Conferences, Covid, Climate

The norm changes you mention would be welcome and are not unreasonable, but even if fully implemented wouldn’t really come close to replacing in-person contact, I think. I think of two different events I “took part in” in Oxford, for examples. One recent one was a workshop for a book about internally displaced persons. This was meant to be a hybrid event, but ended up being mostly on-line, with basically only people very local to Oxford “in person” and everyone else (including me) on-line. Papers were shared beforehand. The other event was for a workshop for papers on a volume on the philosophical foundations of family and childrens’ law, also in Oxford. (This took place several years earlier.) Here, the large majority of the authors met in person in Oxford, and some other researchers from Oxford came as well. We also again read the papers before meeting in person. There were very major difference, that the norm changes suggested here wouldn’t really change.

To start from a fairly banal point, given that I was in Australia, I could take part in only a very small percentage of the workshop because of the time difference. This was a problem (though somewhat smaller) for some others, too. So, it was impossible to take part in most of the discussion. No norm changes can overcome this.

Next, in the earlier case, discussion went on well beyound the sessions. We spoke between papers, at lunch, at dinner, at breakfast, etc. Of course, in person discussion is also easier, but in these cases it could go on much longer. This is perhaps especially important in cases where we might want to think over points, discuss them, reflect, and repond. This is, at least, much harder on-line than in person, especially given the sort of fatigue that comes from extended on-line time. I don’t see the difference in quality of discussion as mearly being a matter of trying.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do more things on line than we have in the past, or try to change things to make on-line interactions better, but it seems pretty clear to me that in-person events have imporant advantages that just can’t be replicated on-line, and we also shouldn’t pretent that that’s not so.

I figured the main reason for shifting back to in-person conferences was to get people to just show up for them. Stealth vacation and all that.

Speaking as someone who has attended a lot of conferences, I think they’re a scam that entrench inequality, which I had hoped the pandemic would end.

First I think they were introduced by a clique of white male academics at a time when grant funding was loosely monitored and easily available as a way of burning public money on travel to fancy places. That generation could bring their wives, fly business, stay extra days and take side trips. Now that generation are in senior admin roles, grant money is tighter and more carefully monitored, and we the gen that follow them are not allowed any of their luxuries but still have to go to conferences. I am not allowed even one day off after the conference, have strict rules on hotel and flight purchases, and I know my Chinese colleagues have it even worse. The generation who invented and enjoyed conferences are making sure they don’t let those who follow enjoy them, while keeping them as a fixture in the academic calendar.

For junior colleagues it’s true they offer opportunities, but junior faculty also have much more restricted grant access (or none) and for them the cost of conferences now competes directly with open access publishing costs (another scam, obviously). Japan’s grant system is fairer than some countries so junior faculty have a good chance of getting funds but they will be small – perhaps a million yen a year or less. From this they have to somehow finance open access publications + conference + sundry gear. Previous generations of academics got their equipment supplied by the uni and didn’t have to pay open access fees. THe balance is different and the opportunity cost of conference attendance is higher.

While it’s true that the personal contact of conferences can be a benefit it’s highly contingent. The kind of “networking” that is done at conferences is the sort of interaction that is easy for the privileged white children of academics who’re used to marching up to strangers to talk under the belief that the whole world wants to hear what they have to say, but for those of us who entered academia from lower backgrounds it’s painful. I’m not shy, I can comfortably break the ice with strangers in settings as diverse as kickboxing gyms in a foreign language or role-playing groups, but I find networking in conferences extremely painful and low reward, and I think this is because of my background. Of course conferences are also sexual harassment and discrimination zones, where there is very little accountability (since you’re meeting people outside of your employer’s site, so you have no recourse against handsy people), and this was part of their charm to the older men who established the system but very offputting for junior colleagues who don’t have the ability to push back against aggressive panel behavior, octopoid tendencies at receptions, or late night room invitations. We all know the stories, and I think they’re hard to stop in such uncontrolled settings.

Finally, visa privilege is a huge issue (not first raised on twitter by Chris!) that researchers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have been complaining about vocally. We are seeing this play out now with the International AIDS Society conference in Canada. HIV predominantly affects countries in the “global south” but researchers from those countries have failed to get visas for Canada and won’t be there to discuss the disease that mostly affects their countries. It can take >1 year to get a visa processed for the USA for people from these countries, so they realistically cannot register or present at conferences. I have a Bangladeshi colleague with a full-time academic position at Japan’s most prestigious uni who was refused a visa for a conference in Oz before the pandemic. Global health researchers from these countries have been demanding that global and public health conferences never be held in Europe, the US, Canada or Australia, but of course they keep being held there.

So now we have the situation where conferences about diseases affecting poor countries are venues for researchers from rich countries to speak; and open access journals which researchers in poor countries can read but can’t afford to publish in have become a venue for people from rich countries to tell people from poor countries what to do.

I have attended a couple of conferences and training courses online since the pandemic began and a few noticeable points about them are that a) they attract more junior faculty and students, b) they have larger attendance c) there is no harassment, bullying or sexual harassment. Plus of course you won’t get infected with a disease that kills you and your grandparents, and you won’t have to burn your grant funds on a trip to a foreign city you won’t have time to see.

I do agree that in-person interaction is important, and navigating this in our day jobs has been a challenge, but I really think an alternative to in-person conferences is a benefit for everyone. The time zone is an issue, but I think it’s no more of an issue than the fact (as John points out above) that a junior researcher can’t afford to travel across time zones. For me, for example, in Japan, conferences in south america are out of the question – it’s an enormous journey, and I simply am not interested in sitting on a plane for 18 -24 hours to attend a 3 day conference and then have to come straight back. Even more so for Aussies attending conferences in Europe, what a drag.

One solution would be to hold all such conferences in a few convenient cities – Dubai and Addis Ababa spring to mind – but that would mean releasing the stranglehold the old white men have on academic progression, so it won’t happen.

Until it does let’s just bin the whole thing!

One immediate thought: how much are we talking about any sort of academic get-together, and how much about the big (sometimes enormous) meetings of professional organisations with hundreds of papers on scores of themes? The latter seem very vulnerable indeed to the sorts of issues faustusnotes raises, not least the accusation of self-indulgence; smaller events focused in a specific topic for people working in that specific area might be more defensible – but are arguably much worse for junior researcher networking opportunities, as to some extent you need already to be networked to know about such events or get an invitation.

This is an important question, which I’m worrying about a lot at the moment as I’m coordinating a project proposal for a funding scheme that is expressly about international cooperation – which immediately raises problems of what events are needed and how to manage them. One of my collaborators is from West Africa, and for multiple reasons it makes sense to organise a meeting there; it’s interesting that this feels like something that is more environmentally costly than doing it in the UK, presumably because I’ll be doing the travelling, whereas I think we can at least make it no worse than that. But clearly this will be completely inaccessible for most ECRs, even if (as I’ve done in the past) I make an effort to advertise it, offer travel bursaries etc.

For what it’s worth, I wrote a couple of blog posts on related topics over the course of the plague, here and here.

But more seriously, yeah, the climate – maybe there’s a way to offset the emissions. In the grand scheme of things a few academics flying around the world is no big deal and where do we stop? Should academics not study, teach or research abroad and stay in their countries? Of course there is the problem of equal treatment, but the value of international cooperation (not only in academia) and cultural exchange might outweigh the problems caused.

How quickly it has become a tradition:

1) People celebrating “finally we can see each other in person again!” both on social media and in the opening speeches of a conference.

2) Perhaps a quarter of the delegates wear masks.

3) Two days after the conference, the email from organisers to all delegates that says somebody was there who, it turns out, had Covid at the time. Please monitor for symptoms.

4) Three to four days after the conference, the social media posts and emails from individual delegates who say, “after avoiding Covid for 2.5 years, I now got it at this conference”, plus photo of positive RAT.

Maybe it is my lack of perspective, because as a mid-career researcher I don’t feel a lot of trepidation contacting others where necessary and I have no problem whatsoever with ECRs contacting me, but the main problems IMO are, first, that people just enjoy in-person conferences so much and, second, that several important meetings in the last few months that I just had to be part of didn’t provide a virtual option. Reasonable organisers can do something about the latter (and wouldn’t it be nice if they at least implemented a mask mandate?), but the former would require an enormous cultural shift.

Sigh… It’s been a very frustrating 2.5 years for me. Not for the same reasons generally quoted, but because almost 30 years ago I was doing in-house research on multi-party multi-media real-time communications over IP protocols. I was interested in how different media could/should be used, and the kinds of signaling protocols necessary. Academic-style conferences was one of the mental models I worked with. Two things that came out of the work: lots of stuff was much easier if IP multicast was available for the transport, and the really interesting problem was the added signaling protocols needed to make the interactions work properly.

It wasn’t ever going to be as good as the real thing, but it could be pretty good. What I really find frustrating is that (a) we’ve let the commercial internet service providers avoid deploying multicast and (b) 30 years later online conferences should be enormously better than what we have.

I’ve never really been an academic, and when I was studying it was email and newsgroups rather than any of this modern kerfuffle. But I still somehow managed to connect with people I’ve never met, and publish a paper with someone who had no idea who I was but thought my ideas were interesting. An Australian academic recently invited me onto their podcast on the same basis… apparently that still happens.

I find that online communication is something you can learn, and for many of us it’s preferable in many ways*. As faustnotes points out, it’s easier to defend yourself against bad actors online, and easier to complain about them when you have a record of every interaction. But it’s also easier to think through what you’re saying, and re-read what’s said to make sure you’re not missing something important. It’s also easier to ask for 30s of someone’s time to present an idea, and have them ignore it if they’re so inclined… but also to have them dash off “tell me more” much more easily than trying to track them down at a conference and find space for a two minute chat with exchange of contact details.

With video calls I struggle to see the point. But since I rarely look at faces and video calls generally don’t show body language I would say that, wouldn’t I. OTOH I watch recorded video at 2x speed and find real-time, unscripted waffling and mumbling boring in the extreme. Even 2x is far inferior to reading unless the emotional content is a key part of what’s being conveyed (AFAIK this would be extremely unusual in an academic context).

I’d also like to take the opportunity to throw the “better communication skills” back in the faces of those who complain that I don’t make eye contact or pick up on social cues… “what’s wrong with you that online communication is so bafflingly impossible?”