Conferencing: the dark ages
Conversations about the pros and cons of attending conferences are beginning to change. In ye olden days (10 years ago) it was simply a must. You must go and be seen and network In Real Life. Then, the questions were about choosing the right conference in order to get the most out of it. In early scholarly life, this would have been decided by reference to the following:
Were the right people (major thinkers in your field) going to be there?
Was this going to be a real opportunity to get good feedback on your work?
Could you afford it? Would your meagre conference budget be blown on one outing that year and if so, was it going to be worth it?
These were the BIG questions. No-one really thought about whether conferences would be accessible, in terms of not being ableist in their design, location or structure. No-one thought (or cared) about the differential impacts conferencing had on women with children (ie those primary carers who could not go), let alone the imperative to provide on-site childcare facilities to mitigate these impacts. No-one thought about the ‘othering’ and outright discrimination that can occur at these events for POC.
Less still (though all women knew it) was it openly discussed whether these venues would be safe spaces for women. Would they be able to navigate them without the customary, nay expected, bout of sexual harassment that openly populated women’s experience of conferencing.
The big decisions were between the major conferences in your field with thousands of papers, which in reality meant giving a paper to 4 of your work colleagues in a hotel room on the other side of the world (or to literally no-one), or whether to go to a smaller subject specific workshop where there was an actual opportunity to meet scholars closely connected to your field and get feedback were the hot topics of debate.
Shamelessly, the other major consideration was whether it was a lovely location. The more tropical the better. The more distant and exotic the better. It was one of the perks of the job.
Conferencing, climate change and accessibility
This attitude to conferencing seems woefully out of date with the times. Whether to conference or not at all is high on the agenda of many academics for ethical reasons. Whether to restrict your air travel (easier or harder depending on where you are located), prioritise train travel, offset your carbon emissions, or simply only attend local conferences are today’s conferencing questions.
Despite all the changes in technology that make remote participation a possibility, the people who organise conferences seem unwilling or unable to change with the times. We still hear the familiar narrative that in person drinks (hello, yet more exclusionary behaviour) are just so essential to building a network, but the truth is many of us are addicted to what we still see as the perk of the job. And unless conference organisers grasp the nettle, the pressure on junior scholars to go to these events will not abate. They feel they have to go. They must build their career through conferencing.
Of course, it is not just conference organisers that are to blame. The international conference is the spawn of many parents. Universities still have archaic ‘indicators of esteem’ in their promotion criteria which are most easily fulfilled by showing you have been invited or presented your work at an international conference. Similarly, the establishment of a global or world leading reputation in a field is seen as being concomitant with travelling to far flung places. Grant bodies require evidence of extensive dissemination of your work and whilst this can be achieved in many ways, the obligatory international conference circuit is still important. You can get enormous amounts of funding to build networks which in and of itself require travel to fulfil the grant conditions. Building cross disciplinary teams with international partner Universities also reflect the priorities of big grant funders.
No-one disputes global collaboration is part of moving knowledge forward. But does this require we all travel to multiple far flung places every year to huge conferences? I’m not sure it does.
Whether and how you choose to conference, or to limit your conference travel, is a decision for each scholar to make, but we should all be pressuring conference organisers and Universities to rethink centuries old mentality. The format of conferences must change for so many reasons: accessibility, discrimination, equality, sexual harassment and climate change are just some of them.