The Diversity and Inclusiveness Beat is running a mini-series called “Why I Support the Virtual APA.” This post will be the first out of four installments. The mini-series was organized by Colin Marshall, who serves as Program Chair for the 2026 Pacific APA.
It’s Tuesday, April 11th, 2017. I’m in Seattle, Washington, in a hotel room with my soon-to-be one year old, James. We have had a difficult day of travel with him on my lap on a crowded airplane, and I desperately need to feed him. He’s crying and hungry and all-around annoying. The hotel, despite my calls in advance, has not yet delivered a crib for him to sleep in or a high chair for him to sit in, so I try to spoon-feed some of the baby food I’ve brought with me while he crawls around the hotel room floor. I am tired, burnt out, and ready to attend my first APA conference.
The conference got better, but it stayed exhausting. The APA does a lot to try to make the meetings inclusive, including helping with babysitting costs for those of us that need to bring our children to meetings. But it’s hard not to wonder how much easier it would have been for me to attend a meeting (and, honestly, get more out of it, philosophically speaking) if an online event had been an option.
I support having online conferences for two main reasons: accessibility and sustainability. There are also, of course, many considerations against online conferences: Zoom fatigue, the lack of dynamic “hallway-style” meetups, not seeing friends and colleagues in person, and much of our home and work to-do lists carried around with us like baggage the whole time, since we are technically “home.”
Some of these can be improved or solved with more creative thinking and investment into making online conferences better; some are built into the online conference format. But online conferences are important, and in order for us to achieve one of the main values they offer—accessibility—we need more of us to buy in and participate. If the online conferences are the ones that fewer of us attend or most of us skip, they won’t help with accessibility. We need many of us to go to the online conferences so that the very folks who cannot attend the in-person ones get access to the benefits of a large APA meeting: many philosophers, gathered together, with many options for presenting and attending a large variety of sessions.
Online conferences are accessible to a variety of folks who cannot attend in-person meetings for many different kinds of reasons. Some graduate students don’t have travel funds and need opportunities to present their work and receive feedback on it. Some folks have disabilities that don’t make it possible for them to travel. Some have young children, or are pregnant or breastfeeding, and getting away for a conference is much more difficult than participating in an online one. (Though if you are breastfeeding and need to get away, I’m happy to share tips on how I traveled with a cooler and brought home hundreds of ounces of breast milk on a plane while on the job market—an accessibility problem for another time!) Some have parents they care for, and leaving them for a conference isn’t possible.
But the conference being accessible doesn’t on its own make the goods of the conference accessible. We have to show up. We need to go to the Zoom presentation of the graduate student giving her paper to her first APA. It can’t just be her, the commentator, and the chair in the Zoom room. If it is, she won’t get the benefits that the conference offers. And if she’s someone who can’t attend an in-person conference for any reason, then those benefits will simply not be available to her at all, and they could be. This is the only option for some people, and so it matters that the people who can do both show up to the virtual ones.
I think sometimes the discussion over virtual conferences gets framed as a dichotomy between virtual and in-person conferences, or as a trichotomy between virtual, hybrid, and in-person conferences. I think this is the wrong way to frame the question, and I think it is telling that the APA’s 2+1 experiment is precisely a 2+1 experiment. That is, two conferences are in-person, and one is hybrid. Rather than thinking about whether all conferences should be virtual or in-person, we should be thinking about how many conferences should be virtual or in-person. It’s interesting, actually, because a lot of people that I talk to about why I think virtual conferences are important sort of immediately assume that the folks who want virtual conferences want all of our conferences to be virtual. But I know of almost no one who thinks all of our conferences should be virtual. But none of those same people seem to think that all conferences must be in person. They seem to be fine with some conferences being virtual. So what’s the real sticking point?
Another question I sometimes face is why is the online APA conference just as expensive as the in-person one? Well, first of all, it isn’t really just as expensive as the in-person one. You didn’t need to pay for a hotel or a flight. Or an Uber. Or parking. You do need to feed yourself, but usually that’s a bit cheaper at home than in a different city. It’s true that the registration fee is just as high as for an in-person conference, but that’s because running an online conference with the size and complexity of an APA divisional meeting actually is quite expensive. And the cost isn’t offset by folks booking rooms at the conference hotel in the way in-person conferences are.
Some people are thinking about how to make virtual conferences work as well as they can from the end of the organizers. Have you thought about how to make virtual conferences work well for you? What would you need to change about your engagement for the conference to be the most productive for you?
So when the 2026 Pacific rolls around in a few months and it’s online—show up. Maybe host a watch party. Maybe attend a public session. Try to make two or three colloquia sessions that you don’t have to attend—try to be, let’s say, a good citizen of the philosophical community. It’s not enough just to say you care about accessibility: you need to do something to show that you care about making philosophy accessible to all.
I think it’s important to recognize that it’s true that online conferences don’t have all of the benefits of in-person conferences. The very next day in Seattle, I met some philosophers in the hotel restaurant who were kind enough to invite me to join them, and one of them has been a conference friend ever since. I’m not sure we ever would have had occasion to meet had it not been at an in-person conference. But I imagine that in addition to making conferences accessible to those who cannot attend in-person ones, online conferences also have other benefits, some that we are just beginning to discover. What are they? Can you help us find them and make them more available?
I hope to see you at the Pacific!
J. L. A. Donohue
J. L. A. Donohue is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include moral, social, and political philosophy, especially moral complicity and interpersonal deliberative obligations. She is also interested in ethics and technology, medical ethics, feminist epistemology, and issues of justice wherever they arise. When she is not doing philosophy, she likes to play ultimate frisbee, stand up paddle board, and play board games.
