On Academic Associations and Conferences: A Curatorial Post

For this week's blog I want to talk about a thing that I talk about a lot, A LOT, which is how large academic associations consistently fail their members. I saw things happen this week in different spaces that made me realize that I am one of many people who have been saying the same thing about needing to redesign how we do conferences for easily the last four years.

In fact I went into my blog archive and discovered at least 6 posts that are about exactly this, so I will highlight a few. This first about "saying it nicely" from May 2022. Another from July 2022 which is my most read blog post with over 12K views about how those who attend inaccessible conferences are complicit in their lack of accessibility. That one made me laugh because 3 years later we are exactly at the same same place and nothing has changed because no one has really made that association have to change. One from May 2024 that reinforces who has to put in the labour to make things better for organizers who should have thought about inclusion in the first place. And this last one from February that reinforces the harm that large academic associations are doing with their conference design.

So with that I am thinking well what is there left to say about this that I have not already said? The thing is these large academic associations will not learn to do better unless we leave en-masse (kinda like what the MLA folk finally realized they needed to do). An example of this lack of interest forcing folk to do better is actually what is happening with Congress this year. Congress the conference, not congress whatever goes on in the States, but that is whole other interconnected piece that I will get to.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of accessibility questions and considerations that were put in Congress planning this year. I know part of it is because last year's Congress was honestly a flop for a myriad of reasons. But also because the folk planning Congress this year at GBC care about accessibility and inclusion in a way that I have not seen other institutions who have hosted Congress do before. There's accessibility awareness, but also a lot of supports for caregivers with children, much more of a push for associations to have "underwaged" as a category for folk who want to join, and a continuation of a commitment to support Black or Indigenous folk in attending.

So part of what needs to happen is having folk in the planning committee who deeply get it, and that is one of the things I want to emphasize here today. Because let's be honest tri-council still has incredibly inaccessible systems to even apply for grants, inaccessible systems that folk have told them for years do not work with assistive technology, with instructions that are not easy to follow, so the gate-keeping is there and accessibility and inclusion is not a priority. So you need on the ground folk who care to make things better in conference design. If you are on a board of an association and you are only doing it for CV padding and not because you actually want to make things better you are part of the problem. And sadly that is where a lot of these issues start.

We have folk in these roles who are doing this because it makes for a nice email signature block, not because they genuinely want to make the association space and the conferences they host inclusive. And when you tell them to do better, this is where they tone police folk and ask to be asked nicely or the weaponizing of progress over perfection comes in. Like having automatic captions available on a video conferencing tool that has had automatic captions for at least 5 years is somehow doing disabled folk a favour, and "see we did a thing; look at us aren't we great." This where I note that having the major scholarship of teaching and learning conference in Canada and the large educational development association conference in North America be actively "anti-virtual conference" should tell you everything you need to know about the morals and values of those associations.

We talk about modelling in the work that we do, but in fact so many of the associations that we are "supposed" to be a part of for whatever reason, tenure promotion, networking, etc fail to model an inclusive praxis in their communications and conference design. Just this week I received an email from one of the ed dev groups in my province telling folk to use an inaccessible tool to connect under the guise of community building. Will they do anything about it? Nope, because again what we have here is a deep failure of praxis which has been the case for years now with that group. 

Honestly I could literally go on forever about this topic. I have so many examples, as do so many of my friends, peers, and colleagues, about associations failing to care about inclusion (not just accessibility, but holistic inclusion). Many folk already have difficulty getting travel documents to travel to different places for a conference, a lack of virtual options tells everyone whose voices and points of view you value and who you are expecting to attend.

And I am not saying virtual options are the only thing that will make conferences better, but honestly it should be a bare minimum start. I was giving a virtual workshop last week where one of the organizers was literally talking on the phone on screen the whole time I was facilitating. I mean this is also a place that has done an in-person only UDL conference for years so the praxis gap there is pretty clear. But this is the thing, these associations and groups making these kinds of decisions have already for years been in compliance with a move away from inclusion, a move away from equity, a move away from having diverse voices and points of view in their conference spaces. So it is easy for them to pivot when folk say that EDI/DEI doesn't matter anymore, because it actually never mattered for them in practice, only in some vague words on a website. They were compliant for years. They haven't actually cared for years.

I leave you with my philosophy for groups and conferences like this. In the past I have put in a ridiculous amount of work trying to make it better, trying to get them to be more inclusive in their practices. In some spaces that may work, but honestly, they will not change unless something impacts them directly, and that is in registration monies and registration numbers. I shouldn't have to wait years for accessibility crumbs from a group that is supposed to be representative of my peers and ethics. Instead I create the spaces that I want and need for myself and I apply the Kenny Rogers philosophy to these other groups now- you have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run. And sadly for so many of these larger academic associations, the time to leave was years ago, and the time to still leave is now.