Speakers
Description
The crisis occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic should give rise to major questions about our collective futures as academics, no matter what our disciplines. The cancellation of many in person academic conferences has been accompanied by a flourishing of online events organised through various platforms. Disability rights groups point out that they have demanded more accessible events over many decades and been told it would be too difficult to broaden access through virtual means. Almost overnight, a way was found to work online. The pandemic has highlighted fundamental assumptions about research distribution and exchange. It should cause us to ask how knowledge is produced now and how it could be produced in the future. We now see more clearly than before that long-distance travel leads to ‘collateral’ intellectual and ecological damage which can no longer be ignored and which we can no longer accept as simply ’collateral’. It is in fact central to how we have worked so far. New practices of knowledge production and dissemination are urgently needed. In our talk we will discuss how the conference model of academia in which usually northern-based scholars have the opportunity to showcase their work at numerous national and international meetings has been based on exclusion. It relies on economic surpluses to fund all the globetrotting. It leads to ecological degradation. It is driven by socio-economic, class, race and gender divides. The hypermobility of scholars in the Global North must now be challenged. We need to look hard at our paradigms of knowledge production and call into question how structures in the university sector have intensified global inequalities.
