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Can we talk about conferences for a second?
If you are running or organizing a conference, and you don't get sufficient responses to your call for papers (CFP), then how about this idea:
CANCEL THE FUCKING CONFERENCE.
1) There is a pandemic right now, so no one is going to travel for conferences, nor should they. If you haven't cottoned on to the idea that you need to cancel your in-person conference if you intended for it to happen anytime in the next 12 months, well, let me help you out:
CANCEL THE FUCKING CONFERENCE.
2) No one wants to attend a virtual conference. No one. If they say they do, then they are lying.
The only thing worse than attending a live in-person conference is staring for hours and hours and days and days into Zoom or whatever glitchy garbage proprietary platform you contract to run your virtual conference. So, some advice about that:
CANCEL THE FUCKING CONFERENCE.
3) Conference registration fees are extortionate under normal circumstances. But hundreds or a thousand or more dollars for a virtual conference?
Get. Fucked.
Either make registration free or...
Get. Fucked.
Either make registration free or...
CANCEL THE FUCKING CONFERENCE.
4) So, no one is responding to your CFP, huh? Maybe you should keep pushing the deadline back over and over again and spam a variety of list-servs with about that? Oh, no. Wait. You shouldn't. You should...
CANCEL THE FUCKING CONFERENCE.
Also, I'm not going to tag specific organizations because it's basically all of them doing this right now. And, honestly, if you know me at all, you can figure out which ones I'm talking about pretty easily.
I'm hoping that maybe this pandemic will potentially rid us of professional organization meetings and maybe even professional organizations since they mostly seem to be tools through which white supremacist power structures within the academy are replicated. So...
