Covid & Conferences: What’s Left to Blog About?

But I haven’t felt like or had the bandwidth for writing much of anything during the past couple of years. The reasons are fairly obvious . . .

• The state of the world

• The pandemic (and living in an immunocompromised household)

• The state of the world including the pandemic (and living in an immunocompromised household)

What could I possibly add that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by someone else? Also, the questions posed in this post “Is blogging a futile, self-afflicting, empty exercise” regularly resurface.

But I recently attended my first in-person media literacy conference since March 2020. That is a good reason to write something, surely? Get back up on the horse. The horse being the blog, as it were.

The conference was filled with people I wanted to chat and hang out with, friends and colleagues I’ve known for a while, and people whose work I admire and respect (that sounds like I don’t admire and respect the work of friends and colleagues but you know what I mean). I was really happy to see faces I’d only seen on a screen in several years. The panels, discussions and papers were thought provoking and provided the opportunity to think through various debates in the field as well as consider new works, approaches, and researchers. And I know how hard the conference organizers worked to make the event happen. So ultimately I rationalized my decision to attend the International Media Literacy Research Symposium this way:

• This is the best option for tiptoeing back into conferences given its small size

• We can drive to Wisconsin (not ready to get on a plane)

• The weather will be decent, we can eat outside

• Surely we all need to get back into it (what is “it” again?)

• We can’t live in isolation forever

• We’ll adjust those k-95s straps (maskacne be damned) and lose all feeling in the ears

And I’ll admit between the bouts of “ooh, too close” and “how many are in the room?, I’ll skip the drinks”, I enjoyed meeting new people, reconnecting with old ones, making small talk (enjoy is a stretch, who am I kidding?) and even hugging friends (and being Irish, obviously this is wildly out of character)

But I had, and continue to have, mixed feelings about attending the conference.

In the carefree times (not really) before the pandemic, climate crises, (term I recently came across while reading Maeve Higgins’ book) as well as a whole host of diversity, equity and inclusion issues were only mentioned in passing at conferences.

But before and after this one I am struggling to reconcile my in-personness with these issues and the obvious accompanying privilege.

In the “The Future of Conferences” the authors observe,

“Pre-pandemic, most conferences tended to adopt a standard structure with very little evolution or experimentation. In the future, we envisage a ‘mix and match’ model based on a library of solutions that can be adapted to the particular needs of each conference”.

They offer all kinds of ‘mix and match’ conference solutions. Well worth a read.

But perhaps Small Pond Science stated it most plainly,

“If your society is serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion, you need to keep having online conferences”.

The same article highlighted research by Matthew Skiles and colleagues who “investigated the impact of the switch to online scientific meetings in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion” noting unsurprisingly, that attendance was generally higher, but especially so by women and LGBTQ+ scientists as well as international participants.

The week before the conference Angela Pashia shared a thoughtful piece on my social media feed titled “Conferences – The Five Stages of Grief” by Fobazi M. Ettarh who noted:

“How quickly all the promises made to “the vulnerable” at the beginning of COVID have been forgotten. By continuing to go to conferences that are only in-person, you encourage more conferences that are only in-person. And that is exclusionary to so many different people! It excludes not only disabled and chronically ill library workers, but any and all library workers who have disabled people in their lives!”

This post haunted me throughout the conference. And yes, I hear you, admittedly it didn’t stop me from attending.

So despite having an immunocompromised partner, I too have now contributed to this exclusionary system.

Making it somewhat blog worthy (maybe?).

Thanks for reading. If you fancy, share how you are navigating covid and conferences.