After my last post, friend and fellow scholar Rolf Pendall asked me a pretty good question, which is: can we really justify having a big yearly conference at all, granted the climate effects of all that travel and the disadvantages big conferences have for many scholars, including myself, whose social anxiety makes most conferences rather torturous.

Rolf suggested smaller regional conferences, which is an interesting idea. Riffing on that idea, I thought about maybe doing topical conferences–a symposium on planning theory, for example.

There are some advantages to smaller conferences, even if I don’t necessarily think they would have much climate benefit. (Maybe I am being dense here but I think shorter trips are likely to add up to roughly the same, and I suspect plenty of scholars would want to attend more than one conference under a new, more distributed conference strategy. )

One major advantage would be that smaller conferences would be shorter and easier for parents to manage and for junior scholars to afford–we could probably manage most tracks at ACSP in two days if we separated them, instead of how ACSP demands about a week-long commitment from administrators, from those who have put the radical planning sessions prior to the main event, and a person can wind up staying a pretty long time at ACSP if they moderate a session on Thursday and their presentation is Sunday. Two days is about $400 to $800 savings in hotel and childcare costs over what can happen with ACSP scheduling now. Lots of people fund travel out of their own pockets, and this savings would be significant.

A smaller conference wouldn’t help me much in terms of my social anxiety, as mine kicks in for any group, big or small. Leaving my house is an effort, so it doesn’t take much to put me off going to anything anywhere at any time. I probably get to ACSP once every three years, and perhaps the right answer anyway: for those of us who just don’t do well in social contexts, emphasizing conference participation less than we have in the past for hiring and promotion would likely be better. I’ve always tried to be useful as moderator, giving feedback particularly to more junior participants on their manuscripts, but I can say I only twice had a moderator do the same for me in twelve years of ACSP.

We could also try timing the conference differently: we could do the big national conference every other year instead of every year. Smaller conferences create new organizing burdens that currently get covered by the bigger conference staff and host universities.

That strikes me as a pretty good suggestion, too, but it shares the same drawback as distributing to regional or topical conferences: ACSP matters for job seekers a great deal. I’m pretty sure I have never succeeded in impressing anybody at ACSP, but that’s just me. We have tons of job networking going on, and if you finish your dissertation and graduate during an “off” year, it would change your prospects quite a bit, and adding an extra year of potential unemployment is way hard on young scholars.

The possibility I like, but the organization wouldn’t, is trimming down the yearly conference to two-three days at most. This involves a lot more work on the part of the organizers, but I do like the idea. Instead of evaluating abstracts, we could limit submissions only to people who submit completed manuscripts by the submission date, we review those manuscripts, and we take the best by tier: by tenured, nontenured, graduate student, giving priority to junior scholars. ACSP wants participants and registration fees (and how else does it pay the bills), but all that leads to a very large conference with a lot of partially baked ideas which may not benefit from feedback anyway, and that don’t reflect all that well on the person giving the presentation.

What idea do you like? Or is there a different one we should think about? I like “planning theory bad mammajama symposium” where I only invite people I like, but I suppose it’s not all about me, more’s the pity.

Those of us who have been around awhile have been through the mill with ACSP more than once on controversies about conference location and the political/cultural environment of the conference. ACSP has relocated the conference before in response to constituents’ legitimate demands that we respect NAACP travel boycotts, and now we’ve had a similar problem with an upcoming conference hosted by Clemson. I haven’t been privy to decision-making that went into either awarding the conference to that location or in the demands the decision be reviewed. SC has been active in anti-trans legislation, and we have to ask questions about what it means to bring dollars to places that do that.

I did take the survey that ACSP sent out asking for reactions and reflections, and the survey was hard for me. I really don’t know what I think. All I have is: I want to have conferences in places where my trans friends and friends of color are treated with the respect and decency they deserve. Unfortunately, I can’t think of many places, included my beloved California, where that’s really, genuinely true.

I am sympathetic to the argument that travel boycotts just hurt working people in the state who have very little influence on the policy process. But I have to rejoin, how much *benefit* do working people get from business anymore? I mean, it feels a little like corporations just take all the profits from everything and the only thing you do by boycotting a place with lousy policy is save those working at the Motel 6s for shitty wages already some work having to deal with you. That doesn’t strike me as all bad, necessarily, especially if the preprondance of benefits from labor get captured by elite interests while the preponderance of the work falls to the laborer.

For the most part, I basically think we should just do whatever Planners of Color Interest Group and the Queer Planning IG)* tell us to do and go with that.*

We recently got an email from ACSP outlining the responses to the survey and the costs of changing course on the conference location at this point, over $300,000. And that’s the part of this discussion that rubbed me the wrong way. By disclosing that number, it creates transparency, but it is also very likely to put a great big ol’ thumb on the decision scale among ACSP member cis- faculty who aren’t 1) aren’t likely to experience potentially life-threatening violence at the hands of the police themselves and 2) not particularly tuned into why trans faculty would like us to stay in safe(r) locations. Certainly, plenty of cisfaculty understand these things and support their trans colleagues brilliantly, but are they the norm at ACSP?

To wit, ACSP has a major financial interest in staying the course, as it did last time this came up, and that cost itself becomes a reason to stay the course. But we’ve been through this before, and the costs are high, so the question for me arises: why do we keep granting conference bids to places that are going to be a problem? Ok, maybe we can’t predict it, but…we should., right? We’re planners. All this comes down to how we need to get more diversity on that ACSP board. It’s one thing to get blindsided by a legal changes and another to ignore the last four years of bathroom wars, and this latter here is more likely to happen when the board doesn’t have somebody who is likely to raise these issues, and concomittantly, other board members who will support and back up anybody who raises the issue (instead of, as in my life, just ignoring them.) otherwise we are in a forever cycle of award bid, make plans, “discover” the problems, welp, can’t change the locale because it’s so costly.

Another, confounding problem is simply that some of our very finest planning programs are in states that seem hell bent on writing the rottenest abortion legislation possible so that whatever “compromise” makes its way out of the rubble they hope to make out of Roe and Casey boils down to all women must wear mannacles and attend Liberty University and any trans men will be stoned in the public square. Georgia Tech, Clemson…boatloads of excellent programs in Texas…

The bottom line for me is that I just don’t want to go to places with state legislatures doing these things. I don’t want to go Florida OR Texas (great planning programs) because of their gun craziness, and I don’t want to go to these places where women just don’t seem to matter.

*I do not think it’s a interest group yet. My perspective is the women’s interest group should do a good job of standing with and advocating for our queer colleagues and our colleagues of color, but the organization has been uneven on that, and groups deserve their own places and their own voices, so I have made it into an interest group in my own mind. Making it formal does create a potential service and leadership tasks for our queer colleagues, which sucks, too, so I can also see why keeping it less formal makes sense too. )