this. And then this year COVID happened and the upshot of that was that this summer we've been focusing on reading groups. This idea of the reading groups builds on experiences from the working groups where we've had smaller groups within a working group with a shared background and shared interests, identify important texts within their field, read them together, meet regularly, many times online and not in person. So that fit conveniently with the circumstances we found ourselves in. And this process creates the potential for deeper and more rigorous conversations for developing shared thought and for advancing thought together. It can lead to the articulation of questions and then new questions can lead to further reading within the field or delving into the Baha'i perspective, to discussions of method and approach, and to more elaborate projects. So I've mentioned here a few of these elements of our work, the disciplinary working groups, the reading groups, other small focus sustained projects, seminars, other kinds of spaces that I didn't describe. And then add to that developing the means of coordination, accompaniment, reflection, and shared learning. And that gives a general idea of the work of the CCI. I'd like to make one more point about collaboration. Clearly the work of individual scholars has been very important, a very important contribution to this work and will continue to be. At the same time, we're realizing that there's a special role for collaboration. The Baha'i concept of consultation has very rich methodological and epistemological implications. And we're seeing a special role that we can have in encouraging processes which have collaboration and consultation at the center. Likewise, with an effort of this scope, the collaboration needs to extend over successive generations. So that we have one generation laying a foundation of ideas and then drawing in younger people in the same field, collaborating together, and then the younger generation proceeds with the work built on what's been established. So as I mentioned, our approach is evolving. We have these multiple lines of learning. I think now we're poised to hopefully learn a lot more about these small collaborative projects. And perhaps beginning with a multiplication of reading groups. There are a number of reading groups share outs in the conference program for the rest of this week. So if you'd like to hear about what some of these reading groups have done this summer and get ideas, you can do that. If you have a particular interest within your field and you can find a few others who share that interest and would like to delve into it to select some readings, you could choose a reading that gives an overview of the discourse or perhaps a writer whose work resonates with the high ideas. You can set some kind of schedule to maintain a pace and some intensive work together. You can meet regularly and consult and maybe try to capture some of your ideas in writing. It's a very simple first step. And if you feel that the purposes and interests of your group align with the aims of the association, we would very much like to hear about what you're doing and to follow your efforts. And over time, I think it's clear that as a number of groups become active within the same field, there would be a need to bring them together to share with each other what they're doing and gradually to form more working groups in fields where we don't already have them. So I hope this has been helpful in sharing how the association is moving forward to follow the guidance of the House of Justice. There'll be chance for questions to the CCI later on in the session, but now I'll hand the floor over to Michael Sabet who will talk to you about the journal. Thank you, Selvi. I'm not gonna speak for too long so that we can open the floor to questions. I'd just like to draw out a couple of themes that have already been raised by Selvi and Julia that we've also been thinking about in the work of the Journal of Baha'i Studies. So many of you may be familiar with the work of the Journal. It's been in existence for over 30 years and it's in some ways quite an unusual publication. The Journal aspires to excellence and it's a peer-reviewed journal that meets the standards that you would expect in a rigorous academic journal. But in at least one way, it is quite unusual. There's a tendency in academic writing to create ever greater specialization and you see this in journals that as time goes on, journals become hyper-specialized. The Revelation of Baha'u'llah potentially touches on everything so a Journal of Baha'i Studies could potentially become a Journal of the Universe and you'll see this in individual editions. You can flip through the pages and see that scholars who are deeply informed in vastly different fields will be bringing insights from their studies into dialogue with their study of the Revelation. And so it's one volume of the Journal can be sort of a site of very interesting cross-pollination. So going forward, of course, the Journal is also, we're also thinking about the same questions of the centrality of the generation of knowledge, the importance of universal participation and what it looks like to learn in action. And a particular point of residence, I think, is this idea of what does collaboration look like in academic writing? The model in sort of the mainstream of academia can be very solitary and this isn't only a matter of sort of intellectual preference that people like to work alone. It's also sort of a matter of culture, that competitive attitude towards the generation of knowledge tends towards individualism. So the initiatives of the CCI, the working groups and the reading groups, the vision is that these groups will not only study together but also over time and as it becomes appropriate contribute to the generation of knowledge and this can be done in a collaborative way. So we're interested and these are just questions at this point, I don't think we have fixed answers, but we're interested in learning what it might look like for there to be more space for this kind of collaborative writing to find its home in the journal in a way that still, of course, lives up to the rigor of published academic writing. And that's not to say, of course, as Selby highlighted, that individual scholarship will fall by the wayside. It's doubtless the work of individuals will remain very important. But finding a balance and not simply absorbing the, I suppose, bias towards individual scholarship that exists in our culture, this is something that we're certainly interested in learning about at the journal. And also sort of trying to get away from a dichotomization between those who think of themselves as the type of people who contribute to formal published scholarly work and those who don't see themselves in that light. Obviously, not every contribution needs to be published in a journal to be of value. Some of the most valuable work will never find its way into a journal, and that's completely fine. But also we shouldn't fixate on sort of artificial barriers as to who we think is qualified to publish or to consider themselves, somebody who might submit something for publication. So in the spirit of sort of that, on the new website, which hopefully of all, you may all be sort of visiting in another window while you're listening to this, you could find the, in the contact information, you can find the email address for the editor. And if you send an email to that address, I'm very happy to consult if you just have an idea that you think might one day become a paper or not a paper, maybe a presentation at next year's ABS conference, anything of that nature. I'm always very happy to consult and exchange ideas. So I think I'll leave it at that so we can open up to questions. So I'll hand it back over to Shabnam who will be, I think facilitating the questions for us. Thank you, Michael, Selvi and Julia. Before we go to questions, I'm wondering if Jeff, Michael, or Eric would like to add anything. Okay, they look very content, they're smiling. So I think everyone's ready for questions. So if you do have questions, please add it in the comment section. We do have one question that has come in and this participant is wondering what the vision is for future conferences, especially after COVID-19 as it relates to this in-person or virtual format. So maybe Julia, if you'd like to take that and anyone else has any insights. Well, it's interesting, I think this is a time during which we're also soliciting ideas and just different approaches that the community might have ideas about. I mean, as I mentioned, it's been a period of intense learning and so I think all of us are actually just eager to get back together and consult because we've all seen this conference from different angles. We've all spoken to lots of different people. We've had lots of interactions with others outside of the Baha'i community. So the vision will congeal and evolve, I mean, in the months to come, but what's exciting is just knowing how much new stuff and new experiences coming to the table. So it'll be an exciting time and we encourage you whether you want to leave comments here or whether you want to write to ABS or reach out to us individually or however you choose to be in touch. This is a time during which we're all kind of in this together and there's no formula. It's all being conceived through this experience. So stay tuned and stay involved. One thing I might just add is that we were very much planning to be in Dallas this year. So this, like it was mentioned before, the going into this virtual space was not something that was planned from the get-go. And so we've made a lot of adjustments and like Julia is saying, it's hard to know at this point exactly what the learnings are in terms of our intended kind of changes, which is to increase accessibility, participation, diversifying the participants who engage with the association. And so there are a number of intentions that we had in thinking even about this annual conference and all the other activities during the year. And so we'll be sure to reflect based on those intended changes as well. So more to come on that for sure. I'm gonna turn it over to Jeff Cameron for some additional insights on the work of the committee on collaborative initiatives, the CCI. Thanks, Shabnam. I just wanted to mention just building on Selvi's presentation and Julia's discussion of the conference. You know, over the last several years that the association has been thinking about expanding its learning processes outside of the annual conference itself. The annual conference is an important point of meeting, point of focus and concentration for much of the work of the association, but that there are opportunities identified by the House of Justice for the pursuit of knowledge and the generation of research and other kinds of intellectual activity outside the conference itself through reading groups, through seminars, through other kinds of collaborative projects. And many of these are both virtual and in-person. So in a way the agility that the association has been able to show in relation to the conference has already been reflected in its activity over the past number of years where there have been structures created whereby people can get together both virtually and in-person to advance their various interests in collaboration with others. So I just want to underscore that, you know, beyond the conference, there is a kind of blend of the virtual and in-person that I think the association has been working with for some time in which we are now seeing a kind of mature, a fluorescence of in the form of the conference this year, despite the fact that we can't be together. Thank you, Jeff. Any other thoughts or contributions to this conversation? Could we maybe hear a little bit about the methodology seminars that took place this year? The contributions from that work at the conference this year have been a highlight for many as we're hearing. And maybe we could just hear a little bit about that effort and the role of, and why we focused on methods. So as you probably have seen, there were six different sessions that really grew out of this initiative, which in many ways was a very early kind of piloting initiative in response to a House of Justice letter from 2013 regarding the high studies in which the House of Justice highlighted the question of methods and how all the highs, whichever field or discipline they're in have a responsibility to reflect on both their discipline in light of the revelation, but also specifically on the question of how knowledge is generated in their fields. What are the assumptions underlying those methods? And so last year we piloted the seminar with a small in-person group. This year we were planning to continue that effort and it became virtual. It was taking place in June already in the midst of COVID. And so there were six disciplinary groups that came together that were in conversation with one another leading up to this seminar and really were able to sort of evolve their thinking and learning around questions of methods within their disciplines. And so you saw a group looking at Africana studies and economics and the natural sciences and social sciences and religion. And it was really interesting to experiment again with these small groups that were sustaining a conversation that was a discipline specific conversation. And then as they entered into the seminar, those groups then were able to come together and hear from other groups. So there was this interesting balance of reflecting with people in your discipline, but then also hearing the kinds of questions and challenges that come up in other disciplines. And also within the context of the seminar had a chance to delve more deeply into this question of critique and a particular approach that emerges out of literary studies, but that applies to all of our fields, which is our stance vis-a-vis other theories and insights. And how does that relate to the Baha'i approaches of consultation and a kind of collective epistemology and all of these questions? So we were really challenged and stretched and really just took the next step and thinking more systematically about methods. And I mean, in some ways, I guess this can sound abstract, but it's really the question of, we keep talking about generating knowledge, but then we also have to look at what are the methods by which knowledge is generated and what assumptions and ideas shape those methods and what might we contribute to that? Thanks, Julia. It's already been mentioned that sometimes when we think about ABS, we often think about this annual conference, but as Selvi mentioned earlier, there's a lot that happens year round. And Eric, as someone who's kind of seen the evolution of the working groups, the disciplinary working groups, I wonder if you could share some learnings maybe or examples, some concrete examples from of this evolution and work of working groups. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think I've been kind of connected to this process with the association for three or four years now. And I think seeing, I think what ABS is really trying to do in a way is to contribute to a kind of an intellectual culture. And this is what I think was mentioned a couple of times. It's an intellectual culture that kind of stems from the community building process and the institute process and the kind of deep intellectual engagement that kind of work calls us to and to translate that kind of intellectual culture to participation in academic and professional discourses. And I think one of the things that we've seen over the last few years is really a proliferation of spaces for people to take initiative. And I think about the association as a unique kind of agency within the North American Bahá'í community. One of the key things that it does is create spaces for people to act, create spaces for people to engage in study, to engage in consultation, to engage in a kind of, yeah, collective act of reading and contributing to the discourses that define their fields. When I first kind of started serving with ABS, we were just sort of piloting a couple of seminars. There were these, we had maybe four or five working groups, disciplinary groups that were trying to read their fields and with a mind to the conceptual framework of the Bahá'í community. And during that year, I think we had, yeah, maybe three seminars. We had a health seminar, we had a seminar for people looking at media and society, a seminar looking at religion and society. And really just in the last two years, the number of spaces, the number of people who were able to engage in them, the diversity of spaces, spaces that were broad and engaged, anyone who was in the field of health or media was able to come and participate in one of these seminars and allow it to kind of broaden their perspective to engage in a conversation with others in their field and to start to maybe through consultation with others, see if there's maybe a particular path of inquiry that they would like to pursue. Since that time, now we have these seminars that are really focused on specific live discourses that are taking place in the public conversation that sometimes span different fields that allow people to really have a sustained conversation about a single line of inquiry based on a fairly extensive reading and thought, and then to be able to come from that with a whole new set of questions and potential new paths for exploration. The methodology seminars that Julia just mentioned were really remarkable. Being able to, you know, having participated in them, I don't think that I had, I've seen or heard of a space where graduate students, you know, behind graduate students and early career scholars you know, participated in a sustained conversation about their fields and the methods that are a part of them for something like three days. There was 80 to 90 people participating in this call and hopefully these spaces will grow and continue to evolve so more and more people can participate in them. But it's really a remarkable growth in the association's efforts, I think, the extent to which these spaces have multiplied, diversified and intensified. So I'd say that that's kind of what stands out to me when I think about the last few years, the development of the association. And the conference really is a, this particular conference is a testament to that. Even thinking about the question and you know, an in-person conference versus a virtual conference, maybe we want to think really how this just the kind of the advancement and the sophistication of these online spaces, how many more kinds of spaces it creates opportunities for us to pursue and learn about without, you know, kind of negating the really the great need for in-person spaces to collaborate and connect and consult. Thank you, Eric. So there are several great comments here. More, I think feedback for ABS, which is really wonderful to consider. There's one comment that's shedding light on the situation right now with the Navajo community and their disproportionate kind of experience with COVID-19 and wondering if there's, you know, Wi-Fi availability accessibility for those who would like to join the conference virtually and just, you know, perhaps ABS can consult about technical capacity or technology capacity in various communities. Thank you for that important feedback and we'll definitely take that into consideration. There's also a number of kind of comments here about the importance perhaps of interdisciplinary spaces and conversations as we think about the urgencies of our time and the issues we're facing in the world. So I don't know if, Michael, you'd like to speak to the seminars or the reading groups and how perhaps in some of these spaces, different disciplines are, you know, individuals in different disciplines are coming together around a specific concept. Sure, you know, we're trying to learn both on how to advance this work within disciplinary context and across disciplinary context. So we've had a number of spaces and processes that have been interdisciplinary. One group I've been quite involved with for three years now involving probably by now at least 50 people in various ways is a group really looking at questions around constructive agency, resilience, social change, and it's been very interdisciplinary. Last summer when we had a face-to-face conference, we had two intensive seminars attached to it, each of which were two days long, one of which was on liberalism and it was interdisciplinary. It was probably political science heavy, but not exclusively. I mean, there are many people there from different disciplines. Another one on propaganda, which was again interdisciplinary, very intensive. These methodology seminars have been interdisciplinary. Some of the reading groups that have been happening and are happening right now are interdisciplinary. So we're learning quite a bit about that. There's a comment that's connected to this, which I think Shabnam alluded to, that asks about using the website to list all the working groups and reading groups and so forth. I wanna just address that because this is something we've consulted a lot about. Turns out it's quite tricky because the good news is we can't keep track of all the activity that's happening and certainly in the future, all the activity we imagine happening. So we need to start thinking, I think in a slightly different way. What we're trying to develop is a framework within which ever-increasing numbers of people can take initiatives. And we're familiar with that in the Bahá'í community. We know what that means now and we know the complexity of that and the scale at which it can grow into over time. And, but within that approach, it quickly becomes impossible to sort of track and list and enumerate all the initiatives that are happening in one centralized place and to keep it up to date. We need to think instead about processes of coordination and accompaniment and systematizing learning across initiatives that we can share. We need to think about, for instance, sharing insight from the frontiers of learning. So those are things I think we will get better and better at doing is sort of bringing to the annual conference, to the website, to other spaces, things that illustrate what's possible and sort of extend the frontiers of what we're learning about this kind of work. So I just wanna really invite people to think in those terms that the ABS website or the Executive Committee or the Committee for Collaborative Initiatives will never be able to serve as a sort of clearing house for everything that's happening or a sort of catalog, but more really as a catalyst and mechanisms for systematizing learning and drawing more people into the framework and progressively clarifying elements of that framework over time. Great. Thank you so much. We have about two minutes left. So maybe I will ask this one last question, which is, does ABS offer opportunity to participate in the conference if someone can't afford to pay? So maybe I'll just say that in prior years, when we've had our in-person conferences, we've always had financial assistance for those who may need in order to attend the conference, realizing that the cost of the conference is great if there's travel and accommodations and other considerations as well. For that reason, one of the beautiful aspects of this virtual conference was that we were able to actually make the conference free of cost for those who needed it to be. And so this will be an ongoing consideration, I think, again, as we think on the one hand of increasing accessibility and participation, and on the other hand, thinking about the modalities and the costs involved. So again, a great question and this virtual conference has afforded us a new opportunity to learn and to think about what's possible. So I appreciate the question. Yes, Julia. Just maybe one quick thing to add. You might have seen on the app, there's an option to donate to the scholarship fund, which, again, is dedicated to supporting others in their ability to attend. So I encourage you, if you're in a position to be able to support something like that, please do. And as Shabnam said, we are continually pushing ourselves and our thinking to try to break down these barriers. So that is continuing and we're doing our best. As Shabnam mentioned, this was an opportunity to have a pay as you wish conference and we wanna take all the insights that we got from that experience and just carry them forward. One more reminder is that there will be a survey sent out to all participants, which will be another opportunity if you have feedback specific to the conference or any other aspect of the association's work, please do give us constructive feedback. It'll help in our learning process and also in determining what works for our participants. So appreciate your engagement with us this evening. Thank you for being here. Thanks to all the panelists for sharing your learnings and insights. And please do continue to engage with the work of ABS and thank you all again for being here this evening.