APA to End Experiment with Online Divisional Meetings
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has been experimenting with holding one of its three major conferences entirely online. The organization has now announced that, after the second of these online-only events—the Pacific Division meeting taking place this April—it will go back to holding all three meetings in person.
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[“Reach” by Hank Willis Thomas and Coby Kennedy, O’Hare Airport]
Amy Ferrer, executive director of the APA, along with the Secretary Treasurers of the three divisions, Andy Cullison (Eastern), Alex Sager (Pacific), and Ariela Tubert (Central), said in an announcement:
Throughout the planning of both of these online meetings, APA leadership has been closely monitoring the results of the experiment—interest and participation in the meetings, effectiveness of and engagement in sessions, effectiveness of the technology for presentations and networking, participant feedback, resources required to organize and host the meeting, financial outcomes, and more.
The results of the experiment so far show that interest and participation in the online meetings are significantly lower than for in-person meetings—for example, paper submission numbers for both online meetings were just over half of the number of submissions usually received for in-person meetings. Participation in the online sessions was also significantly lower than for in-person meetings (in other words, session audiences were smaller online than in person). The process of organizing an online meeting is more challenging for the program committee than organizing an in-person meeting, online meetings are more taxing on APA staff, and the technology for large online meetings is often difficult for participants to navigate. And perhaps most telling, participant feedback on the Central Division meeting indicates that while many people appreciate that the online format may be more accessible for some people, a large number report that they personally would not participate in another online meeting.
Taking this information into account, the three divisions have determined that it is untenable to continue to organize divisional meetings in an entirely online format.
The experiment with online meetings was prompted largely by a campaign by Philosophers for Sustainability.
The announcement acknowledges that environmental and accessibility concerns about in-person meetings remain, and states that there are plans to develop other kinds of online programming and meetings:
The divisions and the board of officers recognize that the motivations for initiating the 2+1 experiment—primarily climate impact and accessibility—remain, and the APA will continue to pursue those goals in other ways. In particular, we remain committed to developing programming that serves those who cannot or prefer not to participate in in-person divisional meetings. Pivoting from its original plan for an online divisional meeting, the Eastern Division executive committee will work with the board of officers, the other divisions, and the APA staff to develop a different kind of online conference—something specifically designed to work well in the online format. This online conference will likely be smaller, held at a different time of year than the divisional meetings, and incorporate the best elements of the online divisional meetings (such as watch parties) and best practices from other online events. More information about this future online conference will be announced as it becomes available.
You can read the full statement here.
Related: “Penned Up and Forced to Listen”: On the Value of In-Person Conferences
Yeah who cares about global warming, accessibility and all that crap. It just isn’t FUN! And we are serious academics who prioritize fun over ethical responsibility. What is that you ask? Do we *teach* ethics to other people? Of course!
This is quite unfair. My sense, both from my own conference organizing and from testimony from APA folks, is that the APA put _tremendous_ effort into trying to make an online APA work. And my further sense is that, on reasonable grounds, the organizers felt that those efforts failed. They reported that the online attendance was abysmal, and they reasonably thought that the very poor attendance was hard on those who did attend, hard on those who put significant hours into making the online conferences happen, and hard on the APA’s limited financial resources.
If you took this decision and the related challenges seriously, you could think that this is announcement is saying:
You don’t have to agree with all of this reasoning. You might think the online APA meetings did work or would soon have worked with slight changes. You might think that the online effort was so important that it was worth pursuing no matter how effective and no matter how expensive. Or you might think that skipping a regional APA meeting each year is a good idea, regardless of whether there is an online substitute. And so on. Those are all plausible views, I think.
But those are substantive disagreements, not condescending disagreements. And those substantive disagreements do not come anywhere near accusing the organizers, the actual attendees, or the (many) non-attendees of preferring to party rock and not caring about accessibility, the environment, etc.
Own your opponents in the comment section with these simple tricks!*
Philosophers hate him!
*The tricks are ridiculously reductive descriptions and some kind of implicit all-or-nothing “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” principle that would license an inference from the obvious fact that everyone at least sometimes “prioritizes fun over ethical responsibility” to the conclusion that there is something wrong with there being any ethics education at all.
(Apologies if this facetious reply is inappropriate. I suppose that as someone who has had to endure over a year of 100% online classes and meetings during the coronavirus pandemic – and to whom it has consequently become very clear that it is generally somewhere between very difficult and impossible for online meetings to be adequate substitutes for in-person meetings – I found the reductive “prioritize fun” description slightly triggering.)
“Yeah who cares about global warming, accessibility and all that crap. It just isn’t FUN! And we are serious academics who prioritize fun over ethical responsibility. /s”
Philosophy isn’t made by machines.
Is this meant to be a comment on the APA for discontinuing the experiment, or a comment on the (non)attendees, or a comment on the people who are typing on the internet, burning electricity?
Kudos to the organizers! I think the overall approach of trying new ideas, actively gathering evidence on how they work, and then actually revising them in the face of countervailing evidence is exactly what I would hope for from an organization like APA. I’m sure they got blowback both for taking one meeting per year online and for now taking it offline again. I value this kind of experimentation, and I think so do many others in the profession.
just wondering why people didnt submit as much to the online version? seems counter-intuitive to me.
My suspicion is that the primary value of submitting (and being accepted) in a conference like this is the opportunity to present your work in front of your peers and crucially to discuss your work informally with people who attended. I have not attended the APA but I have attended other conferences and for me I often got more value from these informal conversations with people who were interested in my talk. This is the kind of thing that just doesn’t happen in an online conference
My untested theory is that the average philosopher who would self-select into being a member of the APA and wanting to present at the annual conferences would also generally prefer in-person meetings.
So even if, on average, philosophers as a whole might prefer online conferences for a host of reasons, those who specifically would want to present at APA conferences disproportionately prefer in-person meetings.
“Barely anyone submitted when it was online”.
Conjecture: maybe we don’t need 3x annual APA conferences and small subject area conferences are better, other than for social reasons?
Just saying, let’s not consider only the convenient explanations. We are philosophers, we need to be critical of our assumptions especially when we don’t want to be.
“Need” is a poorly-defined word here. We don’t “need” any conferences. But many people find conferences valuable for their work.
But if plenty of people have been submitting papers for 3 in-person conferences a year, and not as many have been submitting papers for the third conference when it is online, then the number of conferences doesn’t seem to be the explanatory factor – the online-ness seems to be what matters.
In theory, I would be a good target audience for APA online meetings. I was trained in the US and maintain professional contacts there. I also live far away from North America, and strongly prefer not to sit in an airplane for 11-14 hours, attend a conference for a few days, and then sit in the sky for another 11-14 hours to get home.
Still, the online APA meetings have not been appealing. Here is why.
(1) Cost. My university will pay for conference travel (even to North America!) but I am on my own for online conferences. I understand and respect that infrastructure for online meetings is not cheap – the APA is not running some kind of racket. Still, the membership + registration fee is not cheap for me (maybe it is cheap for Americans?) and I cannot justify that kind of out-of-pocket cost to, essentially, go to work.
(2) Timing. 18:00 Eastern time is the middle of the night where I live. 18:00 Pacific is even later. Attending the sessions is incompatible with my teaching schedule: if I am teaching in the morning, going to a conference all night is not going to work.
(3) Zoom fatigue. Like everyone else, I attended conferences and taught on Zoom during the pandemic. I still attend Zoom talks from time to time, and it remains a useful tool for interfacing with colleagues that are far away. Still, I question the efficacy of Zoom for larger sessions. For small groups, it is no problem. For larger sessions, where I will probably not make it into the question queue anyhow, recorded lectures are perhaps better: then, I can focus on the lecture on my own time (not the middle of the night).
I am also outside the US, and have the same issue as above, but I suspect that similar ones come up for people inside the US, too, even if to a smaller degree. When I worked in the US, if I traveled for a conference it was assumed that I’d not be teaching, meeting students, attending meetings, etc. during the time of the conference. But, if the conference was on line, and I was still “in town”, I’m not sure the university would be eager to give those same benefits. Maybe it should, but I’m skeptical that it would. That would reduce the number of sessions I could “attend”, even if I was trying hard to attend a lot of them on-line. Also, while the time zone differences are not as serious as for people over seas, even the difference between Pacific and Eastern time can be a problem for people on-line. early sessions or late sessions will be hard to “attend”. Even mid-day ones will be at inconvenient times. I also find that, for me, actually being at the conference helps as a disciplinary device. If I am there, I am there to go to the conference, and so focus on that. (Obviously, not everyone does this.) But, if I am at home, I simply find it harder to “go to” sessions for several days, when my normal work, family, noraml events, etc. are all still there. I expect I’m not alone in this, even if it could be over-come.
These are all little things, and they apply less to smaller workshops or conferences than to very large multi-day things like APA meetings. But, small things add up, and I’d be surprised if this wasn’t a big part of the problem here.
I wrote a post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY about this decision. Here is the text of post:
Earlier this week, the American Philosophical Association (APA) announced that it would discontinue its 2+1 experiment, the “experiment” whereby one of its three annual conferences would be held online and hence be accessible to disabled philosophers and other groups of philosophers otherwise excluded from the association’s events. You can read the stated rationale for this decision here.
While the 2+1 formula itself was tantamount to a segregationst mechanism, the APA’s decision to entirely eliminate online participation in its events constitutes another form of outright discrimination. Indeed, the APA has reinstated itself as an association of DERPs, that is, an association by and for Disabled Exclusionary Righteous Philosophers (for explanation of this term, go here and here). As many philosophers of disability who dwell on these matters recognize and aim to identify, however, the subordination of disabled people is fundamental to philosophy, that is, foundational to its guiding and core assumptions. Hence, this decision is, for us, unsurprising, predictable even.
It would, nevertheless, be more palatable and forthcoming for the APA leadership to acknowledge the biases and limitations of their respective understandings about and conceptions of (for example) disability and (in)accessibility, equity, and exclusion, rather than to suggest, as some of them have done on Daily Nous and Facebook, that critics of this decision have underestimated them, been unfair to them, condescended to them, and so on. I distinctly recall that about a dozen years ago some of them argued that it would be too expensive to make (in-person) APA conferences accessible. While these conferences, that is, these (exclusionary) in-person conferences, remain inaccessible in a variety of ways, the APA leadership appeals to improvement of them in these regards as evidence of its continuing efforts to welcome disabled philosophers, implicitly and explicitly signaling to us that it can learn from its past epistemic indifference and ethical shortcomings. Perhaps in another decade, if it were to persevere with them, the APA could likewise appeal to online conferences as further evidence of its additional self-improvements and desire to welcome us.
I have, virtually by myself, organized 5 online editions of the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conference series, albeit with the technical assistance of an events team at the University of Oxford. I am in the midst of organizing the 6th edition of the series with a new organizing team that, among others, comprises philosophers at various institutions, including the host institution, University of Central Florida. This 6th edition of the conference will take place entirely online at the end of the month. Hence, I have significant experience in relevant respects.
In any case, my experiences with the organization of these online conferences have been entirely unlike any of the descriptions that have been offered by the APA and its spokespeople. Granted, the conferences that I have organized were much smaller, with fewer sessions, presenters, and other participants. Yet I cannot help but think that the APA has created an enormous amount of mystification about the putative complexities of organizing online conferences, fictionalizing about them rather than edifying about their material consequences and the benefits of them for a variety of constituencies.
Perhaps if the APA had hired a highly qualified and specialized technician to help produce the single online conference that it has thus far planned, many of the issues that it claims to have encountered would not have taken place or would have been easily resolved. For the past 5 editions of Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change, James Morris,** who is a freelance tech wizard and is now regarded as a valuable member of both our organizing team and community, has provided impeccable technical expertise for our conference, as well as offered accessibility information and explained Zoom functions to attendees in Zoom chats during the conferences, corresponded with presenters, and more. Jamie will of course do the tech for us at the end of the month. With Jamie’s oversight, our conferences run without a hitch. Ask any of the past participants.
**I would be happy to pass along Jamie’s contact information to anyone who wants to organize an online philosophy conference, workshop, or presentation conscientiously and diligently.
Read the original post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here: APA Tells Disabled Philosophers to F*ck Off (In a Manner of Speaking) – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
In the spirit of experimentation, maybe the organizers can try doing something about one of the more awkward features of APA meetings for scholars, namely, presenting a paper 6+ months or whatever after it was accepted. The time gap forces authors to put a kind of embargo on developing their paper. It’s odd. Few people seem to work on papers in the way this format forces them to do so.
This would be a good thing to do for sure! I don’t know how other professional societies organize things for their large meetings, but from various roles I’ve played on APA program committees, it’s very hard for me to imagine how to speed up the process.
I think it’s very reasonable for someone to actually present a substantially updated version of their paper, as long as they provide their commenter with the updated version with sufficient time before the session. This probably isn’t clearly enough conveyed in any of the description of the process.
As the Program Chair for the upcoming Pacific Divisional meeting, I am saddened by this decision. The original plan was to have 3 virtual meetings, and then evaluate. Instead, the experiment was cut short after a single meeting, without a broader discussion within APA membership (the format has many supporters, see this, this, this, and this).
Note that the original program chair for the 2025 Central tragically had to withdraw for health reasons, and the resulting organizational problems hampered the planning of the conference (though I still found it valuable). So that was far from a fair test of the format.
Submissions for the 2026 Pacific were lower than in previous years. But that made room for more invited sessions and novel formats. I am still excited for the 2026 Pacific, especially since it will facilitate Watch Parties that will reach undergraduate philosophy clubs and other groups. And I hope that APA leadership allows for an open, thoughtful discussion again after the 2026 Pacific.
Colin, I also found this odd: “The original plan was to have 3 virtual meetings, and then evaluate.” They have now made a decision after holding only one conference. 1. Things may improve (submissions/attendance) as people get used to it. Running three meetings online, as planned, might give a more accurate picture. 2. Ok, the majority might prefer in-person meetings. But are we all utiliatarians now? An online conference is just better for disabled people, for staff on precarious contracts (no funding) – and let’s not forget people who are trying to avoid “super-spreader” events because of their health conditions (e.g. immunosuppressed). Here we really see how the vulnerable are thrown under the bus.
There is something else to consider: the current Trump government. Many scholars outside of the US will be reluctant to travel there, because they might have to provide access to their phone/laptop. And their social media activity will be scrutinized. There is a real risk of being refused entry and sent back if you are critical of Trump online. An online conference would avoid such problems.