Is the end of hybrid conferences arriving just as they have been invented?
I assumed that in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shifts to more people working remotely and from home, that academic conferences would not think twice about embracing hybrid forms of meeting even as academics begin to travel again. Well, some are thinking twice about this and reverting to in-person conferences. The rationales: hybrid conferencing is expensive, online participants do not hang around before and after their panels, and in-person events build stronger communities of scholars. However, the costs of a shift to only in-person conferences would force more people to travel long distances, and reduce international participation, particularly from low-income countries. Online access has enabled more meetings and more international and even more local participation. But does it clash with the business model of academic conferences?
These questions reminded me of the way we used to conference, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a graduate student in political science. We attended conferences regularly, but most often in local or regional conferences. For example, I was in graduate school in Buffalo, New York. My graduate school colleagues would submit papers and attend the Midwest Political Science Association Conference. It was founded in 1939, but is still going strong, organizing its 81st Annual Meeting in a hybrid format (good for them). The Midwest conference would almost always be in Chicago so easily reached by car, trains, or coaches. Its composition was undoubtedly more biased toward the local universities, but they had sufficient scale to bring many academics together. I’ll return to this in a moment.
Since the 1970s, however, the thrust of most associations in the US was to internationalize. The American Political Science Association (APSA) had the highest reputation in the US, but there was also an “International Political Science Association” (IPSA) existed. In the 1970s, it was viewed as less prestigious than the APSA. But American academic associations pressed to become more international, less ethnocentric. So new conferences tended to be call the “international” association of whatever discipline, such as the International Communication Association (ICA). Its name was coined in 1969, to new name for what was the National Society for the Study of Communication (NSSC), founded in 1950, with rise of media and communication studies after the second world war (Weaver 1977). ICA now has over 5,000 members from over 80 countries. Internationalization worked.
ICA like many other international associations move their conferences around the globe each year to ‘walk the talk’ of being international. To justify travel around the world to an international conference, the associations often extended their meetings to more days, often preceded and followed by side events. Pre-COVID-19, they were going well. I didn’t hear many seriously questioning them, given relatively cheap airfares and the budgets universities devoted to supporting travel and rewarding faculty for presenting at conferences.
Is this model sustainable? As travel costs have risen, and hybrid forms of participation have become widely available, do they even make sense? Today, any academic unit or association can organize a talk or panel that can be open and accessible online for an international audience. Key speakers can be beamed into a local university department to speak with their faculty and students. So when I hear major international associations considering the value of not providing online access, it suggests that I am not seeing the picture from the viewpoint of the associations. Are they losing money, seeing less quality, working harder to gain attendance? Is it sustainable to continue to grow the internationalization of associations? Is it even desirable given their carbon footprints? Are there other options?
For example, might a return to more local and regional associations and conferences be desirable? This might provide the in-person community building and stimulation that is inevitably more difficult to cultivate online but reduce travel and costs to universities and academics. But unlike in the 1960s and 1970s, or before, it is now possible to bring selected international colleagues into speak or attend local and regional conferences, perhaps countering the more ethnocentric biases of earlier generations. Happy to hear others’ views on these issues.
References
Weaver, C.H. (1977). A history of the International Communication Association (L.M. Brown, ed.). In B.D. Ruben (Ed.), Communication yearbook (pp. 607-618). New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Books.