What’s The Plan?

It’s April, cats and kittens, and that means that for many of us, conference season is quickly approaching. We are paying fees and drafting papers and reminding ourselves of where we’re committed to and when and then panicking about conflicts. Or at least, that’s my usual April.

Not so much this year. Most of the conferences I usually spend my summer at — all but one, as near as I can figure — have either gone explicitly back to fully in-person meetings or included a very vague reference to “hybrid” in the CFP that didn’t offer any details or allow a submission to be flagged for online only. Of course, mask mandates and vaccination expectations are a thing of the past, so safety plans for these gatherings, which are almost never available at the time you have to respond to a CFP, will likely be limited to handwashing and hope.

I know we’re supposed to be pretending the pandemic is over, but where I live currently 1 in 17 people has Covid-19 and the excess death rate is astonishing, especially in people under 44. The BC Human Rights Commissioner (who evidently no one listens to) is flagging the equity implications of the race to unmask.

I am at a point in my career (more about this later) where I can decide to put a pause on conference presentations until such a time as I feel safer being in a room with infinite unmasked humans — I don’t know when that will be, but it isn’t soon. I manage and mitigate risk as best I can with a school-aged child, which means that to minimize the viral load we are all exposed to, I mask indoors (including at the office), we don’t eat indoors at restaurants, and our playdates are outdoor affairs. We use our whole risk budget up on our kiddo going to school, and organize our lives accordingly. If I do travel, it’s to see my mum, not to sip lukewarm coffee while a man asks me a comment-not-a-question. Conferences — which, I confess, I barely enjoy — absolutely don’t make the cut.

The truth is that travel for conferences has always disadvantaged some in the academy, whether because they are disabled, underwaged, or have caregiving responsibilities. But right now, as an active pandemic rages, the choice to return to in-person programming is even more explicitly a choice to exclude.

That said, I don’t actually expect or even necessarily want everything to be online. I know people like to meet in person, and I know that for some there are benefits. And the reality is that I’d rather have no hybrid than bad hybrid, which is a uniquely miserable experience.

But it’s a hell of a privilege to just say, “No thanks.” Neither my CV nor my presence in the discipline will be meaningfully harmed by my decision to not engage in conference travel for the forseeable, and I have three virtual keynotes lined up in place of whatever conferencing I might have done instead. Which isn’t to say I won’t miss out — I will. On collegial conversations, on engaging with critical, in the moment interventions, on those kinds of special collections and book projects that seem to spring to life at conferences. I’ll miss out on all of that. But I will be okay.

It’s important to be honest, however: we can’t pretend that moving away from online conferencing doesn’t contract the available opportunities for many people, and, depending on the discipline, may erase them entirely. This raises a question, though, for all of us in the academy:

What’s The Plan?

I am asking this non-snarkily of all who are attending conferences with many missing colleagues, but more significantly and earnestly about those who sit on hiring committees, or performance review committees, or tenure and promotion committees? As conferencing opportunities dry up for members of our community, how are we working to actively shift our expectations of what a productive academic summer looks like?

I think we have to be able to talk about this, because silences in the university are a breeding ground for inequity. When I see troubling language around the return to on-campus events and a defensive rejection of online options, I worry about all the unsaid assumptions and who will be unmoored by them. If we remember that the academy’s default mode is ableist, it can help us to work harder to fight against it and offer other options. But if we don’t remember that, if we just reconnect with old ways of doing things because we’ve missed them without looking around to see who isn’t in the room, we will exclude more and more of our colleagues.

So how will you advocate for those colleagues when you hire or review or adjudicate? How will you remind people that voices in the room are missing? Where will your equity lens be when someone asks why a candidate seems to have a gap in their CV, or questions how they mobilize their research? How will you respond when someone circulates a job posting at a conference or flags a promising candidate from an in-person event? Will you be a voice for the folks who aren’t in the room?

For me, the biggest change in my practice is that I am committing to posting all my speaking notes and slidedecks here, going forward. It was always a good practice that I neglected to get around to; it seems to me that it’s now urgent. I hope others will consider doing the same.

But mostly, I hope we keep noticing who isn’t in the room and finding ways to mitigate those absences and make visible the hidden opportunities of the conference space. The second we stop, we’ve already done irreparable harm.