Dear SPEP colleagues,
For environmental and accessibility as well as financial reasons, we would like to solicit your thoughts on a proposal to experiment with a rotation of one virtual conference every fourth year (with the first virtual conference in fall 2025). While we are very well aware of the value of an in-person meeting, our reasons for suggesting this are many:
- There is clearly a negative environmental impact from air travel. This is a reason why many professional societies, including the APA, are experimenting with a virtual conference as part of their conference scheduling.
- It has become increasingly expensive to travel to our annual conference, and having a virtual conference every fourth year would allow for greater attendance and participation from underfunded colleagues and graduate students.
- In-person events organized at large convention hotels and universities are less accessible for a wide range of philosophers: those with certain disabilities (some of which are incompatible with travel and others which make it substantially difficult and/or intermittently impossible), those who are neurodiverse in ways that conflict with the intensive social activity built into the structure of academic conferences (both in session and out), people with any number of caring responsibilities for family members and intimate partners, and people who cohabitate with others who are immunocompromised, just to list a few examples.
- It has also become increasingly expensive to host and organize a meeting. The virtual SPEP conference in 2021 was financially very advantageous for SPEP, with very high registration and relatively low cost for the virtual platform (which everyone seems to think was very successful) at the 2021 meeting. Organizing an “every fourth year” virtual conference could increase SPEP’s assets to the point where the society could help underwrite the costs of meetings in an “expensive” city like New York City or Chicago, or could help us to support local hosts who don’t have the institutional support to cover the $15,000-$30,000 that local hosts are currently expected to provide in order to host a meeting.
We are cognizant of what is lost with a virtual meeting in terms of renewing friendships, networking with colleagues, meeting with publishers, and the like. But we think the benefits of considering a virtual conference every fourth year would be in the best interest of our society. We are interested in hearing from the membership about whether they would support experimenting with a virtual conference every fourth year. Please post your comments below or email them to any member of the SPEP Executive Committee.
The SPEP Executive Committee
Please leave your comments on this proposal below.