The American Philosophical Association (APA) is beginning an experiment in which one of its three annual divisional meetings is held online. This year, it’s the Central Division Meeting (starting February 20th) and the APA is facilitating novel forms of participation in it, such as “watch parties” for philosophy departments and philosophy clubs.
In the following guest post, Robert Pasnau, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and president of the Central Division of the APA, talks about the upcoming conference, including why it’s being held online, what it has to offer, and how to best take advantage of it.
This Year, the Central APA Comes to You
by Robert Pasnau
This February, the APA is embarking on an experiment, and we need your help.
In response to a petition, backed up by a survey of members, we are trying out a plan on which, each year, one of the three annual meetings goes online. This year it’s the Central, next year it’s the Pacific, then in 2027 it’s the Eastern. After that, we’ll see. Our first experiment happens in just a few weeks, over two Thursdays to Saturdays: February 20 to 22 and February 28 to March 1. The program is now online.
The first thing you can do to help is to participate in the conference.
Under the best of circumstances, it takes an enormous amount of effort to organize an APA meeting. A virtual conference is harder still, in part because of the technical challenges and in part just because we don’t have much practice with organizing them. The program committee and committee on virtual meetings, along with the APA staff and Central Division Secretary-Treasurer Chloe Armstrong, have worked very hard to make this happen. We got a lot of submissions, there are wonderful things on the program, and now we’re going to find out whether it works.
The motivations for going online are in part environmental (it was Philosophers for Sustainability that first petitioned us), and in part to provide better access for people who find it difficult or impossible to attend meetings in person. There are lots of reasons why an in-person meeting can be challenging for members of our profession, and so if these virtual meetings are a success it will be a real boon to many of our colleagues who are unable to enjoy the privilege of meeting in person.
But will it work? We’re fairly confident about the technology, but what we don’t know is whether people will show up in the way they do for ordinary meetings. Will people come to talks other than their own? Will they take advantage of the various special events on offer? In short, will the philosophy community come together?
To participate fully, you must register in the usual way. (It turns out virtual conferences are as expensive to run as in-person conferences.) But we’ve created some opportunities for folk to participate without registering. Some of the events on the program are free and open to anyone, such as a special plenary session featuring Kluge Prize winner Kwame Anthony Appiah. Keep an eye out for communications from the APA on how to participate in these public sessions. Other events, including some of the most high-profile events—the Dewey Lecture, several book symposia, and my own Presidential Address—are part of the “watch-party” plan. Under that plan, a department (or philosophy club or other group) pays a small fee to register for watch-party access and then gets a license to screen these selected events in front of an audience.
So here is a second way to help: get your department to organize watch parties for some of the main events. And, if there are people in your department who are on the program, invite them to give their presentations in front of a local audience (while also on camera). That’s in fact what I’ll be doing in Boulder, live-streaming my address in front of students and colleagues. It will take this experiment to a new level if we each make our own department a remote satellite for the main online event.
Finally, you can help by giving us feedback, either right now or after the fact, about how we can make these online conferences better in the years ahead. Although going online is in some respects inevitably worse, it also offers opportunities to do things that cannot be done in person. We’ve taken a first stab at realizing this potential, but there’s doubtless much more than can be done. Submit your feedback by taking the evaluation survey that will be distributed after the meeting, or send us your ideas at [email protected].
I wonder if others experience this psychological phenomenon re: online conferences. When I go to an in person conference, I obviously cannot engage very much with other professional duties (including teaching) nor can I fulfill my usual family obligations. I feel exempted from those duties while I’m gone. With online conferences, I don’t feel exempted. For instance, I feel it would be wrong to get someone to cover my teaching so I can attend a session that conflicts with my class or opt out of taking my kids to a doctor’s appointment. Therefore, I am apt to attend fewer sessions and to generally less engaged when a conference is online. (Also, time differences can be an issue.)
Absolutely. No way my family is going to leave me alone so I can listen to debates about substance ontology.
For me, and I imagine many others, childcare responsibilities make it very hard to travel to a multi-day conference, so as nice as it might sound to be freed from my ordinary obligations to do just philosophy for a few days, it’s not really in the cards. So, sure, you’re right that my responsibilities will permit me to attend only some sessions, but some is better than none!
Cindy
You are the voice of reason. It is a very sad development in professional philosophy in America. I find on-line “meetings” really taxing. It is obvious that many people are multi-tasking … grading papers, checking emails, perhaps refereeing a paper, disciplining their children, etc. during these meetings. It is a really low grade experience. Of course there is all sorts of bad behavior at in person conferences as well. But it is not so pervasive. Also, often when one tries to partcipate in an on-line talk or meeting, one has to leave to attend to things like child-care, a department meeting, etc., that others expect you to be at given that the meeting is “ONLY” an on-line meeting.
People and the APA are welcome to have these events, but they should not sell them as regular conferences. The current entering cohort into the profession have a grim future ahead of themselves … their jobs will be far worst than previous generations because of things like on-line conferences.
Most people will say that online conferences are worse than in-person conferences, but better than no conferences. If there are some people for whom in-person conferences just aren’t an option, then it seems like a good thing that online conferences are, even if the rest of us give up some in-person conferences to allow there to be some online conferences.
I definitely wouldn’t want all conferences to be online.
Stop having pronouns as a required field for registration.
What is the objection to having pronouns for an online conference? You can enter the usual pronouns people use for you (or your preferred ones). Even if you don’t like people having preferred pronouns, it is a registration detail that causes you no inconvenience while being beneficial for others. In addition, it can be useful for people names from different cultures that either you cannot identify the usual gender or that are not gendered. When cameras are off, it can be hard to know how to refer to people.
Also, there is an option for “None (do not show on badge)”.
But, hey, let’s not let our an ounce of rational thought get in the way of our cultural grievances.
It’s not really a conference at all. You don’t interact with others during sessions the same way, and you don’t have any impromptu conversations in the hallways or in the bar. Jobseekers can’t network. Why not just mail everyone the papers? Don’t pretend it’s a conference if everyone is still at home.
No true Scotsman…
That’s not a no true Scotsman. A *true* no true Scotsman would be uttered by a true Scotsman, no?
What am I learning from the these comments is that the new conference* format is better for some members and worse for others compared to the standard format. Wait: maybe that’s why the APA is doing it!
*Or rather: “conference” if you have strong intuitions about the essence of conferences.
> It turns out virtual conferences are as expensive to run as in-person conferences.
I still can’t get my mind around this. Like, really? Hotels are ridiculously expensive, and overcharge every step of the way. Am I really to understand that even getting rid of all those expenses – all the absurd ‘technology’ costs, multi-hundred dollar urns of coffee, etc. – the basic cost still remains the same? Who’s getting rich off this if not the hotels?
I would love to see a BOTE estimation of the costs of the virtual conference versus the non-virtual conference.
Cecil: I’m not the best person to answer this, but I’ll try. The short answer is that the claim you quoted was about how much it costs the APA to host a conference (which translates to registration fee costs).
In terms of the work an APA has to do, it’s basically the same. People still has to coordinate the program committee, referee papers, and then sort out the schedule. Some of that is done by volunteers, but much of it by paid APA staff.
With virtual conferences, there are additional costs for technology. Of course, technology costs aren’t nearly as much as renting a whole hotel conference center. But (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong about this), the conference rooms those are partly paid through meeting participants who book rooms at the hotel.
So that’s why registration fees aren’t drastically different. But virtual conferences are much cheaper for participants overall, since they don’t have to book travel or accommodations.
To be clear: nobody I know advocates for getting rid of in-person APAs. But having regular virtual ones in the mix brings some real benefits to a lot of people.
Hotels don’t exactly “get rich” off conferences either. Sure, they’re a profitable line of business, like grocery stores and airlines and paper mills. But they don’t have unusually large profit margins – it turns out that operating real estate, and regularly cleaning and maintaining and staffing it, is fairly expensive.
I have co-organized (with Jonathan Wolff) 5 editions of the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conference, which is an entirely online conference. It would be difficult to convey how vital and cherished this conference is to disabled philosophers (and our allies) who are routinely excluded from in-person conferences. Due in large part to their online format, the conference(s) provide a venue for disabled philosophers to showcase their research in a scholarly setting that is uniquely devoid of ableism and hostility toward them. Indeed, the online conference format in general should be recognized as a desegregating mechanism. Today’s online conference might be aptly regarded as akin to yesterday’s lunch-counter.
In this regard, in 2022, I wrote an important post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY about the ableism that conditions criticisms of Zoom. You can find the post here: About the Ableism that Conditions Your Criticisms of Zoom – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
In the post, I address (and, to my satisfaction, undermine) a number of the critical musings that Cindy Stark has mentioned. In any case, I was surprised to read some of her remarks which suggest that the particular objections to online conferences that she raises are somehow “new” and that they have not been widely and repeatedly debated, especially on this blog.