Academic conferences do some
important jobs. They allow intellectual workers from different regions to meet
and talk. They provide life-support for disciplinary Associations, if we think
they are still needed (as I do). They introduce young players to the world
beyond their own departments. In
principle they embody the public interest in freely-circulating knowledge.
In practice, it’s not so
good. They are enclosed: a bunch of intellectual workers huddle inside a
building, shut the world out, and talk to each other for days. I was once at an
international conference – a good meeting, about an important social issue -
that was held in a beautiful, empty seaside hotel with handsome grounds
entirely surrounded by high mesh fences. It was like living in a billionaire’s
chicken-run.
Within the huddle, toxic
things can and do happen. Sexual harassment is now more recognized for what it
is. It is made more likely by the inequalities of power, the out-of-town venue
that becomes a state of exception, the obligatory socializing and the alcohol.
I don’t have any statistics but I’ve seen it happen, and it adds to the anxiety
and oppressiveness for younger women especially.
There are other problems.
Cliques form, and ignore or exclude outsiders. I have mentioned alienation in
earlier posts: for young people, big conferences may mean corridors without a
known face and lunches eaten with the seagulls. Inside, Big Men engage in
status competitions and faction fights. Even worse, Big Men fight each other by
bullying each others’ students.
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| ... there is an A-list ... |
Most conference-goers
suspect there is an A-list of insiders, the people in the know, whom you
glimpse hurrying away to Important Meetings. The suspicion is correct. I’ve
been on the A-list sometimes. Part consists of the people doing the organizing
shit-work, part consists of the people with prestige. Sometimes these parts
overlap.
The cost of a mainstream
conference is a huge issue,
especially for scholars from the global South. The air fare for an
intercontinental flight, the registration fee (minimum 440 US dollars for the
one I’ve been to most recently), the visas and medical insurance, not to
mention the cost of accommodation and food, put it out of reach for most young
academics and graduate students. If their university has any travel money, it’s
likely to go to senior people, and still be too small. In a relatively well-off
African university that I know, the conference grant does not even cover an
economy air ticket to the global North.
‘Border protection’ by
governments often excludes leftists, Muslims, and intellectuals from societies
in conflict. I was at one conference in a rich white-majority country where a
keynote speaker arrived, was seized by immigration police at the airport, and
immediately deported - strange to tell, a woman of colour. Heroically she
managed to give the keynote address by Skype.
Sadly, there is a lot of
wasted effort. Most of the plenary sessions are ritual, and boring ritual at
that. (We should borrow an archbishop and learn do it in style!) Many papers
are given by people who don’t have much to say, but are obliged to appear on
the programme for career purposes. Even with good papers, the usual format
chops up time into tiny cubes, interrupts promising conversations, and keeps
discussion on the surface.
So: abolish conferences?
It’s worth considering. We would save time and money. The carbon costs of
international air travel are troubling. It would be good to live without these
human costs of stress, anxiety and exploitation. But other things in the world
will have to change before the economy of knowledge can do without conferences.
So: what can we do to democratise them?
With big ones, there are some
obvious moves. Cut the cost; make them shorter; open them to the public; have
many fewer papers; have more sustained discussions. Conferences should never be
in a three-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel. Modest demeanour should be our
watchword.
But bold ambition! We should
replace the glum introspection of plenaries (The Crisis in Nanophysics. Herpetology
at the Crossroads. Whither Sociology Today?) with events designed for a much
wider public. There’s a real need to involve schools as well as colleges in
these gatherings of professional researchers.
Not much will change until
we disconnect the fact of participating in a conference from the obligation to
give a paper. This is the link that produces crazy, crowded agendas, and
chopped-up time. We need other models of active participation, and other ways
to document for funding. At conferences in Latin America it is common to give
everyone present a certificate of attendance to take home, and that is a start.
Let’s reconsider the need to
gather thousands together in the one place, every year or every two. Could we
have a World Congress of X that happens simultaneously in 20 or 40 different
centres, linked electronically? Current
video-conferencing technology is not very successful, so this will not be equivalent
to face-to-face discussion. But with some imagination and hard work, we could
surely arrive at a format that combined some video-linking with a lot of
electronic exchange of texts, and text-based discussion. That might achieve
some purposes of big conferences at a fraction of the money and carbon cost,
and allow wider participation. There may be other ways of unpacking the
big-conference format, too.
In earlier posts I have
highlighted the informal discussions that happen in conferences. Perhaps we should
put much more energy into small regional events. These may have a specific
intellectual or practical focus and not try to cover the waterfront. Even with
a plenaries-and-papers format, they would have lower travel costs, a better
chance for sustained discussions, and a scale that doesn’t require an
events-management corporation to organize.
The downside: the risk of
marginalization, reinforcing global hierarchy. A regional conference held in
Massachusetts will currently have more cachet, and a heap more resources, than
one held in Malawi. I don’t know a way around this until states and academic
organizations are serious about redistributing resources globally. But I doubt
the inequality would be more severe than what we experience now.
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| Technology of the future? |
Large or small, we need practices that replace the paper-presentation
format with collective discussions. This is not a new idea. I remember a
sociology conference in the early 1970s where the organizers, mainly young
sociologists from the University of New South Wales, tried to change the
culture of conferencing. Instead
of a list of formal papers, they set up thematic workshops. They took away the rows of chairs and
brought out cushions and beanbags.
Instead of lecturers there were convenors of discussions. The event was meant to be
participatory, fluid, equal – abolishing distinctions between speaker and
audience, opening the ground for more people to engage.
I have been to several like
this since; I have even organized one or two. Similar formats are used by
summer schools, doctoral schools, and some highly specialized research
networks. The format is exhilarating, risky and demanding. To work well these
events need preparation by all the participants, and effective facilitators –
something academics are not always good at. I’m not sure that my back today
would manage an hour sitting on a bean-bag, but perhaps I can learn.
Enough! I’m sure there are
other models floating around, and I’d love to hear of people’s experiences with
them. Meeting-and-talking matters for intellectual life, for all the reasons I
gave at the start of this post. We do need more imaginative, inclusive and
democratic ways of doing it.