This year's conference, Sustainability Without Borders: Global Commitments vs. Local Impacts, brings together sustainability scholars from across the Great Lakes region to examine the disconnect between sustainability as it operates within global supply chains and how it is experienced in specific places, communities, and local economies. As international business and sustainability scholarship increasingly intersect, this year's gathering asks how sourcing decisions, multinational operations, and cross-border production networks shape sustainability outcomes far from where those decisions are made and what gets lost, distorted, or reinterpreted in that distance. In a moment when so much of our professional and intellectual life has been mediated by AI-driven tools and virtual exchange, this conference is deliberately designed as a small, in-person space, chosen to stay intimate enough for genuine cross-disciplinary conversation and safe enough for early-stage ideas to be shared honestly. The goal is not simply to present finished research, but to rebuild the kind of analog, relationship-driven scholarly community that pushes disciplinary boundaries through sustained human dialogue rather than algorithmic curation.