The first discussions of a global, fully online EMCAIL conference began in the fall of 2020; at this moment in time, we had grown accustomed to living in lockdowns, to travel restrictions, and to having in-person events canceled for the foreseeable future. Although early 2021 brought with it the promise of vaccines that could curb the spread of COVID-19 and allow us to return to some sense of normality, large, in-person events of any kind were still very much out of the question.
But in this moment of perpetual COVID-19, members of the EMCAIL community saw an opportunity. In the first phase of the pandemic, in-person events were all either a) postponed to some future date, or b) re-organized as online events. While we were all desperately hoping that we would soon be able to be in the same indoor space again (to, you know, share research, ideas, and also aerosolized breath droplets), the early online events, such as the European Conference on Conversation Analysis, taught us that “online” isn’t worse than “in-person”. In the words of Emily Hofstetter, an ECCA organizer and founding member of the DMCA organizing committee:
“It was clear that digital meetings worked well enough that it was absurd to say we had to be in person to get work done, and that a lot of people were suffering needlessly from being unable to go to places in person”
And thus the idea for what came to be called the Digital Meeting for Conversation Analysis was born: a fully online, global EMCA event, for ECRs by ECRs. My name is Sam Schirm, and I joined the organizing committee in summer 2021, first as a member and then as the secretary. In this piece, I will give some insight into the DMCA organizing committee, its motivations, how it came together, the challenges it faced and how it addressed those challenges, and how it sees the DMCA in the larger picture of the EMCAIL community. Along the way, we will hear from other members of the committee, their experiences organizing the conference, and what they hope the EMCA community takes away from the DMCA.
More on the motivations
International conferences are important to the scientific endeavor; they are opportunities for researchers to exchange research and ideas with their peers in institutions and circles with whom they’d otherwise have little contact and broaden researchers’ professional academic network. For ECRs, international conferences are particularly important, as they allow ECRs to find their footing in their new academic community. With the postponement of ICCA to 2023, many ECRs lost the opportunity to attend the EMCAIL flagship conference and take part in those exchanges during critical career stages, such as their PhD studies or postdocs. An early motivation of the DMCA was thus to give ECRs, even in a pandemic, the chance to engage and network with their peers and more senior academics from around the world.
However, even without transmission-curbing travel restrictions, international, in-person conferences are often (almost as a rule) prohibitively expensive for ECRs. The financial hurdles often means that ECRs — particularly ECRs based in low- or middle-income countries — cannot afford to attend international conferences. This is not to mention the visa requirements that holders of many passports have to fulfill. Not only do these barriers to attending an international conference disadvantage many ECRs, as they miss out on the socialization into the field, the barriers also disadvantages EMCAIL as a whole, as it shuts out new and diverse perspectives on current issues in the field.
Beyond the research and networking opportunities inherent to academic conferences, the organizing committee saw training as a central component to the career-development goal of the DMCA. There were several kinds of training that the organizing committee — itself made up of mostly ECRs — saw as particularly useful for themselves and their peers. First, there is the development of skills that ECRs can apply to their research project, such as how to work with particular kinds of data, how to analyze specific kinds of phenomena, or how to incorporate different methods into EMCAIL projects. To offer this analytic training, the organizing committee blocked off an entire day of the conference in both streams for workshops with experts in EMCAIL. Second, the organizing committee wanted events that discussed the practicalities of being an EMCAIL researcher. The organizing committee invited members of the EMCAIL community with diverse experiences to participate in panel-style plenary events on three practical areas: writing grants, publishing research in EMCA, and a live-recording of the State of Talk podcast [link to podcast] on “Life in EMCA”. Finally, the organizing committee saw it important that ECRs have a forum to share their experiences and challenges navigating intra- and interpersonal aspects of working in academia. The DMCA therefore also included discussion groups, facilitated by senior researchers and invited experts, on topics including navigating imposter syndrome, time management, and being a woman in academia. Training and research were complimentary components at the DMCA, creating a holistic career-development event for ECRs.
Beyond being a bridging event to the next international conference, the DMCA was meant to be a “global, inclusive and accessible event” (Uwe Küttner, chair Africa-Americas-Europe stream), and to show that “bringing together the global EMCA[IL] community does not have to mean investing crazy amounts of budget to attend face-to-face conferences” (Ufuk Balaman, website management). The DMCA “wasn’t just taking place online out of pure necessity, but with the intent of using ‘online’ to our advantage” (Uwe Küttner), and to “[provide] and ideal opportunity for scholars from across the world, particularly those with limited financial means, to participate in the EMCA[IL] field sharing their work, meeting friends, learning from senior scholars” (Lucas Seuren, founding member of organizing committee and former chair Africa-Americas-Europe stream).
How the committee came together
Being a global event, the DMCA sought to offer researchers in all time zones talks, plenary events, workshops, and social events. With committee members based in and with connections across all continents (save for Antarctica), the organizing committee threw around many possible solutions. It was an early decision between ISCA and the organizing committee that the DMCA offer two “streams”, with one stream catering to the timezone in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (AfrAmEu stream) and another serving Asia and Oceania (AsOc stream).
In Fall 2021, through the organizing committee members in Asia and Oceania, members of the Australasian Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (AIEMCA) learned of the plans for a global EMCAIL conference, and saw an opportunity. By combining with the standing DMCA committee, the AIEMCA could contribute their connections and knowledge of the Australasian EMCA community to the planning of the DMCA. The AIEMCA reached out to and met with the organizing committee, and with that, each stream had their organizing committees, one for Africa-Americas-Europe and one for Australasia.
Because time differences made it impossible to find meeting times that worked for everyone across both committees, there were stream-specific meetings in which each committee would handle planning and issues for their half of the world, and cross-stream meetings to update each other and make decisions for the conference as a whole. This mix of stream-specific and cross-stream collaboration allowed the streams to “[work] quite independently, yet so well in tandem that DMCA was clearly perceivable as a coherent event” (Uwe Küttner). The two streams followed a unified vision for the conference, using the expertise available to them in their time zones to meet the needs of their ECRs.
Challenges
As Uwe put it, “[g]iven that this was a “first time” for everyone and considering all the things that could possibly have gone wrong, the event itself went surprisingly smoothly, especially on the technical side of things.“ It would be unreasonable, however, to expect the first global online EMCA conference to go without a hitch.
On the one hand, there were unknowns as to the financial planning of the DMCA. As Lucas Seuren noted that there was no way for the organizing committee to know how many participants would attend the DMCA, and with only a rough estimate (or even guesstimate) it was difficult to put together a budget and financial strategy. The financial unknowns were mitigated in great part by ISCA’s support, as ISCA covered many upfront costs, such as the cost of the Zoom licenses and the Whova conference platform; ISCA also made it possible to offer discounted registration to ISCA member by contributing $15 per registered ISCA member.; in the end the DMCA was financially successful enough to offer scholarships to ECRs who would otherwise not be able to attend the event.
Now that I’ve mentioned it, I can get to the next (and more visible) challenge: the Whova conference platform. We asked a lot of Whova. Beyond providing a digital podium for typical conference events such as plenaries, keynotes, workshops, and posters presentations (albeit for a global audience), there were also other functionalities we needed from the platform. We needed a platform that allowed us to easily manage conference registration and that only let those who registered attend the conference. We needed a platform that provided attendees the means to communicate at the conference (rather than resorting to, e.g., e-mail). And we needed a platform that offered both synchronous (i.e., live) and asynchronous (i.e., recorded) ways of viewing presentations to accommodate different time zones. There were, of course, other functionalities that Whova offered (such as allowing for asynchronous discussions and letting attendees put together their own personal program) that were “nice to have”, but even just the need-to-have technical requirements of an online conference platform posed a challenge..
Adding to that challenge was that kinds of customers online platform providers typically served. As Emily Hofstetter, who with Lucas Seuren met with several platform providers, notes, “[m]ost online platforms weren’t for academics. They were for industry conferences. We [the DMCA] were such, such small fry to them”. In shopping around for platforms, Emily
“desperately wanted the platform organizers to be able to run us through a video of being a pretend visitor to an imaginary conference, and then a pretend organizer. Just show us how the front and back ends look and work”
And, in hindsight, Uwe, who took on the role of chair after the selection of Whova, wishes “we [the organizing committee] had started actively familiarizing ourselves/working with Whova earlier, since I believe we could have saved quite some time by using (or even knowing about) some of its in-built features.”
After considering many different potential platforms, Whova fulfilled (in one way or another) our technical requirements for the conference. While we did have to find some creative solutions within Whova’s tools to, e.g., offer an environment for posters, or create workshop events in the program that would only be accessible to those registered for those workshops, in the end, as Uwe already mentioned, the technical end of the conference ran relatively smoothly. The Whova platform ended up being “accepted so well by the community and … they also used [Whova] to interact with each other outside the presentations.” That is not to say that the DMCA organizing committee endorses Whova for any future EMCAIL online conference; rather, organizing committees must consider the goals of their conference, the events their conference should offer to meet those goals, and the kind of interaction they want to foster amongst conference attendees. Those decisions should in turn inform the choice of platform. And the selection of digital conference platforms is constantly changing, with new tools and functionalities we haven’t yet considered. Every conference has different goals and needs, so each conference should choose the platform that best works for it.
Looking to the future
The DMCA was the first global event in EMCAIL, planned by ECRs for ECRs. The organizing committee would like this first iteration of the DMCA to be remembered as an inclusive, accessible, and engaging academic event. Leelo Keevallik, a senior member of the AfrAmEu organizing committee,
“would like people to say it was their first step on the international arena, that the global engagement was encouraging and that they received helpful feedback. [She] would like ISCA to know that ECR organisers know what they want, are reliable and professional in their work.”
There are of course many things that future iterations may want to revisit, such as the shortened “15 min presentation + 5 minute question period” format, or whether there is a new conference platform that could better cater to the needs of an academic event. The DMCA was, in many ways, “a place for experimentation” (Emily Hofstetter). While it still very much kept to what we know from academic conferences, with presentations, workshops, posters and keynotes, it played with some of the formats, offering plenary events on practical issues for ECRs in EMCA and creating online spaces for participants to socialize. But there are more ways to play with conference formats:
“Why not have reading groups, perhaps where you read through the paper together and stop as and when people want to comment …? Why not do spontaneous collection creation together, have collaborations be built out of submitting data to a session? Can’t we have speed dating for collaborators, where instead of a poster you hang out at a topic board and people come with possible trajectories for that topic and build a potential paper together?” (Emily Hofstetter)
As you may have noticed, I mentioned “future iterations” of the DMCA. This was not a slip of the tongue (fingers?). The organizing committee of the first DMCA hopes that its success can inspire members of the EMCA community, particularly ECRs, to organize and run more events, ones that continue to play and expand the possibilities of academic events while maintaining the goals of inclusion and accessibility. More events for ECRs, by ECRs.
Throughout this piece, I’ve tried to work in the voices of the organizing committee to try and give insight into what it was like to plan this event over the course of a year and half. Now I want to share my feelings. I joined the DMCA organizing committee, not at the very beginning, but very much in its early days. I saw an opportunity to gain experience planning an academic event and learn from more experienced colleagues. But, more importantly, I saw an opportunity to spend more time with people I consider my friends. I think like many of us in academia, especially at the start, I have regularly had doubts as to whether I want to stay in this world. And I think if I had chosen another discipline, I would have already left. But what keeps me in EMCAIL are the people. They are brilliant, collaborative, supportive, funny, and motivating in ways that I think are special to EMCAIL. I hope the first iteration of the DMCA reflected the people in EMCAIL, and I can’t wait to see what future ECRs do with the conference.