In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:
In many ways conferences moving online is a great thing for increasing accessibility to junior academics who otherwise might not have been able to afford conference travel. But there are some pitfalls to the new medium that I think we should flag for more senior academics and it may be worth discussing strategies to help mitigate such concerns. In particular, I'm thinking about how Zoom meetings make it much harder to approach speakers and more senior academics during breaks. Some conferences I have attended specifically encourage participants to keep discussions going during the breaks, but this is a recipe for academics who already know one another well to form an 'in group' breakout room that might prove doubly hard for relatively unknown academics to break into. When these groups form in an in-person setting, it is easy enough to hover around and find an opportune moment to join the discussion. In a virtual setting, however, there is an additional epistemic barrier, since one may not even be aware that such discussions are taking place. One concrete step virtual conferences could take is to leave Zoom meeting rooms open after talks and encourage those who wish to continue the discussion not to break out into new Zoom rooms. Simply continuing over email is also relatively exclusionary. Minimally it is worth bringing the concern up so that more senior academics can be aware of the way in which virtual settings can rob junior academics, particularly those of us less likely to ask questions in a large Zoom meeting, of a valuable means of low-stakes participation.
I like this suggestion a lot. It's not only online conferences that can be exclusionary in these kinds of ways. In-person conferences can be similarly exclusive, as in-groups can continue the conversation after talks in ways that others might be interested in but feel excluded from. It's not clear what can be done about the in-person case–aside from encouraging people to include others. But in the online case, this reader's suggestion seems helpful: conference organizers can simply remind people to keep discussions during break going in the original Zoom meeting rather than breakout groups.
I wonder what other things might be done to improve online conferences. I haven't been a part of one that uses Zoom myself, but imagine others have. What works well? What doesn't?
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