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Which is why the prices of these conferences—especially around registration fees—is so jarring. I know many young scholars who go into debt to attend academic conferences for an interview, or to meet a potential advisor. And at the end what they went for may or may not play out.
And, I want to be clear, these costs are just for attending the conference. They don’t include the time you might need to take off from your other job, the child care costs, or any other expenses/lost income back home that facilitates your attending the conference.
How can we either make it so that conferences aren’t so pivotal for determining someone’s future prospects relative to interviews/etc. and/or set up funds to assist younger scholars—especially contingent faculty and PhD workers? Because right now, there is inequity.
I attend a conferences because I get them paid for by fellowships. But what happens to the hundred other PhD workers/contingent faculty who don’t have access to these limited fellowships? Justice is not that I’m in the space, it’s that we *all* have access to the space.
I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t raise this issue and should instead suck it up and just put it on a credit card and go to the conference. But why? Why are we offering individualist solutions revolving around debt for a *systemic* issue.
The academy was built to be exclusionary, and we collectively haven’t done enough work to name and analyze that. It was created for white men with wealth/status. How are the exorbitant costs of conferences *which are central to the profession* a vestige of that?
As academics our critical lens can’t only be applied to structures outside the academy. We must also examine our history and the ways power shaped systems that continue today.
Changing systems requires systemic analysis. And it requires being honest about what we have.
Changing systems requires systemic analysis. And it requires being honest about what we have.
