Dear SPEP colleagues,
For environmental and accessibility as well as financial reasons, we would like to solicit your thoughts on a proposal to experiment with a rotation of one virtual conference every fourth year (with the first virtual conference in fall 2025). While we are very well aware of the value of an in-person meeting, our reasons for suggesting this are many:
- There is clearly a negative environmental impact from air travel. This is a reason why many professional societies, including the APA, are experimenting with a virtual conference as part of their conference scheduling.
- It has become increasingly expensive to travel to our annual conference, and having a virtual conference every fourth year would allow for greater attendance and participation from underfunded colleagues and graduate students.
- In-person events organized at large convention hotels and universities are less accessible for a wide range of philosophers: those with certain disabilities (some of which are incompatible with travel and others which make it substantially difficult and/or intermittently impossible), those who are neurodiverse in ways that conflict with the intensive social activity built into the structure of academic conferences (both in session and out), people with any number of caring responsibilities for family members and intimate partners, and people who cohabitate with others who are immunocompromised, just to list a few examples.
- It has also become increasingly expensive to host and organize a meeting. The virtual SPEP conference in 2021 was financially very advantageous for SPEP, with very high registration and relatively low cost for the virtual platform (which everyone seems to think was very successful) at the 2021 meeting. Organizing an “every fourth year” virtual conference could increase SPEP’s assets to the point where the society could help underwrite the costs of meetings in an “expensive” city like New York City or Chicago, or could help us to support local hosts who don’t have the institutional support to cover the $15,000-$30,000 that local hosts are currently expected to provide in order to host a meeting.
We are cognizant of what is lost with a virtual meeting in terms of renewing friendships, networking with colleagues, meeting with publishers, and the like. But we think the benefits of considering a virtual conference every fourth year would be in the best interest of our society. We are interested in hearing from the membership about whether they would support experimenting with a virtual conference every fourth year. Please post your comments below or email them to any member of the SPEP Executive Committee.
The SPEP Executive Committee
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This is a fantastic proposal. Nearly every major academic conference is moving to a model like this for all of the reasons listed above. Can’t come soon enough!
I support this proposal but suggest doing a virtual conference every three years. The organization might also consider including a certain percentage of virtual sessions at in-person meetings.
The pros of doing a virtual conference occasionally are clearly stated above, and I think they are good reasons to consider the proposal.
The most obvious con to me is that the virtual conferences I’ve done haven’t been as engaging or productive in terms of engaging with other scholars and learning new ideas to inform my teaching and research.
If we decide to do a virtual conference regularly, I suggest that we experiment with different ways of doing so which try to capture the experiences we’d be losing. I think what I’d miss most are the small hallway conversations between a few people with similar interests. Such conversations can happen virtually, but it’s harder to initiate them at a distance. Is there a way of facilitating that?
All of the reasons y’all listed are fantastic and compelling reasons to move to a rotating virtual conference model.
I’ll also add another: for folks like me who have transitioned out of academia but would like to continue to be engaged in academic spaces, traveling for in-person conferences can be costly, both in terms of money and time. We can’t expect reimbursement for registration or travel expenses, and it feels bad to use PTO for a day of travel to a conference. A virtual option would help alleviate some of the strain associated with attending conferences as an independent scholar.
To many of us, there is little of value in attending a virtual conference, just as there is little of value in attending virtual classes. We are not measuring the learning loss or personal loss of virtual conferences, but we are measuring that in our schools, and we have seen remarkable declines in both for our students during the Pandemic. That sacrifice may have been worthwhile and our society could but is not attempting to make up for those personal and educational losses with in-person summer courses, but the loss of in person professional meetings is also quite great. They are remarkably stimulating intellectually, personally, and professionally, none of which effects obtained from 2021’s virtual meeting for me. By going down this road, we also weaken continental philosophy in this country by weakening our ties to each other and our commitment to the discipline. And, to address several of the reasons for the move above, we may well increase, rather than decrease, our environmental impact by this measure, to the degree that we are less influenced and informed about environmental issues because we are not physically present to discuss them; we lose out on a chance to constitute lower cost, university-based alternatives to corporate conference centers, as the Heidegger Circle has done; and the benefits of travel and interaction for those with neuro- and physical-atypical characteristics, as for others, are surely significantly greater than isolation.
I think it might be reasonable to have an online option each year…?
There is the access factor. It does seem a weak attempt at access improvement to provide the option every 4th year.
Also, there is a difference between access factors and choosing not to attend in person for other reasons.
This could be balanced by the costs. People who do manage access factors that impede attendance could pay a reduced rate as they are, not by choice, getting an inferior experience. But people who choose not to come in person could pay the same price as those who come in person. Unless there is an access factor, speakers, chairs, etc. could be asked to agree to come in person.
I think many would choose to keep coming in person. I think quite a few of us are coming on our own dime now as it is and would continue to do so.
It strikes me that the first four considerations – that we have responsibilities 1) to drastically reduce environmental damage, and to improve equal access for people who are 2) underfunded, 3) embodied (which is already to say differently embodied), and 4) responsible for others – work. And, given that they work, they already work *too well* for the limits of the proposal. If these are real responsibilities, they’re incumbent on us more as the rule than as the exception, suggesting that a virtual *option* needs to be incorporated into every conference.
Again, consider that four years is a very long time, in academic life, between opportunities to be in the loop. The 25% solution will not meet the stated goal of ‘allow[ing] for greater attendance and participation from underfunded colleagues and graduate students’ in a way that can make them relevant to SPEP and SPEP to them, I don’t think.
Of course, it doesn’t follow that those with the right advantages and the appropriate metaphysics can’t continue to get together in the ways that feel most present to them. What counts as presence, bodily presence, personal presence, full presence, mere presence, tele-presence, etc. are, and should be, all highly contested among philosophers. Surely, we’re very familiar at a theoretical level with such debates, particularly in their relation to power. But, in institutional practice, we often continue to impose a single, conservative, strikingly humanist, view of presence on colleagues who don’t share it, in the form of this curious habeas corpus of the scholarly conference. It’s unnecessarily exclusionary, of course, and I think we see it already coming to be regarded as unprofessional. I hope it also quickly comes to strike us, in retrospect, as eerie that there was ever a time when we preferred not to listen to the voice of colleagues unless we shared a room with their intestines.