In some countries such as the US, society is slowly beginning to return to a pre-pandemic normal. With a return to normal we can foresee the return to in-person conferences and other academic events.
The pandemic has brought to light several things we didn’t know or hadn’t tried out before. We now know that it is logistically feasible to organize and hold conferences—including large conferences with hundreds or even thousands of participants—entirely online. I will here make the case for keeping one or two of the divisional meetings of the APA virtual, and moving the in-person event(s) on a rolling basis, both for accessibility and based on climate concerns.
A bit of background. The American Philosophical Association has been holding regional, divisional conferences for many decades. These are in-person conferences held in large convention hotels that attract over 1000 philosophers from all across the world.
When I was on the philosophy job market in 2012 and flew out to an APA divisional meeting on the east coast, the APA was daunting and terrifying to me.
In that period, job interviews were held in-person at the Eastern APA, either in conference ballrooms in full view of other job candidates who sat nervously waiting, or in hotel rooms. I flew out for a first-round job interview because the committee told me it was impossible to interview me remotely. I was pregnant and although I did not really feel up to an intercontinental flight in my state of fatigue and morning sickness, I did not want to disclose that fact to a potential employer, so I flew in from the UK, bombed the interview and never heard back from that school. I was relieved to never have another first-round job market interview at the APA.
Fast forward several years, and first-stage job interviews in philosophy are held almost exclusively online. What was before unthinkable and unpracticable has now become standard practice. Job candidates heaved a collective sigh of relief. No longer did they need to pay out of pocket vast sums to fly into an expensive hotel for the chance to go to a single 20-minute job interview.
Now we are in 2021, and my attitude to the APA regional meetings has changed significantly. This is in large part because I am very lucky. I have a tenured position and am a full member of the philosophy profession. I do not have the kind of disability or mental illness that makes attending in-person conferences taxing (I have others that I can hide, so I am privileged also in this respect). I have a salary and travel funding. The APA no longer brings to my mind the terrors of the job market, the “smoker” (a large ballroom reception where you socialize awkwardly with prospective employers or stand with a glass in your hand without anyone talking to you). Rather, the APA is an opportunity for me to reconnect in person with many friends and acquaintances that I have made over the years. I value the in-person connection and relish going to the different talks.
Many other faculty members I know feel the same. They are very eager to return to in-person APA conferences. But not everyone feels this way. Earlier this year, I was speaking to a friend who has chronic illness and extreme social anxiety. This friend did not share my enthusiasm for a prospective “return to normal”. She questioned that the end of the pandemic should mean the end of an accessible conference experience for her.
Her experience brought to mind an interview I read with author Susanna Clarke, author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. After her very successful debut, Clarke traveled a lot but then was struck with chronic fatigue syndrome, which forced her to be housebound. But that all changed during the pandemic:
The weird thing is that as other people’s lives have closed down, mine has opened up, because suddenly a lot of things are on Zoom and I can talk to people from my sofa. I know other chronically ill people have found the same. Once again you feel in opposition to the world – your experience is different.
Robert Kingett expresses a similar sentiment: “I fear the world returning to normal”. Writing about his experiences as a blind author in the publishing industry, he notes:
What was even more sobering was how the industry at large pushed me away with their actions while their words said something totally different. Hosting reading events in venues with lots of steps. Claiming that hosting a virtual author panel rather than an in-person panel would be extremely taxing on their technicians. Plus, readers hate virtual events anyway. Not detailing the thousands of ways writers’ retreats would, proudly, remain inaccessible to me and so many others. These are just some small things the industry does to push us away in the hopes that we will give up and suddenly stop trying to be included.
All those technical difficulties that were so impossible to surmount were shoved aside by Covid. The alternative digital venues opened up accessibility in a way that he and others could only dream of before. He feels a sense of dread for the time when people “will go back to their normal lives because that will leave me, and so many like me, shut out to a greater degree than before.”
In-person events organized at large convention hotels are less accessible for a wide range of philosophers: those with disabilities, chronic illness, social anxiety, underemployed people without travel funds, people with caring responsibilities. This, by itself, constitutes sufficient reason to keep one or two divisional meetings a year remote. Solving those accessibility concerns with a hybrid format seems logistically complex, given that the APA does not even have the funds to put a projector in each room, and would give an impoverished experience for people who choose to attend remotely. Leveling the playing field by going fully remote seems to me the way to go.
For social connection and a different experience, we can still keep one or two in-person events. The APA would in that respect fall more in line with other large professional academic organizations such as the American Academy of Religion or the Cognitive Science Society.
Keeping one or two APA divisional meetings remote would also drastically reduce our carbon footprint. The frequent flying that academic events require has a heavy carbon footprint, and some events are more carbon-heavy than others. For example, suppose you have a speaker fly in to give a departmental talk. In those cases, there is just one person who needs to make the trip by plane; everyone else attending typically lives close by. But a large regional conference has several hundred people flying in. Increasingly, for some academics frequent flying has become morally costly, and constitutes a form of moral injury.
Some of us feel torn between, on the one hand, the professional need to attend conferences, and, on the other hand, the seriousness of the climate crisis. A former colleague of mine who lives in England (he is not a philosopher, but works in a philosophy-adjacent field) now refuses to attend conferences held in the US, Canada, and other places he cannot reach by train even though it is professionally important to do so. He thinks the goods of no longer flying across the Atlantic outweigh the potential downsides of lack of scholarly connection. This year, he didn’t face that dilemma because all major events in his discipline went online. He was able to participate in events he was not able to attend for many years.
Reducing the number of in-person APA meetings would thus help to solve moral dilemmas for some of us who want to reduce our carbon footprint. A philosopher who no longer wishes to fly across the Atlantic can attend the online conference, rather than being torn between her ethical views and the professional necessity of taking part in the major conferences in her field.
This is not to deny the value of in-person connection. We now see clearly how conferences serve multiple purposes: we get the chance to learn about the state of the field, including on things outside of our direct interest, but we also use conferences to foster social connections over drinks, food, and informal conversation. The organizers of recent e-events I have participated in have tried their best to also try to make that second element work with Slack channels and virtual drinks, but it is undeniable that there is a difference.
However, I think our current (often pessimistic) evaluation of e-conferencing is also colored by our whole pandemic experience. Regardless of our personal tolerance for risk, we have all seen our social lives alter in significant ways. Many of us taught online, or hybrid. Lots of social events (even those that require no flying) were cancelled. When we project what e-conferences would look like as a default going forward, we should not project our entire pandemic experience into the future. Attending an online APA in 2023 will not feel like attending an online APA now, when so much has been moved online. When the pandemic has receded, we will have plenty of other opportunities for embodied, physical engagement, including local events.
Since we have not been able to fine-tune and customize online events the way we have been able to hone the in-person experience, we could also envisage that there is still a lot of room for improvements for e-conferencing, including the practices that surround it. For example, we might do well to cancel class when we attend e-vents like we do for in-person events. A quick informal poll among social media friends showed me that many of them just went on with teaching, administrative meetings and other duties, and this made it hard for them to enjoy the e-conference experience.
Making one or two APA regional conferences online by default is an easy, low-hanging fruit intervention. I have heard proposals to simply add a fourth, electronic option to three in-person options. While this would solve a number of the problems I highlighted above in terms of accessibility, and is certainly preferred over a hybrid format, it would not reduce our collective professional carbon footprint. I am not convinced it would increase accessibility either, for as a fourth, extra option it would risk becoming a marginal, lesser option for people who don’t have the resources or who are otherwise unable to attend. By rotating virtual APA meetings, this would be less of an issue. The CV value on a young scholar’s resume of a presentation on a virtual APA would be the same, for one thing. Adding yet another event in a discipline that already has more conferences than other disciplines (three versus one) does not seem desirable.
I have also heard people (from the APA and outside) express skepticism about my proposal, saying the APA is logistically tied with hotel deals. However, these deals can be revised or cancelled down the line. Others say the initiative for more e-conferencing should come from smaller conferences and that the APA is simply too big, or the divisional structure too complex, to make it feasible. However, precisely because the APA is so big, and APA meetings have so many delegates, the potential impact of moving one or two conferences yearly online is much larger than leaving it up to smaller, individual initiatives. The APA could play a crucial role in accessibility and environmental sustainability, rather than bringing up the rear.
Given the importance of APA meetings for the profession, I think it is important to keep an ecologically friendly and accessible fully virtual event.
Helen De Cruz
Helen De Cruz holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of religion. Recent publications include De Cruz, De Smedt & Schwitzgebel (Eds.) Philosophy through science fiction stories (Bloomsbury, 2021) and De Cruz (Ed. and illustrator). Philosophy illustrated. 42 thought experiments to broaden your mind (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Alternative proposal: make all meetings hybrid with the option of either attending in person or Zooming in. I realize that the costs of a Zoom set up at every session might be significant but, arguably, it would be worth it.
First of all, it would mean more flexibility in selecting in-person venues because there would be less in person attendance. It would mean that the APA wouldn’t be tied to meeting at big-big, ultra-expensive convention hotels but could meet at more affordable venues. In addition to providing access to people who can’t/won’t travel it would potentially mean that in-person attendance was more affordable. Charging Zoomers registration at a reduced rate would go some way to paying for Zoom set-ups at sessions. Moreover some presenters would Zoom from off-site venues, further decreasing costs. Significantly smaller in-person events would, I’d suspect, mean fewer APA staff needed at site which would further reduce costs to the APA.
I’m guessing—I don’t have figures. But I’d urge the APA to do the math. To start, put out a survey to ascertain what percentage of members would prefer to Zoom, and then look at smaller, more affordable venues, etc. to get an idea of the costs of the all hybrid policy I’m proposing. I’m also curious about the costs of Zooming. There’s no need for an elaborate video set-up with camera on tripod. Presenters can Zoom from laptops. Whether the management of convention hotels would tolerate this is another thing.
As to the benefits—HUGE. The greatest conference participation for the greatest number! Right now I am ‘at’ the joint meeting of the Aristotelian Society/Mind association in the UK—from California, USA. There is a time difference—the session tomorrow on panpsychism which I am aching to attend, will begin at 1:30 am my (PDT) time. But I’ve set my alarm. A while back I went to two Arche events, which were WONDERFUL, beginning at my 4:30 am. During this past plague year, with lots of colloquia and meetings on Zoom I’ve been able to get to about 10+ times more papers than I was ever able to get to under normal conditions. I pray that this will keep on going! There are lots of people like me at smaller places that aren’t primarily research-oriented, as well as independent scholars, who don’t have easy access to in-person events, who are aching for intellectual stimulation and participation. Zoom democratizes participation. As a minor benefit, having sessions available on Zoom would make it economically feasible for presenters to use powerpoint, sharing screens, which in-person participants could pick up on their laptops.
The only serious downside I can see to the policy I propose is that with Zoom participation available universities would cut back on travel money. OK, that needs to be addressed. But I’d still argue that the huge benefit of much, much more access to APA sessions for many, many more people outweighs any costs.
So, please, APA, give serious consideration to this proposal! Please get the empirical facts, do the survey, do the math, investigate alternatives to big expensive convention hotels in big expensive cities, and investigate the feasibility of my proposal.
I think alternating in person with virtual is better than allowing virtual participation at conferences because I like a level playing field. I like everyone having to participate virtually. I have more worries about the gendered impact of hybrid formats. But even alternating I suspect we’ll end up with more women participating remotely at the remote conferences and more men attending in person, skewing the gender breakdown at philosophy conferences even more than it’s already skewed. I know when my children were young it helped me to justify the amount of conference travel I did by claiming, truthfully, that it was expected of me. Family stepped in because conference travel was part of my job. If attending in person becomes optional I suspect we’ll see fewer women/people with young children at conferences. There’s also issue of conference travel funding, skewing conference participation more towards those at wealthier universities, more than it is already. Anyway, lots of important things to think about here. Thanks for getting this idea on the table Helen.
This is a wonderful post, and it speaks to something morally urgent. At the least, we should ask of the APA that it develop a realistic plan to become carbon neutral or carbon negative as much as possible as an institution with its involved sets of practices. It should also look seriously into just carbon-offsetting options, for these are well documented to be problematic, but they are nonetheless important.
I’m in favor of even fewer in-person large conferences combined with regional nodes that build into large virtual gatherings. The Western Political Science Association’s virtual communities initiative is also promising, and the APA could develop its own version, using it to generate cohesive online conferences bringing together virtual communities that have developed their own consistency and rigor.
Thanks for publishing this article.
[…] over at the American Philosophical Association blog, Helen De Cruz (St. Louis University) has an interesting proposal (h/t Jamie Mayerfeld).: alternate in-person and online meetings, but with the latter largely in the […]