News from the Collective

Letters from the Volcano is an experimental zine conceived by Franco “Bifo” Berardi and developed by Mitra Azar, Hugo Sir, and a small group of agitators from the four corners of the world. LAVA emerged from a desire to understand the recent wave of social movements starting in autumn of 2019. These movements involved a number of people from countries with very different sociopolitical and cultural conditions who nevertheless displayed certain common dispositions: the desire to break free from the psychic and economic impoverishment ingrained into surveillance-oriented computational neo-liberalism, and strategies developed both offline and online towards the achievement of this goal.

LAVA believes that the inevitable is always superseded by the unpredictable.

Issue #1 of LAVA – Letters from the Volcano, entitled “Be Water,” can be read here

Until the beginning of 2020 it seemed that the volcanic explosion in the form of the unpredictable and simultaneous appearance of radical and direct forms of resistance was taking over the global political scene. Then, all of a sudden, this human-unpredictable was replaced by a nonhuman-unpredictable: the virus COVID-19. The human lava was swept away by a nonhuman lava, and the explosion of the volcano turned inward, imploding.

The virus COVID-19 has taken over the stage of human unrest and has opened the door for a meltdown of the global capitalist economy. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic opens space for rethinking politics from scratch: on the one hand, it allows a profound questioning of the structural dysfunction of global capitalism; on the other, it risks turning the cadaver of capitalism into a zombified techno-fascist limbo of total surveillance, ultimately killing civil society. This political conundrum will be the center of issue #2 of LAVA – Letters from the Volcano, entitled “Be Earth.” The forthcoming issue will deal with nonhuman agents such as COVID-19, melting ice, pollution, and the nonhuman forces that more and more turn into political vectors in ways that, paradoxically, go beyond politics.

By Terry Anderson; edited by Lucy Barnes

In this post I discuss the challenges and the opportunities associated with virtual conferences.  Despite the attempts to make parallel experiences both on site and online, it is obvious to almost all attendees that a virtual conference is not the same as attending in person—and often not the first choice.

But is it good enough?

Does it meet needs that cannot be met face-to-face?  Does it allow exposure to online technologies that themselves become meaningful learning experiences?  And of course, the driving question for distance educators is: does it expand and make easier access to learning for everyone?

The costs of in-person conferences

The costs of travel are considerable: not only the environmental costs of airplane travel, ground transportation to conference venues, the cost of heating and servicing hotels and conference meeting rooms—but the economic cost too.

In 2010, we attempted to quantify these costs for a medium-sized conference by noting the distances that would be travelled by the 194 delegates to a scholarly conference headquartered in London, England. Having obtained the locations of each delegate we calculated the air and ground transportation for all participants and estimated the hotel and conference facility costs.

The average delegate saved $2,162 (US) and delegates who would have come by airplane saved 2.21 tonnes CO2 of carbon emissions.

To put this into perspective the global average consumption in 2005 was 4.51 tonnes. Thus a single conference would have consumed nearly half of the global annual consumption and much higher than the average annual consumption in many developing countries.  The cost for attendees to the virtual conference was $69 (US), a 3000% reduction in cost of attending face-to-face.

There is no question that virtual conferences save on the production of greenhouse gases and save delegates thousands of dollars.

Successful econference techniques

One of the challenges of virtual conferences is to engender the type of informal and often spontaneous interactions that can and do occur at face-to-face conferences – most often before or after scheduled presentations. For many, these networking opportunities are as valuable as the formal sessions themselves.

In an attempt to gain some of these informal benefits, Fraser, et al. (2017) presented a model for regional hubs at which delegates gather to attend both online and face-to-face sessions.[1] This can drastically reduce travel costs, with only a slight reduction in the diversity of potential contacts and of course also decreases the appeal of tourist, family or other personal benefits of expensive travel.

Tools

In recent years, as online communication becomes ubiquitous, delegates have considerable experience with types of tools normally used to host virtual conferences, through social media, email, video conferencing, immersive environments or other mediated communications. Thus, the potential for valued spontaneous and planned communications increases with the population’s network literacy.

Virtual conferences have tried a variety of mediated techniques to engender this type of spontaneous networking. These often include profiles, “liking” and other techniques used on social networks, and non-programmed virtual spaces that support real time interaction. Participation in conferences also builds technological competence among participants.

Timescales

A virtual conference is distinguished from ongoing, online communities of practice because it is time limited. Typically, a virtual conference runs over 2-3 days, but unlike its face-to-face comparator, participants are unlikely to all be in the same time zone. Thus, organizers have experimented with 24-hour conferences and of course the asynchronous components of most conferences allow participation around the clock.

Rather than merely attempting to mimic face-to-face conferences, organizers are experimenting with digital tools that promise to enhance communication beyond that supported face-to-face. One of the most obvious benefits is the digital record that remains, enabling the conference – or sections of it – to be repurposed for future events, either face-to-face or virtual.  Besides the recording of presentations, conference organizers have used threaded audio discussions allowing for asynchronous voice and video sharing.

The virtual conference also supports the intervention of technologies such as translation, automatic transcription, visual and audio enhancement and other technologies that are emerging in the online world.

More recently, we have seen conferences that are housed in virtual worlds providing opportunities for simultaneous experience of a variety of virtual environments and technologies designed to increase participants’ telepresence. Julie Santy, Mary Beadle and Yvonne Needhamhave noted the positive impact of conferences that bring together professionals from related, but often siloed knowledge bases and limited inter-professional interactions.

As these advantages grow, we may yet see a day when face-to-face seems a too ineffective way to communicate – in addition to being environmentally unsustainable.

Uptake

So, what holds adoption up?

As a graduate student I undertook a small study among medical doctors working in small communities in Northern Ontario. My intent was to determine the demand and the barriers to the compulsory professional development for medical doctors that could be delivered at a distance.

When I queried these doctors about the disadvantages associated with attending professional development activities in large urban centres that are located in some cases thousands of kilometers from their homes, I heard a variety of concerns. Doctors would have to leave their families and their practices, arrange for substitutes, travel by car to airports, stay in strange hotel rooms, listen to potentially boring talks and eat restaurant food for days.

When I asked about the contrasting advantages, I heard that the doctors looked forward to getting away from their family and patients, travelling to far away cities, staying in hotel rooms, eating fine restaurant food, and listening to inspiring talks. These same characterises are both positive and negative: the same reasons both encourage and discourage adoption of virtual conferences.

Conferences have become an established and often subsidized means for participants to travel, to extend their visit with tourist activities, to bring family members along on a holiday and to enjoy social networking activities with persons of kindred interest.  Virtual conferences are limited in their support of any of these characteristics. Thus, until established social, employment and taxation practices are changed (for example tax write offs and employer subsidy of face-to-face conference attendance), we will continue to see virtual conferences play a secondary role to their face-to-face cousins.

But just as these socially constructed obstacles to virtual conference adoption are large, they are fragile. We can expect improvements in the technologies used to support conferences, increase networked literacy amongst both participants and presenters and increasing pressure to restrain professional development costs – both financial and ecological.

Virtual conferences are not the same as face-to-face conferences. In many ways they are far more cost-effective and environmentally efficient. Moreover, in many ways they are good enough to ensure quality learning, professional development and network exposure. We should remember as Voltaire said in 1770, the “best is the enemy of the good.”

This series of blog posts is drawn from Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene edited by Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier, forthcoming with Open Book Publishers. Explore the other posts here.

[1] Hannah Fraser, and others., ‘The Value of Virtual Conferencing for Ecology and Conservation’, Conservation Biology, 31.3 (2017), 540-546.

By Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier and Chelsea Miya; edited by Lucy Barnes

Motivations: why do we have academic conferences?

Universities and colleges are complex environments with a range of stakeholders who influence aspects of academic conferences. This includes how they are organized, conducted, and located, and whether the conferences happens at all. While there are some major overlaps, the motivations for organizing and hosting conferences can be quite different for different groups.

Early career academics, like graduate students and pre-tenure professors, might need to build their research networks, to establish their place in the field and to enable access to leading researchers in their fields. Many mid-career professors seek to broaden their research networks, build on their reputations, and take leadership roles in journals and society conferences.

Some researchers have described the key motivations for academics to attend conferences to be: opportunities for social networking, keeping current in research areas, pressure to participate in an internationalized workforce, and building social capital.

University administrators might see conferences as venues for recruiting potential students and staff, building capacity in current students and staff, fostering research collaborations, building prestige for the host institution, and generating conference tourism revenue. Similarly, external stakeholders like business and political leaders, organizations and governments (civic, regional and national), might see conferences as venues for fostering research collaborations, building prestige for their jurisdiction, generating tourism revenue, and building capacity in current staff.

Universities must also attend to financial and reputational issues related to conferences. Over the last several decades, with more financial pressure on core funding based on traditional teaching and research activities, universities in North America have turned more to auxiliary service activities like conference hosting to bolster financial resources.

Meanwhile academic reputation—which can be boosted by hosting conferences—is the largest single factor in the overall ranking metrics for universities. The importance of conferences at an organizational level is illustrated by the fact that even universities facing financial challenges will often offer funding for academic staff to participate in conferences.

The importance of presence

Looking at the core reasons why academics participate in conferences, it is evident that the focus is on presence. On an individual level, conferences serve a diverse range of uses for academics because knowledge work “involves communication among loosely structured networks and communities of people, and understanding it involves identifying the social practices and relationships that are operative in a particular context.”[1] International travel has become an important aspect of building and maintaining social capital for academics.

A very pragmatic reason for academics to attend conferences is knowledge mobilization. Conferences can serve as spaces where relevant knowledge can be surveyed through shared presence in a scholarly community environment. Likewise, conferences are a way to promote new research and to connect it with what others are doing.

Ultimately, the key motivations for academic conferences include the creation of spaces for social presence, cognitive presence, and access to leadership presence. Conferences are also important spaces where the agenda of research fields are negotiated.

Econferences: Affordances and Constraints

Technological

The speed of travel and flow of information have been among the most important technological affordances supporting research conferences. In particular, aviation has created opportunities for academics in wealthier countries with access to travel funds from research grants and institutional professional development funds.

For individuals in other parts of the world the cost of travelling to distant conferences is often prohibitive, as the cost of airfare to a major conference in Europe or North America can be greater than the average annual income in developing countries. This has created a situation where researchers who have the funds to travel, which usually means researchers in the Global North, have disproportionate international visibility.

The rich travel more and those without funding struggle to be heard.

Accessibility

There are physical, political, and social constraints to participating in traditional f2f conferences which rely on physically moving all the individuals to a single location. Physical barriers include issues like disability; political constraints are, for example, situations where a conference is hosted in a country which restricts visas for visitors from other parts of the world; social barriers might include issues like family care.

Over the last 50 years, there has been an exponential growth in technologies that accelerate the movement of information while simultaneously reducing the financial cost of using those technologies. However, there are significant populations in all parts of the world who have very limited access to computing devices and infrastructure, as well as important technological constraints and challenges for econferencing, including maintaining acceptable levels of video and audio stream quality.

Temporal

Time limits give an ephemeral immediacy to conferences. Conferences are designed to focus attention, and have people examine something together for a limited period of time. In the academic milieu, this distinguishes conferences from research groupings, online email lists, and other longer-term working collaborations.

Trade-offs are embedded in time constraints. For example, if a researcher wants to attend a conference, they might have to travel for a day or more to get there. In the same way, when a group of academics are brought together to focus on a particular issue at a conference, they are by definition not focusing on other areas of their own research.

A constraint of traditional f2f conferences is that participants must return to their home institutions, therefore ending the conference dialogue (and spending time travelling). Many scholars agree that online conferencing has an immediate affordance of allowing asynchronous dialogue relatively unconstrained by time.

Environmental

Mitigating climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the current era. Air travel is a significant contributor to climate change, and one of the largest discretionary aspects of an individual’s CO2 footprint.

As discussed above, academics can influence change at many levels of conference culture, as participants, attendees, keynote speakers, funders and conference organizers. In short, academics have both an opportunity and a responsibility to make personal and organizational choices that make sustainable conferencing more broadly available.

In the following posts, Terry Anderson, Nick Byrd and Geoffrey Rockwell et al. share concrete examples of how to create and run econferences across a range of disciplines. These studies highlight the benefits and challenges of moving academic gatherings online, and it is the authors’ hope that the academic community can learn from their findings to build capacity for future econferencing initiatives.

Econferences can improve accessibility, lower cost, and significantly reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, it can prove difficult for virtual gatherings to replicate the benefits of face-to-face interaction. Will we find that hybrid conferences, which combine face-to-face and virtual conferencing, help us bridge this gap?

This series of blog posts is drawn from Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene edited by Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier, forthcoming with Open Book Publishers. Explore the other posts here.

[1] J. C. Thomas, Kellogg, W. A., and Erickson, T., ‘The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management’, IBM Systems Journal, 40.4 (2001), p. 868.

This series of blog posts are drawn from Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene edited by Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier, forthcoming with Open Book Publishers.

Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene asks what it means to 'do research' sustainably, and one of the book’s central topics is how to stage successful conferences online. One consequence of the global pandemic we are all currently facing has been a wave of cancellations of academic conferences, and we are all having to learn how to do more remotely, now and for the foreseeable future. Because of this urgent new situation, the authors wanted to make relevant chapters publicly available immediately. This series of blog posts is based on some of those chapters, and the peer-reviewed manuscript versions of two case-study chapters can be freely accessed via the University of Alberta repository, here and here.

By Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier and Chelsea Miya; edited by Lucy Barnes

In 2019, a record number of private jets landed in Davos, Switzerland for a climate talk hosted by the World Economic Forum. The scale of the event, with an estimated 1,500 jets used to transport participants there and back, was unusual. Yet, it speaks to a wider problem within the research community. Even as colleges and universities take steps to green their campuses, the amount of air travel that academics engage in continues to rise.

Our flying is unsustainable—all the more so in the current COVID19 era, which has made travel all but impossible for the foreseeable future—and yet research depends on open and timely communication of ideas, methods and results. How then can we adapt our conferencing practices to preserve their communicative value while reducing the need to fly so often?

To answer this question, we need to understand more about the attraction of traditional academic conferences: how do they function, and what do they offer researchers?

Terminology

Econference

We will use the term econference to describe the act of conferencing via digital media.[1] It seems very possible that the term econference will evolve into common use at some point in the near future, similar to the evolution of terms like e-books, email, e-transfer and e-research.

It’s also more nuanced: the “e” invokes the dual electronic and environmental dynamics of the medium.

Our definition of econference is adapted from the one put forth by Anderson and Anderson to describe ‘online conference’ and reads as follows:

An [econference] is a structured, time-delineated […] event that is organized and attended on the Internet by a distributed population of presenters and participants who interact synchronously and/or asynchronously by using online communication and collaboration tools.

Hybrid conference

A hybrid conference combines online and face-to-face (f2f) communication and collaboration. As will be discussed in the AtW case study, the hybrid model may provide a key opportunity for conference organizers to strategically balance the core motivations of f2f social networking with the mitigation of environmental impact by using digital platforms to replace travel where possible.

Posts in this series

• What Do Conferences Do—and Can Econferences Replace Them? by Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier and Chelsea Miya
• Are Virtual Conferences Good Enough? by Terry Anderson
• Time Management and Continuous Partial Attention by Terry Anderson
• Successful Econferences: Examples and Case Studies by Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier, Chelsea Miya, Terry Anderson and Nick Byrd

[1] There are several other terms currently used: web conference, online conference, virtual conference. The problem with the phrase web conference is that it is also often used to describe one-to-one discussions online, or face-to-face (f2f) conferences that take the internet for their subject. Both online conference and virtual conference are somewhat cumbersome when used as search terms and in metadata.

We are reposting this anonymous open letter meant to address Dutch cultural organisations, institutions of education and research, and government bodies. Its goal is to raise concerns regarding freelance and remote work during the COVID-19 emergency. Feel free to circulate, appropriate and adapt this text. Here’s the source: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/N+YV5BXQdELU0Z2RZLIuwLkH3My2GNNk9SsdwJ51Gd0/

We are freelancers working in schools, universities, art academies, museums and cultural organisations. Many of us are hired as freelancers not because we asked for it, but because this has become the default in the Netherlands. Coronavirus is now showing us the limits of freelancing. Precarity is becoming even more apparent. Often, we have regular and continuous labor relationships with our institutions: we are like employees, however we lack the same leverage and safety. We are part and parcel of the organisations we work for. We don’t deliver a service to these institutions, we are these institutions. The fictitious autonomy that was projected on us came out of the 2008 financial crisis, where budgets for education and culture were slashed, never to recover despite 10 years of significant economic growth. Precarity has been there for a long time, now it is just more visible.

As the pandemic escalates, strict countermeasures are introduced. Many events are cancelled while schools, universities and museums are now closed. While unavoidable and necessary, these measures also result in a significant loss of income for anyone working under such precarious conditions. Now these conditions are clearly revealed. And we shouldn’t be the ones paying for it.

For ZZP’ers (self-employed), the pandemic falls under category of “business risk”[1]. Well, fuck that. Cultural work is not our “business”. We didn’t choose to be a business, we never asked for the risk, so it shouldn’t be offloaded on us. This shift of structural responsibility to the individual is a neoliberal favourite and we should expose it for the fraud that it is.

As much as possible, we are asked to organise our work to be carried out remotely, while facing the anxiety and the mental load provoked by the current state of exception. We are asked to actively dedicate extra time and energy to keep things running during the emergency. But we need some guarantees from the cultural organisations and institutions we work for, and from the government.

We demand cultural organisations & art academies:

• to accommodate and devise solutions to allow remote work or work from home, allowing for truly flexible ways to deal with the consequences of the pandemic (e.g. taking care of the elderly and kids). At the same time, performing remote work shouldn’t be the condition to be paid for a previously agreed plan.
• to maintain agreements with the staff even if events, classes and lectures are cancelled or postponed. To make sure that despite any emergency measure, cultural workers are paid unconditionally.
• to postpone lectures, classes and events only in agreement with the freelancer, as they might have other commitments.
• to ensure that any measures deployed in this moment of crisis are not there to stay. e.g. online classes are a temporary solution to a measure where people are asked to stay home; when universities reopen, so too should normal classes.
• to agree to accommodate these demands in written, official form.

When discussing remote work, we demand the cultural organisations & art academies:

• to not consider it as the first concern right now.
• to not see remote work as a condition for teachers to be paid.
• to not make remote work mandatory for both teachers and students.
• to consider the time students and staff need to spend with household members these days.
• to not offload the research and testing of methods and tools for remote work solutions onto individual workers.
• to keep in mind that predatory Big-tech industries will instrumentalise this crisis for their own gain. The current crisis shows our dependence on digital infrastructures. In order not to become fully dependent on them, it is important to talk about the alternatives to these offers which uncritically promote technology as a solution to everything. Neither students nor teachers should be required to open social media accounts or install software against their own will.
• to ensure that any measures deployed are temporary.

If remote work is being organised, we demand:

• to take into account the home situation of both students and staff, to not be blinded by the illusion that everyone can work and concentrate at home. This situation will be increasingly difficult for families to handle as more and more private and public locations, spaces, outlets, venues, shop, schools will be closing. Likewise, many may contract the virus or take care of someone who has contracted it.
• to not impose synchronous work. Students and staff might not be able to show up at a specific time for anything, as they might have to prioritize their days differently. At the same time, asynchronicity shouldn’t mean that the workday exceeds the agreed boundaries. Bottom-up and considerate self-organisation should be prioritised over top-down managerial plans.
• to not forget that internet connection is unstable and at times unavailable for some, which means that personal data-bundles need to be used. Also, to not forget how frustrating and counter-productive it can be to talk over a stuttering video connection.
• to acknowledge the circumstances and turn remote work into an exercise of collective care taking for all. Sometimes this means to cancel classes, decrease workload and allow disconnection. This is more important than the continuation of the routine.

We demand the government:

• to defer the payment of mortgages installments for unprotected cultural workers and precarious workers in general. This is already happening in Italy[2].
• to support freelancers and students (who are often working on the side to pay their studies) with a “pandemic allowance” to still be able to afford the minimum requirements for stable living (rent, food, etc).

These demands do not only concern the welfare of cultural workers, but they are meant to preserve the quality of education and the cultural sector in the long run. What maintains these fields alive is the trust among the parties involved. Ignoring these demands means eroding that trust and therefore contributing to more atomised and individualised cultural organisations.

Some steps in the direction of our demands are already being taken: a majority in the House of Representatives proposed “a support package for the cultural sector” because of the corona crisis.[3] The Kunstenbond opened a website where freelancers in the cultural and creative sector can report their cancellations due to the corona virus.[4]

As previously mentioned, the current emergency has only made more apparent the precarity inherent in the education and cultural sector, where structural risk is often disproportionately shouldered by the individual. If the limits of such a system were not already apparent, this moment of crisis should allow us to reconsider it and foster the struggle against the flexibilization of working conditions with renewed urgency.

Notes

[1]: https://www.kunstenbond.nl/home/339/corona-virus-leidraad-voor-zelfstandigen-in-cultuursector
[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/italy-readies-crisis-plan-that-includes-mortgage-deferrals-2020-03-10
[3]: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/13/kamer-steunpakket-nodig-voor-culturele-sector-a3993692
[4]: https://www.kunstenbond.nl/home/338/corona-virus-kunstenbond-wil-financiele-steun-voor-zelfstandigen