For the love of Mike, get past your ableism, academia!
You should already have done it for the sake of disabled academics, but climate emergency means it is utterly wasteful and foolhardy to keep holding in-person events that everyone has to pony up to travel to instead of academia investing in creative, accessible online events.
It also makes the event more accessible to those who cannot get visas, $ to travel, etc. @academicchatter
Tried to use gather.town for one XENON meeting-- it gets you partway there, and @NikoSarcevic was part of organizing a great couple of cosmology conferences using it-- but it is a lot of new+extra work
@kraweel65@ml@academicchatter@NikoSarcevic
But you need a very strong hand from the organizers saying that everyone should be present in those spaces consistently (otherwise 50+% will slink off to get coffee or "go work" between presentations)
@kdund@kraweel65@academicchatter@NikoSarcevic It isn't "extra". It's work that long needed to be done to be inclusive of disabled academics yet no one really wanted to do it until the pandemic made it non-negotiable for abled people. Then the moment they wanted to pretend the pandemic was over, they mothballed it again. That is why it seems like so much work...because instead of being done a little at a time, it was deferred for decades. #Ableism.
@kraweel65@ml@academicchatter@NikoSarcevic
I also think that if unis were serious about these ways of working, they'd make physical booths etc. available for attending telecons+conferences so you can get your mind out of your office for them.
@ml@kraweel65@academicchatter@NikoSarcevic
At the time, it was certainly extra work to have also the social part there-- the notional plan was to only have a list of zoom meetings.
@kdund@kraweel65@academicchatter@NikoSarcevic Words matter, the framing matters. Accessibility is framed as "extra" because ableist institutions do not like admitting they've been deferring on their duty of serving the public (which includes disabled people) the entire time.
I will not let them frame it as "extra". I am highlighting the fact that the work falls on us because those paid more to manage things mismanaged. #Ableism