This is bullshit and part of the reason is that we’re trying to replicate an inaccessible experience on a platform that has completely different affordances.

You CANNOT replicate the “conference experience” remotely because remote conferences are different environments. (1/n) https://twitter.com/waitmanb/status/1358116328381497352

Now, you can create a similar experience of social interaction through organization of the space, and many conferences have done this REALLY well: @CogtweetoSeries first conference was a standout example of this as it took advantage of the unique structures of the platform. (2/n)

And it did so in such a way as to maintain the accessibility portion of the conference while blending the social portion with a variety if techniques that I would call innovative as fuck and should be standard for conferences. (3/n)

The other conference that did this well was the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conference put on by @biopoliticalph and @JoWolffBSG which had access in mind from the start and managed to maintain the social experience of conferences while maintaining access. (4/n)

But, again... they had accessibility and collegiality in mind when organizing the remote space for the conference rather than simply replicating the “conference experience,” whatever that may be. This gets me to my last point, which is crucial. (5/n)

The “conference experience” is not experienced the same way by everyone. All of this has to do with the organization of the space both socially and physically. Conferences aren’t just inaccessible because folks can’t get in the room, but because being in the room sucks. (6/n)

By this I mean the ways conferences aren’t spaces for collaboration unless intentionally designed in that way because they reproduce some of the worst elements of the adversarial culture of the academy. Or, more damning, they reproduce structures of oppression in academia. (7/n)

I’m not just talking about who is invited and what message that sends, but how the conference experience can be one of public navigation of oppression without refuge. Sara Ahmed and Audre Lorde have good pieces on the subject, but so do junior faculty and grad students. (8/n)

So,this pandemic could’ve been an opportunity for the academy to reimagine the conference experience for the future, but all we’ve done is tried to reproduce what we’ve lost as if it were an ideal to aspire to, without considering if that ideal is worth it. (9/n)

And that, I think, is the issue: we’ve kept trying to reproduce the same inaccessible thing without considering if we should reproduce the conference experience online. Ian Malcom said it best: