Events & Academic Activities — should we do this virtually?
We are in uncertain times. It appears that the pandemic is tearing up the rule book and many people are left scrabbling with what to do. Time passes and opportunities fall through our fingertips. To fill the void, virtual coffee meetings and discussions abound.
As we sit apart, we are urged to be together often in a virtual sense. Semi-synchronous discussions apparently create an aura of normalcy, while in our new reality we are engulfed in chaos.
In these times of deep and disturbing uncertainty, people are clamouring to create new activities, events, and more. We hope to fill the void and dampen the shock of our current situation.
Let’s acknowledge things, while people say “this is the new normal”, perhaps we should acknowledge that the status quo is entirely abnormal.
We have been developing our lives, step by step, usually in a gradual fashion with some certainty, or collective experience of what might work and be successful. The current world does not occupy the timeline we envisaged, and at present we remain in shock at the schism of our day-to-day reality.
In this piece, I’m going to explore some of the structural issues that will be affected by the pandemic and our virtual environment for academics. Towards the end of the post I provide a few pointers that you may want to consider if you are looking to organise an event, a virtual series, or a discussion meeting.
In many ways, this time of increased virtual meeting could be viewed as an opportunity to skill-up with the ability and means to engage more. Participation could be opened to people who would not normally be engaged, and this is especially advantageous for people who typically cannot attend meetings in person, travel long distances, or be away from home.
These virtual meetings can break down barriers, which is excellent. At the same time, it would be useful and beneficial if the structural issues that limit fair participation are also considered and addressed.
How does this impact us?
It is widely acknowledged that society is unequal, and academia creates, mirrors and sustains many of these inequalities. A lack of diversity, in terms of gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and (much) more remains symptomatic of a wider issue regarding equity and inclusion.
In times of stress, many people will resort to a path of least resistance. In some circumstances this can lead us down a path which results to ‘baking in’ of structural inequality.
In our current circumstances, social distancing involves many major restrictions that impact our ability to engage in (so-called) ‘productive’ work. The pandemic has created and strengthened major barriers for participation, and this will have lasting impacts for the generation and curation of ‘outputs’.
I hesitate with the word ‘productive’ here, as being productive is an aspiration for many. In terms of ‘outputs’, I am intentionally leaving this broad.
Productivity can be measured in a variety of ways. For most, a growth in productivity is unreasonable, as the existential panic surrounding the pandemic creates a spectre that haunts our waking hours.
For output, this is a catch-all. Some of these outputs will be concrete and flavours of our past lives. They may involve curating a new discussion or writing up some work, which ultimately can be minuted in terms of a journal paper. Other outputs may be a virtual conference talk or webinar, where you can influence the thinking of others, educate people, and raise your individual profile and ultimately fuel the success of your ideas.
Being ‘productive’?
In conducting activity in an attempt to be productive, and generate outputs, even a maintenance of activity is far fetched. Caring responsibilities, cooking three meals a day, and cleaning are now in our faces and hoover up our time. Many of activities were met by third parties, such as the little things like the simplicity of buying lunch. In the new abnormal, we left to inefficiently fend for ourselves. This affects our productivity, as our ready and usual access to things that make our lives easier are cut off.
This is a privileged view as many are left with a more perilous predicament, with an uncertain future and perhaps an uncertain income stream. This is combined with huge uncertainties on how the upcoming recession will impact our individual and collective futures.
We are already starting to see the clouds on the horizon. Many universities announcing hiring pauses, freezes, or even abruptly cancelling processes that were ‘in hand’ career progression for an academic is now in flux, and likely to be ever more competitive and (unfortunately) cut throat.
Virtually productive
So why does this affect our engagement with the virtual space?
On the good side, virtual participation can enable a certain amount of flexibility. We can choose what to engage with, when to engage with it, and (largely) how to engage.
New opportunities are quickly filling some of the voids, including virtual conferences, discussion forums, and online seminars. You might be thinking, perhaps I should get involved and organise something?
For me, as an established academic, the cancelling of yet another conference or activity has little impact on my immediate future. My future creativity may be slightly stifled, but this is a small blip in my journey.
However, for students and early career researchers, they are missing out on opportunities to show case their work, develop skills, and grow their own networks.
For the whole community, activities which involve discussions provide us all a chance to keep connected and create new opportunities. They are known to stimulate some creativity and promote new collaborations, which are important given the flurry of grant proposals that are likely being written right now.
Yet, before you write that first call for papers, or send that first speaker an email, please hold off. Pause a second to consider your motivations and what outcomes you intend. Perhaps consider the intended and unintended outcomes of your action. It is especially prudent to consider what else your participants may be doing:
As Alessandro Minello articulates elsewhere: “Another demand on my time are colleagues located around the globe who have the atavistic desire to meet face-to-face online. At any hour of the day. And that’s how my colleagues have come to know my son, whose little head pops up on the webcam now and again.”
Equity in the Virtual World
The burden of these virtual engagements, and the barriers to participation, are going to be unequally felt across our communities.
As we see people moving their work towards their ‘minimum work product’, in order to be create virtual communities and maintain a semblance of ‘activity’, as commented previously, we can see events and activities popping up. People might be kicking off a seminar series, calling a meeting, or hosting a virtual conference. Is this being done well and is there a continued focus on supporting our growth towards equity, or are we entrenching the unbalanced status quo?
At a simple level, we could consider a workshop that targets early career researchers.
Do members of our target audience have a suitable home environment from which they can participate? Maybe they have poor WiFi? Maybe they live near an apartment where the landlord has decided that now is the perfect opportunity to renovate. Maybe they have been forced to move back in with their parents? Or maybe their relationship is being stretched, as people have moved in together before they would have otherwise?
There are numerous factors that may limit participation, both actively in terms of offering to speak or organise things, or simply in terms of the simple act of turning their microphone on.
We can take a short look at some external factors that can impact the participation of people who are members of different groupings within our virtual spaces.
Ethnicity
In UK Universities, there will likely be the continued minoritisation of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) researchers; this is related to the so-called ‘ethnicity penalty’, the lack of black/black mixed PhD students funded by UK research councils, and reduced access to research funding by ethnic minority academics. Sustained under-representation of any group makes it especially difficult for views from that group to make a foothold, as with insufficient critical mass individual from the group make have their time stretched and viewpoints will not be shared, and let alone listened to. This substantively evidenced, as members of ethnic and/or gender minorities are often more innovative during their PhDs, but they are not rewarded in the furthering of their careers.
In the UK, there is a co-correlation between socio-economic status and ethnicity that affects people’s current living status, comorbidity of underlying health conditions, and occupation of their time, for instance looking after family members.
There are a multiplicity of other factors that individuals from ethnic minorities will face during a pandemic, including many Muslims who are observing Ramadan.
Often these issues are seen as less important by the those in power, and perhaps this has prompted recent correspondence in the Lancet which has highlighted a lack of reporting on mortality of BAME individuals. This is despite a large BAME proportion of deaths of healthcare workers, and that 1/3 of cases in Intensive Care Units with COVID-19 symptoms are not white.
The direct implications here may go ‘unnoticed’, as the data is unlikely to be uncovered for some time.
Gender
A more often talked about issue considers gender and child care. We are not in a ‘race to the bottom’ here, each issue is as important as another, and different people will have different priorities and impacts on their lives
Gender and childcare is often more reported about, as it is easy to ‘see’ this impact. Children appear on screen from time to time. Seeing the impact of this characteristic can be easier to quantify, as the presentation of an individuals gender may be more obvious than other characteristics discussed here.
Child care often disproportionately falls upon women in a heterosexual relationship, and there is no reason for us to anticipate how this will suddenly change during a period of lock-down. You might imagine that children are more well accustomed to seeking out one parent over the other, or one parent being more accustomed/casually ‘programmed’ to undertake domestic chores.
There are anecdotal suggestions that efforts around social distancing eat more into women’s time, perhaps linking to how journal article submissions are being heavily skewed, with men submitting more papers. This can be seen with access to online virtual seminars and conferences which have manels (all male panels), together often with the absence of people of colour.
Relationship status and living conditions
For single people and those living alone. This period of social isolation will likely affect them differently. Loneliness and lack of human contact may affect their mental health and limit their ability to relate to others. This could be compounded by the angst of putting everything on hold, meanwhile other people get on with their family life and push things forward.
For academic people who are used to distracting themselves from their day-to-day existence, and have not built up a support network this could be a huge issue, and some may have chosen to go and live with family and friends. This physically moves them into unprepared territory. If you want these people to participate in your event, you are asking them to engage and showcase their work within a ‘work environment’, which has different and unusual constraints and pulls on their time.
In large metropolitan cities, people may have sacrificed home space and comfort for convenience to their place of work and places they would like to hang out. The shock of home isolation has now rendered that cost-benefit analysis inaccurate and these people now have to cope with these less than idea living conditions for a 24/7 work-life existence rooted in the same precise location.
Some couples may have been partially cohabiting, and now due to stricter lockdown rules they may have moved in together. Stressing space, access to facilities, and ‘simple things’ like seeing a distortion of their sleeping patterns and time to refresh and regain their composure.
Others may be living in multiple occupancy households, where everyone needs to be on a conference call at the same time, or the kitchen table isn’t very big and it’s not a suitable workspace.
Don’t be surprised if someone needs to give a keynote talk from the ‘comfort’ of their bed, they may have no choice.
Age and career status
Many who are familiar with my writing will know about my concerns about age-based discrimination in academia, particularly with regard to early career people.
If you want to create a fairer system, it is important that you share your social capital with those who are less privileged. This results in an improvement for everyone, as academia is not a zero-sum game.
In terms of career status, this is reflected in the protection of “early career” events, awards and activities. If your intent is to promote network forming and curate spaces to promote the work of early career folk, please do engage here. Be careful however, avoid age based discrimination and patronising early career folk. There are mature researchers who have changed careers, and those who have had career breaks due to caring responsibilities. Make them feel included and consider their needs in your planning.
For the early-career grouping, often they are the least financially stable group (both students & researchers, as well as early career faculty). This financial stability is not going to get better and may impact their mental health. Some may have lost access to their “side hustle” which was keeping them going financially, others may have to rapidly reinvent themselves to keep things afloat.
Sexuality
For members of the LGBTQ+ community, social distancing may have a significant impact on young people’s mental health, including whether they are safe in their current homes (e.g. if they have had to go back into the closet when they move back with their families), and they are now cut off from their usual access to safe spaces.
Furthermore, there have been recent, and continued, announcements of cancellations and postponements of major LGBTQ+ community events and extra-curricular activities. Many of these overlap with academic groupings, creating spaces and communities that support one another and celebrate individuals. This means there is a risk that LGBTQ+ rights and equality will be left on the back burner in the wake of the pandemic.
Hopefully many folk will be familiar with the idea that if an individual’s wellness is impacted, then their ability to perform at the best of their ability is impacted. This creates a subtle but important aspect that underpins structural miniaturisation of individuals from a disadvantaged group, and these people will be further challenged if they are a member of more than one group.
Gender Identity
Most people have lost access to spaces where they can ‘just hang out and feel normal’, and this is especially important for trans people. A lack of support networks and access to safe spaces can exacerbate existing mental health issues, for which transgender and non binary people are at higher risk of having.
As with most of these items, good practice from the real world can be taken into our virtual environment. Making people feel included is important, and one way to make this happen people of all genders is to make the event feel inclusive across the board. A simple act of normalising the act of including your pronouns in the introduction to a telephone call and pronouncing your name clearly can give everyone a chance to feel and be included.
Disability
For disabled colleagues, the rush to virtual working will likely cause disproportionate disadvantage. We know that virtual meetings, with poor quality connectivity may limit people’s ability to lip read, caption, and communicate. For those who are deaf, the use of masks which inhibit people to each others’s lips move in real life may make a return to ‘near normality’ incredibly challenging.
The disabled community is heterogeneous in terms of how social isolation and the pandemic will affect them. For many, the contact restrictions and limited access to carers will impact their independence, and this will affect those with invisible and visibility disabilities differently.
This is complicated further by the increased risk that some disabled people will have directly if they catch COVID-19, limited access to shops and out doors, as well as the Government advice that vulnerable people will have to extend their period of isolation.
All together, it looks like that a lack of action will result in further disenfranchisement and minoritisation of disabled people.
International Researchers
For international researchers (students and staff), the closing down of international travel and variable responses in different countries creates extra stress.
Their individual social isolation is exacerbated, with the tragedy of what is happening in the countries they have connections with compounded into one timeline. They may be torn between timezones and cut off from their neighbours, and suffering from the background noise of xenophobic rhetoric spinning from governments across the world.
Often these factors will exasperate financial inequality, including access to space, resource, and support which will limited their ability to contribute at the same level as their (local) neighbours.
In our virtual argument, also let us not forget the value in body language and time to process that face-to-face meetings afford in bridging divides. This privilege that is not afforded in the 3 x 3 ‘bun fight’ we call a virtual meeting.
So you want to organise something…
Amongst this pessimism, perhaps we could look at how this transition could be eased and to prioritise what is important.
- Ask yourself what you wish to gain from your event or activity, and what benefit it will have for your participants, and whether this will be felt equally across different groups.
- Consider if the event is worth having, or will it further inequality. Does it help to address structural imbalance, or further the existing imbalance through the format, structure, or other activities that will affect your hopeful pool of participants?
- In planning your event/activity, acknowledge that the “new normal” is not normal. There is no rule-book right now.
We don’t know how things will change, despite our best efforts to plan and scheme. This will require flexibility and being considerate. Remember that big in person conferences or seminar series take many months of dedicated planning, and there is no reason why organising a virtual activity will be any different. I suspect in most cases it will require more work, as people will be unfamiliar with what works and what does not. - Our health and well being is the most important aspect of our day-to-day, especially while (in many locations) we are amongst this peak of cases and deaths. The simple act of keeping as healthy as we can, and looking out for ourselves is item one in our to-do lists.
- If you want to organise an virtual activity, think about what you would like to gain from it. Share this idea with (more than) a few friends and colleagues, preferably from multiple backgrounds. Make it clear that you are not necessarily asking for their help to organise it. They can be your sounding board and highlight key issues that may need to be addressed. Do not expect the first people to get back to you with help, as they may be still hovering around items 3 and 4 on this list.
- Look at a few events or activities that are currently going on. Evaluate what you like about them and what you do not like about them. Have a think about who was included, who was lined up to speak, and who were the participants actively, and passively disenfranchised by the event/activity.
- If you get to this stage and think it’s a bit much. Ask yourself ‘why do I want to do this thing’ — you likely have some extremely good motivations, and it is possible to organise events online and it’s great practice for the future.
Get some supporters on board and perhaps morph your idea around your collective goals. This will also help build in redundancy into the organisation, as well as provide everyone with mutual support to push the event forward. - Actively consider diversity, across multiple categories; e.g. you could be organising a LGBTQ+ in STEM event, so consider whether you have good representation of people from different career stages, ethnicities, and much more, and actively consider how you might address this. If you are struggling here, go back to the drawing board and ask yourselves about your priorities and focus.
- Seek feedback. We’ve already asked for a sounding board at the early stage. However, there are many more items of feedback that you can obtain, both through actively asking for help, as well as reading about what others have done and listening to the feedback on past events.
Even sly comments and other engagements can be a pause for your to reflect and grow. Sometimes people will be expressing their general frustration, but you can learn from this and link this back to your initial priorities. Please do not ‘dig in’ — learning from our mistakes makes our communities better. - Audit your event. After each major milestone, consider the demographics and engagement of who felt able to participate and get involved. Did you skew your event towards a specific demographic grouping? Was this intentional or unintentional?
- At a minimum, create a code of conduct. The codes of conduct that were created for “non-virtual” events can be a good starter, but do also consider issues that may related to direct connection of the virtual world, such as cyber bullying and harassment, recording of events, and the importance of people to be free to introduce themselves (as they may look/sound very different to your expectations due to the ‘wonders’ of webcam technology).
- In your programme, discussions, organising sessions, and feedback — make sure you provide space for people to comment and provide feedback on inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility issues. These may be in public, one-on-one, or in written feedback. Different people will respond differently. Share these responses, and your actions, with the community so others can learn from your failures and successes, and we can all move forwards together.
If you do undertake this event and have video conferences, you may want to read a past piece “video conferencing — good practice guidelines” that I wrote with a few other folk.
Finally, best of luck with what you do get up to! Don’t feel disheartened if you give up, or it doesn’t go according to plan. The new normal is not normal, we were not working towards the standards we established before the pandemic uprooted our lives.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dr Sam Giles for helpful feedback that prompted a note that virtual meetings can reduce barriers for participation. Thanks for Dr Erinma Ocho for pointing out that my framing on ethnicity was not as clear as I had liked, it’s still not as clear as I want, but it is more now qualified.
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