News (blog)

Hi everybody:

I am the current president of KTASA. I've actually been president for a year longer than presidents of this organization normally serve. Last year in the face of declining membership and conference participation, John Dougan--our executive director--and I suggested putting the conference on hiatus for a year in order to regroup. So that's what we did.

We then scheduled an alternative meeting in May 2009 to talk about the future of KTASA and opened the meeting to any interested members--only seven of us attended: 5 members from Tennessee and 2 members from Kentucky. We met at Western Kentucky University and spent the day trying where to figure out where to go from here. At the end of the day, both literally and figuratively, we decided KTASA was worth saving and set out to implement a strategy for revitalizing the organization.

This website and blog are one piece of that strategy. Another was planning a conference with a theme that would attract both and academic participants as well as folks from the surrounding community.

All of us who attended the meeting wanted to do what we could to sustain KTASA because of the wonderful interdisciplinary experience by attending the conference and interacting with scholars from so many different fields. We hope you'll join us. If you'd like to volunteer, let us know.  We a looking for a program chair for next year who would then serve as president the following year.

Join our on-line community, email us, post to our forums--let us know what you are thinking. And spread the word about KTASA.

Looking forward to a successful year,
Susan Myers-Shirk