Dis-belonging, Exclusion, and Re-thinking Academic Conferences

This is a collaborative project with Amelia Morris (ULAw). Between 2017 and 2018, we undertook interviews with academics working in UK Higher Education about their experiences of attending, presenting, and navigating academic conferences. From our interviews, it quickly became clear that the academic conference was a space not equally experienced by all academics. For marginalised scholars, the conference space heightened anxieties and discomfort around their bodies, leading to a self-disciplining of bodies. Inevitably, the extra preparations and discomfort led to exclusion for the conference space.