Climate activists often say: Organize your networks! Collective action and social movements have become crucial for an effective response to a growing climate emergency. And with a tight timeframe, climate responses need many people to organize from where they already are, with the relationships and institutional memberships people already have. This raises the question: what should philosophy’s corner of a climate movement look like, and how do we build it? Presumably, it will involve implementing and encouraging sustainable practices in teaching, events, governance, and other areas. We will need to gather together in groups to do these things. To be successful, these gatherings will have to build a sense of community among their participants. To reduce carbon emissions and increase accessibility, the gatherings may increasingly have to be virtual. This raises a more general question: When so many people find them awkward, boring, exhausting, and devoid of personal contact, how can virtual gatherings be a place for community building?
We recently organized a three-day Philosophy and the Climate Crisis conference, held June 10-12, 2021 on Zoom. The conference included keynote sessions with Marion Hourdequin, Bill McKibben, and Kyle Whyte; live panels organized by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Robin Zheng; symposia with pre-watch and/or pre-read talks and live Q&A; a collaboration with Engaged Philosophy; and workshops led by Minorities and Philosophy, the Sunrise Movement, and Philosophers for Sustainability. Our goal was to make progress toward addressing climate change, both by addressing the philosophical challenges it raises, and by bringing philosophers, practitioners, and organizers together to advocate for sustainable practices in teaching, research, administration, advocacy, and community engagement. We hoped that this conference would contribute to building a climate movement within philosophy, in large part by building community and collaboration. We want to share some of our strategies and challenges, as one among other resources that others might find useful. We are especially grateful to the Philosophers for Sustainability E-vents Advocacy Team for their advice and participation in the conference.
In a pandemic year, the challenges of virtual conferences have become painfully obvious. Virtual conferences have struggled with creating opportunities for human contact or informal interaction. Technical difficulties are frustrating and boring. Most of all, talking to someone on video just does not feel as alive as interacting in person. Attending a virtual conference can feel like watching a TV program that is not even very engaging. Struggling with boredom and distraction, many attendees multitask, which reduces personal contact even more. One can say that these are necessary sacrifices, smaller than the harms one suffers when carbon-intensive activities make one’s home uninhabitable. But they are real barriers, and it is worth putting in the effort to see whether they are avoidable.
Rather than emphasize one solution, we opted to make our conference experimental, trying out several strategies to increase and deepen personal interaction:
- Despite our large conference size, we decided to keep the format of a Zoom meeting, in which all participants can see and interact with each other, rather than a webinar, in which only panelists and hosts are visible.
- We tried several session formats, including pre-watch / pre-read talks with live Q&A, live panels, keynote lectures, a keynote interview, collaborative workshops, and informal social time.
- We used self-selecting breakout rooms as lounges that anyone could join and leave at any time: a Theory Lounge, an Advocacy Lounge, a Students Lounge, a BIPOC Lounge, a Cafeteria, and a Green Room for the next session’s presenter(s) and chair(s).
- Breaks between sessions were always 30-60 minutes, allowing participants to continue discussions in the main room and lounges and/or take longer breaks to reduce Zoom fatigue. Participants reported that having a choice among these options helped the conference feel welcoming and accessible.
- Music turned out to be important; we played music in the main room before each session, turning awkward silences into music and dance breaks that were still slightly awkward but mostly fun. We prioritized music by artists of color and artists from outside the US and encouraged audience requests, which also gave rise to friendly conversations in the Zoom chat.
- We used breakout rooms in workshops to increase participation and encouraged active use of the general chat.
All of this helped to bring everyone out of TV watching and multitasking mode by encouraging various forms of participation. We also did our best to set a tone of kindness and fun rather than strict professionalism, and announced an informal dress code in advance. The biggest challenge was keeping the technology running smoothly; we had to put a lot of time and effort into planning out technological details, practicing them in advance, and keeping the process fun.
Virtual formats also offered us important advantages, especially in accessibility and cost. With a $2000 budget that covered keynote speaker fees and tech support, we were able to offer a three-day conference with free registration and about 150-200 attendees from six continents, with 50-80 attendees in most conference sessions. Even in a pandemic year, people who were parenting or dealing with health or mobility issues were able to attend at least parts of the conference. None of them had to travel or bear any significant financial burden apart from computer use and some missed work. Though we encouraged keeping cameras turned on when possible, attendees were able to turn cameras off and listen in if they needed to cook or rest. There were no guilty consciences or moral injury from heavy carbon emissions due to travel, and no social stratification between those who were and were not staying at the conference venue. All of this helped the conference feel collaborative and enjoyable. The accessibility of online conferences was especially helpful in coalition-building; participants from many academic and non-academic groups and backgrounds were able to come together to share their skills and experience, which helped prevent organizational efforts from having to reinvent the wheel. We were very happy that activists and undergraduates without institutional support for conference travel were able to attend.
One strength a virtual conference platform offers is often regarded as a weakness. The live chat function can be a space that is vulnerable to abuse at worst and is often seen to be a distraction at best. But if we are intentional about using it as a resource within the context of a conference, it has the potential to be an inclusive and generative space. It also provides a dimension of interaction that is hard to replicate in in-person conferences. During our conference there was a rich and ongoing live chat discussion throughout presentations, symposia, workshops, and breaks between sessions. Attendees posed questions for speakers as well as other attendees, and shared many academic and non-academic articles, pedagogical resources, and other relevant links related to the issues being discussed in the session. As one participant wrote on our feedback form: “I was especially happy with the chat conversations…. So many links and references were shared throughout the conference. This would have been much harder to do in real-time.”
We were intentional in our organizational planning to establish norms for engagement and asked participants and chairs to model the collaborative engagement we aimed to facilitate. For example, session chairs were encouraged to post resources and information that was mentioned by presenters as they were speaking. (Some of these resources are now available here and here.) We asked chairs to integrate questions posed in the chat alongside questions posed by attendees who chose to utilize the “raise hand” function. Chairs were attentive to the chat and directed speakers’ and attendees’ attention to robust conversations that were developing concurrently there. To keep this somewhat complicated process running smoothly, it was helpful to assign each chair a co-chair or assistant chair, and to distinguish Q&A from side conversations by asking that chat questions for Q&A begin with “QUESTION.”
Facilitating multiple dimensions of engagement, and then being intentional about the integration of these forms of communication, helps with community building in several ways. It contributes to widening the space of deliberation to include various ways people prefer to communicate in group gatherings. It also provides a space for further organizing. Points raised in the chat provided a foundation for participants to establish connections with others and start new projects. The chat also served as a space for expressing commitments to participate. For example, during workshops led by the Sunrise Movement and by Philosophers for Sustainability, conference attendees were encouraged to commit to activities by signaling in the chat which forms of participation they were pledging to take on. (“Drop a W in the chat if you want to lead a local workshop on sustainable practices for philosophers”; “Drop an F if you want to co-lead one of our monthly forums”; and so on.) Everyone was able to see each other’s commitments and was encouraged to connect with one another around shared pledges.
We loved the sense of shared purpose that the conference format helped to nourish. It made engagement feel interesting and meaningful, and kept bullshit, posturing, and competitiveness to a minimum. People participated in theory-focused sessions with an eye to their practical import. Collaborations with groups such as the Sunrise Movement or Minorities and Philosophy unfolded effectively and established a foundation for future collaboration and engagement. After the conference, attendees reported in our feedback form that they found the conference “interesting, humane, and connecting,” “left feeling inspired and energized,” and that it was “really engaging and helped me feel that something would actually come out of it.” Follow-up events by Philosophers for Sustainability were lively and well attended, with participants eager to continue to grow collaborations both on theoretical research and on projects related to teaching and advocacy.
Building a community requires doing some of what many of us would like to see at conferences anyway: breaking out of cold, stuffy professionalism and emphasizing collaboration and opportunity. In that way, instead of being frustratingly not-in-person, an online conference with a goal of movement-building can offer a sense of community that is often missing even at an in-person gathering. We came out of the conference feeling that virtual conferences can be a sustainable, accessible, low-cost, low-travel format that will continue to improve over time. Like in-person gatherings, they raise many challenges that cannot be overcome within a single year. But there may not be another year within our lifetimes in which traveling to in-person conferences can be done without exacerbating a global crisis. It is a big relief to find that virtual conferences can continue to grow in ways that make them more inclusive, more accessible, more friendly, and more productive. We are grateful to everyone who participated and look forward to learning more from future events.
Simona Capisani
Simona Capisani is a Climate Futures Initiative Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University in the University Center for Human Values and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Her research interests are in political and social philosophy, ethics (normative and applied), climate justice, and feminist philosophy. Her current work addresses the moral and political challenges of climate-related displacement and migration. She is a co-director of the International Society for Environmental Ethics Mentoring Initiative as well as a research associate for the Agenda for International Development, where she serves as head of the Energy and Environment research cluster.
Eugene Chislenko
Eugene Chislenko is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His main interests are in moral philosophy and moral psychology, and in related topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and the history of philosophy. He founded Philosophers for Sustainability with Rebecca Millsop in 2019.
This was a solid conference with a good structure to it. I’m glad to have co-chaired the e-Vents team when ideas for this conference were being kicked around. Thank you for acknowledging us.
While personally advocating for a longer run up to the conference and to a “teleological” ordering whereby the conference would then produce a series of actions or events after it, the balance you both struck with wanting to have a hothouse-event-feel alongside some preparatory elements (like your pre-events for presenters and chairs and the pre-reads and pre-watches) worked well. And no doubt the conference has already led to some further things for people and energized PfS monthly forums and the 2+1 Campaign.
The use of music was especially important, you are right. One should also add that it was warm and lively music, of different traditions, so that the sounds weren’t austere or only for one set of tastes or cultures. That was cool. Thank you for that.
If I understand your points well, it’s key that we focus on good relationships in our events, just as much as on research. Would that all conferences worked that way!
Over at the Western Political Science Association, the Virtual Communities program has just been officially funded and launched after a pilot year ( http://www.wpsanet.org/virtual/ ). In my experience, many of them really do have community baked into them and issuing from them, especially some of the older ones (like Environmental Political Theory).
In our Planetary Justice VC, we’ve made community the main focus, and it has worked, although admittedly the research dimension of it is more oblique. It seems that each group strikes a balance as to how much they want to aim directly for research productivity, practical advocacy in the profession (as some of the VCs do), or simple community building, with the practical and theoretical effects being more indirect.
After a year of virtual e-vents, I actually think they are on the whole better all around than in person e-vents. But that may reflect my age (I don’t have the energy I used to!) and being a parent. It’s just so nice to see people from all over and to be able to participate when actually going somewhere would be so disruptive of the tightly-woven schedules of family life. When you add the reasons of justice to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere and the accessibility dimensions Colin Marshall has so well argued for in the work he’s done for the 2+1 campaign (and prior arguments guide to e-vents), e-vents do seem the wave of the future.
Thank you for writing this post and for the conference. I’m proud to have been a part of it.
Jeremy