Frequently Asked Questions

The precipitating reason for imagining a different format for our conferences is the climate crisis. A single 350-person conference requires the equivalent of an entire year’s carbon footprint of about 100 average world citizens. That is a conservative estimate that calculates the carbon footprint of airfare alone. If the main purpose of academic organizations like NAVSA, BAVS, AVSA, VI and DACH-V is to get people to travel to conferences, then our organizations will die as the climate crisis continues to develop. Some universities are already discouraging such conference travel because of climate concerns. We need an alternative. Video conferencing is not a good enough solution since most people get fatigued on these platforms after even just a single panel. We propose a hybrid solution: monthly Zoom panels leading up to a series of hub events in September, with substantive international networking facilitated by COVE. People can choose to participate in whatever ways they wish: just attending the Zoom events, just attending the hubs, just annotating in COVE, or any combination of the three.

We want to preserve what is good about face-to-face events while facilitating international networking in a way that gets around the massive carbon footprint of long-haul flights. We did our best to come up with hubs: 17 of them on 4 continents. We also tried hard to make sure we had hubs that could help Australasians be involved. Not everyone will avoid plane travel with our plan but we hope this solution gets us around long-haul flights, which are the most polluting. On the whole, though, our event is designed to reduce the carbon footprint of our conferences at some measurable degree of scale, while preserving what is essential about these events. Some things will even be an improvement: cheaper access to networking for contingent and non-tenure-track faculty, avoidance of hotels and their exorbitant costs, a return to campuses, more intimate gatherings with fewer concurrent panels, the ability to access all the papers that interest you, greater total attendance, even a reduced danger of spreading disease.

Here is a way to think about it. If you give a talk at a traditional conference panel, there is the chance that you you get a small audience as there are usually 10-14 concurrent panels happening simultaneously at a large conference like NAVSA (and you miss out on those other talks while you are delivering your own paper). Our goal is to open your work to everyone attending at all of the hubs from around the world. Anyone at any of the hubs who is interested in your topic will have the opportunity to read your work and engage with you in a substantive way.

No problem: you can still participate in the virtual events and get access to papers at the hubs through COVE. Annotation at COVE allows you then to engage with the authors directly.

Our goal is to reduce long-haul flights. Some participants will be too far from a hub to drive or to take public transit. Others will have other compelling reasons to fly. Hopefully, though, we have made it possible for you to participate in one of the 17 hubs that is close to where you are already planning to be in September of 2024. If our event is successful and we decide to do this again, perhaps we can convince more hubs to be involved the next time.

Since we own COVE Conferences, we can use it to reduce conference costs.

COVE Conferences also improves accessibility in two ways: 1) Rather than relying on speakers to provide ADA-compliant papers at the time of the panel, accessibility copies will already be available through COVE; 2) As an asynchronous platform, COVE is inclusive of different time zones and uses little bandwidth to meet the capabilities of different internet connections.