Conferences on My Mind

Yesterday, I opened my mailbox to find the latest issue of Composition Studies, featuring a special forum on academic conferences. As I flipped through the pages, reading perspectives from conference organizers across writing studies about the past and future of our field’s gatherings, I realized that conferences have been occupying an unusual amount of mental space for me lately. Perhaps it’s the season, or perhaps it’s the particular moment we’re in as a field. Either way, I’ve been thinking deeply about what conferences mean, what they cost, and what they could become.

Starting with a Small Conference

My relationship with academic conferences has been shaped profoundly by regional gatherings, particularly one that forecasted my professional trajectory. In 2023, I co-authored an article tracing the history of the Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing (GPACW), a conference that quite literally launched my academic career when I was a graduate student.

GPACW was what small conferences do best—intimate, friendly, and encouraging to graduate students and newcomers to the field. Picture this: maybe sixty-or-so people gathered in places like Mankato or St. Cloud, Minnesota, where graduate students presented alongside seasoned faculty, where conversations started in sessions continued over meals, where someone would remember your name and your research a year later. It was small enough that everyone could attend the same keynote, intimate enough that networking didn’t feel like performance art. For many of us, it was our first taste of what academic community could feel like.

The conference nurtured emerging voices in ways that larger gatherings simply couldn’t. Graduate students weren’t shuffled into separate student sessions. We shared panels with established scholars who treated our work seriously. Early-career faculty found mentors and collaborators. Mid-career professors discovered new topics by listening to emerging researchers. GPACW created a scholarly network that fostered genuine community across institutions, career stages, and geographic distances that could feel isolating on the Great Plains.

But GPACW also taught me about loss in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Despite its profound impact on so many careers and its crucial role in field development, the conference eventually faded. The reasons were familiar: declining volunteerism, shifting institutional priorities, the exhaustion of the same people carrying the organizational load year after year. I watched something that had been so vital to my professional development simply disappear.

The experience made me acutely aware of how fragile these spaces can be, how much they depend on the unpaid labor of people who believe deeply in their mission.

The Weight of Welcome

This awareness feels especially heavy right now as I prepare to host the 2025 CPTSC and SIGDOC co-located conference at my institution this October. I want desperately to create a welcoming, meaningful experience for my colleagues. I want our program, department, and university to shine. But I’m also learning about the impossible balancing acts that conference hosting requires.

Take this: after we’d set the date, I discovered that our conference coincides with a home football game. What might seem like a minor scheduling conflict suddenly becomes a major stress point—hotel availability, traffic, the entire rhythm of our campus will be different. I find myself lying awake wondering if attendees will struggle to find parking, if the visiting crowds will disrupt sessions, if I’ll be remembered as the host who didn’t think things through.

These worries might seem small, but they represent something larger about the invisible labor of conference organizing and the pressure to create desirable experiences for our communities.

Reading Proposals, Feeling Everything

Just this week, I volunteered again as a Stage 2 Reviewer to evaluate proposals for CCCC, our field’s flagship conference. Like last year, the experience left me simultaneously energized and drained—a familiar feeling for anyone who’s done this work. There’s genuine joy in seeing the innovative scholarship people want to share, the creative pedagogies they’re developing, the important questions they’re asking.

But there’s also heartbreak in knowing that limited program space means some excellent work won’t make it onto the schedule. There’s frustration with systems that inadvertently exclude people who can’t attend in person, despite our field’s commitment to accessibility and inclusion. I found myself thinking about the proposals I was reading not just as abstracts but as people—graduate students hoping for their first conference presentation, contingent faculty seeking visibility for their research, established scholars trying new directions.

The work felt important and necessary, but it also highlighted how much our current conference structures require us to make decisions that don’t always align with our values of community and care.

Traveling Means More Than Logistics

Next month, I’ll travel to Fort Collins, Colorado for the IWAC conference. Logistically, I’m prepared—flights booked, presentation (somewhat) ready, hotel confirmed. But emotionally, I’m carrying a familiar weight that many others also have to bear.

As someone who carries visible and invisible identities that aren’t always welcomed everywhere, I travel with awareness that certain spaces might be less safe or comfortable for me. The current political climate has intensified these concerns. I shouldn’t have to wonder whether people will treat me differently because of how I look or who I love, but I do. I shouldn’t have to calculate which parts of myself to make visible in public spaces, but I do.

This isn’t unique to conferences, of course—it’s part of navigating academia while holding marginalized identities. But conferences amplify these dynamics because they compress so much professional interaction into such concentrated time and space. The stakes feel higher when you’re presenting research you care about to colleagues whose respect you value, all while managing the additional emotional labor of reading social cues and assessing safety.

The Conferences I Dream About

Despite these challenges, or maybe because of them, I remain hopeful about what academic conferences can become. The special forum in Composition Studies that started this reflection included visions for more inclusive, accessible, and genuinely supportive gatherings. I see glimpses of this future in conferences that offer multiple participation options, that center care alongside scholarship, that acknowledge the full humanity of attendees.

I think about GPACW at its best—how it created space for graduate students to practice presenting in a supportive environment, how it fostered mentorship relationships that lasted decades, how it modeled what academic community could look like when we prioritize generosity over gatekeeping.

I think about what my October conference hosting could model—not perfection, but genuine care for attendees’ experiences, acknowledgment of the challenges people face in traveling and participating, and commitment to creating space where everyone can bring their full selves to their scholarly work.

Going From Here

The truth is that conferences, like all academic structures, are human creations. They reflect our values, our biases, our assumptions about who belongs and how scholarship should be shared. This means they can change when we decide to change them.

As I prepare for IWAC, as I work toward October’s hosting responsibilities, as I reflect on my CCCC reviewing experience, I’m thinking about how each of us can contribute to making conferences more welcoming, more accessible, more genuinely supportive of the diverse scholars who make up our field.

This might mean advocating for hybrid participation options that don’t treat virtual attendees as second-class participants. It might mean pushing for review processes that consider not just the quality of proposals but the barriers different scholars face in participating. It might mean creating explicit community agreements that center respect and inclusion.

Most importantly, it means acknowledging that behind every conference proposal, every presentation, every moment of scholarly exchange, there are whole people with complex lives, varied identities, and different relationships to academic spaces.

We can do better by each other. We can create conference cultures that nurture rather than exhaust, that include rather than exclude, that recognize scholarship as a fundamentally human endeavor. The future of our conferences and our field depends on our willingness to care for each other as much as we care for our research.

The conversation is already happening, as evidenced by that special forum sitting on my desk. Now we get to work on what comes next.