A Different Kind of Conference: Reflections on Thinking Gender Justice

From June 17 to June 19, I attended the conference Thinking Gender Justice: Oppression, Resistance, Liberation, which was organized by UCD's Centre for Gender, Feminisms and Sexualities (CGFS) and hosted here at UCD. Thinking Gender Justice was, for me, singular. Though it was not my first non-STEM conference ^[1] nor my first time presenting non-technical content,^[2] I still found in this conference a unique, novel environment and experience. As the title suggests, this blog post is my attempt to process and reflect on the conference, sharing (hopefully useful) insights with readers while doing so.

A Conference with Vision

It almost feels silly writing, but I fear ignoring it would be a mistake. So let it be said: Thinking Gender Justice had a clearly stated mission, agenda, and politics.

That "clearly stated" bit is important. I'm one of those killjoys who believes that essentially everything humans do in and around societies is political. Of course an academic conference has politics! Of course humans running a conference have an agenda! But, in so many of the academic spaces that I've inhabited, all of the conferences and other meetings that I've attended, politics are not spoken or even spoken of.

Consider the upcoming American Chemical Society (ACS) 2026 Fall Meeting. There is no mission statement, only a call to participate. "Chemists making history. Be part of it," the conference home page urges. But what chemists are making history, and what kind of history are they making? To ACS, it doesn't seem like these questions need to be answered; regardless, we should all join in and "[b]e part of it".

Figure 1: TODO

I suspect that there is a pragmatic reason why most academic conferences (and it is most conferences, in my experience; I'm just picking on ACS) avoid discussing their politics and ethos. They don't want anyone left out. At a conference with a clear, coherent vision and mission beyond "Come together and share your results," it is difficult to imagine speakers committed to sustainability one room over from researchers paid by Chevron and Dow. It's hard to imagine education researchers concerned with student learning sharing a symposium with "AI" boosters. But this is what many conferences – especially large conferences – want: to draw in everyone, regardless of how incompatible their methods and motivations. To not let politics get in the way.

In contrast, Thinking Gender Justice made plain that it was not for everyone and anyone. This conference was for "academics, activists, artists and others committed to liberatory knowledge and action, transdisciplinary perspectives, and coalitional community-building in feminist, queer, race-critical, decolonial, and anti-capitalist research, activism, and living." ^[3] Are you a feminist who's committed to colonial projects (an "enemy feminist", perhaps, in the theory of Thinking Gender Justice keynote speaker Sophie Lewis ^[4])? Look elsewhere. Are you looking to share your queer theory but not interested in doing the messy work of liberation in community? This might not be the conference for you. The openness of the conference's vision and mission was, I believe, genuinely helpful for shaping a group of participants that actually wants to learn from each other. And that intentional, self-selecting group readily formed a community that was (at least, in my experience) supportive and collaborative.

Now, might there be something to be said for conferences or other discussion spaces where not everyone shares a core ethic or politics? Certainly. Disagreement can be generative; it can stimulate growth. But if generative disagreement is what you want (and I'm not convinced that's true for most scientific conferences), say that, and say it with your whole chest. My point here is not that Thinking Gender Justice's mission, values, politics, etc. were particularly laudable or good (though I certainly agree with the organizers in many ways). Rather, I'm saying to conference/meeting organizers: whatever your goal, don't hide it.

An Accessible Conference Is (Still) Possible

I will be among the first to say that I hated conferences in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, when lockdowns were still in place, social distancing enforced, and travel limited, many academic meetings switched to a fully online format. There might be some Zoom or Gather-based social space, but mostly, it was folks either sharing pre-recorded talks and posters or else rapid-fire live presentations with little interaction. I'm sure there were some shining counterexamples, some brilliant, thoughtful, well-designed virtual conferences, but my experience wasn't great.

Even so, far worse has been the snap-back, the return not only to in-person gatherings (nearly all environmentally disastrous super-spreader events) but to an enforced in-person participation. This has placed disabled and chronically ill scholars in an impossible bind, caught between being sidelined from academic discourse or else risking their health and well-being. And this goes far beyond disability. Some scholars, particularly from many contexts in the Global South, cannot easily get travel visas and/or cannot easily afford international travel. And even when travel is not an obstacle, attending an in-person conference can place one at risk, as I encountered when organizing a sympsium in Washington, D.C., USA during a fascist show of force.^[5]

Conference organizers often describe managing virtual talks and participants – and managing access needs more broadly – as a logistical headache. I've heard that it's too technically difficult, especially for small events, and I've heard that it's a drain on resources. While I do not want to discount that accessibility (and, thinking bigger, universal design) can require significant labor and creativity, I point to Thinking Gender Justice to say that an accessible hybrid conference isn't impossible and doesn't even need to be hard.

Thinking Gender Justice used Zoom for virtual talks ^[6] and virtual participation. Zoom rooms were set up by volunteers, who were mostly Master's students affiliated with the CGFS. Since UCD provides Zoom accounts to all students and staff, this approach did not incur any additional costs and did not require conference

Poor Discipline, Imposter Symdrome, and Breaking Boundaries

As I alluded to in this post's introduction, I presented a "paper" ^[3] at Thinking Gender Justice with my co-author, collaborator, and co-conspirator Julia McKeown. Our presentation/paper, "Towards a Madscience at the Borders of the Hypersane", was our first attempt to express our ideas regarding the oppression of madness ^[4] and Mad folks by what we call Dominant Science and a possible alternative epistemology growing from mixed scientific and Mad elements.^[5]

In the weeks leading up to the conference and even in the moments leading up to our presentation, TODO

Footnotes