Beyond 3-day Conferences: From annual rituals to academic communities

Across universities and academic associations, conference planning is a ritual. Each year, conference committees are formed, venues booked, calls for papers crafted, keynote profiles announced and statements on sustainability and inclusion posted. Several conferences follow the same rushed routines, set within a performative atmosphere where speed trumps substance: parallel overpacked 10/15‑minute presentations, sprint clarifications in place of expanded dialogue, awards and a gala.

Almost immediately, organizers announce the next host city and dates and institutional energy reorients to the next edition. The ideas, collaborations and relationships developed through the conference are often given little time or support to continue as scholarly exchanges during conferences are squeezed into packed sessions and hurried corridors.  How can we interrupt this cycle to cultivate enduring research communities rather than simply another conference iteration? Whilst we acknowledge the diversity of professional academic organizations, this blog primarily critiques ‘international and prestigious’ conferences. We also contend that our underlying arguments are also significantly relevant to smaller-scale academic organizations and meetings.

As PhD researchers and co-organizers of university conferences and participants at multiple conferences, we argue that academic groupings should move beyond the conference as commodity and towards the conference as community. This shift requires recognising the deeper structures that shape academic gatherings and then redesigning conferences across three layers: formats, infrastructures and temporalities, within and beyond the conferences, that align with different ethics.

Our perspectives are inseparable from our positionalities, and our own bodies have registered the costs that annual formats impose on early-career researchers. Overpacked panels, 10-minute sprints, rushed clarifications in place of dialogue, a performative atmosphere where speed trumped substance are exactly the accelerations and inequities feminist critics describe, and we have lived them directly. Marta, for example, arrived at a conference in Rabat near the end of a demanding PhD year and ran a high fever by day three; a conference in Turin became overwhelming after a single day. 

Similarly, in a post-conference organizer’s meeting, Luqman proposed that the values underpinning the qualitative research conference theme – such as justice, equity, sustainability, reflexivity, positionality and diversity – should be cultivated within the organizing team, beyond immediate planning for the next conference.

The conference ritual persists for good reasons: conferences offer visibility, networking, recognition and a concentrated dose of novelty. Yet many of the features that make conferences acceptable within a neoliberal university’s programme (e.g. density, speed, spectacle) also hollow out the conditions for dialogue, relational exchanges and care. Taking several uncosted days to think slowly, exchange ideas and be creative sits at odds with the logic of contemporary academic management, which seeks to cost and commodify every working hour.

The costs fall heaviest on those with the least protection and the greatest mobility demands: early‑career and PhD researchers. Illness, fatigue and exhaustion are not side effects; they are evidence of systemic strain. The travel grind, compressed schedules and 10-minute performances, whether as organizers or as attendees, yield what Rosalind Gill calls academia’s ‘hidden injuries’: stress, anxiety and burnout masked as professionalism. Slow scholarship reminds us that thinking needs digestion, reflection and care; events meant to nourish ideas too often leave bodies depleted.

Behind every polished programme also lies an invisible economy of unpaid or underpaid labour, including graduate assistants setting up rooms; convenors maintaining lists; ECRs paying fees and travel. Academic mobility is stratified by funding, citizenship, and visas; who can cross borders (and at what cost) is unequally distributed. Metrics intensify these inequalities, as audit culture reorganizes universities around what ‘counts’ and pressures scholars to treat their abilities, professional identities and reputations as forms of capital to be continually measured, developed and promoted. This resembles Foucault’s account of the neoliberal subject as ‘an entrepreneur of himself’.

Researchers prioritise CV‑friendly venues over spaces that nourish community, what Swartz calls ‘destination conferences’, whereby academics converge in ‘international’ exotic far-away locations.  In addition, intimate choices, such as what to apply for and what to prioritise, tilt toward visibility and the accumulation of capital and knowledge. The result is an audit‑ready persona rewarded over intellectual risk or collective experiment.

Remaking conferences as communities requires action on three design layers: format, infrastructure and temporality. Concerning formatting, this means fewer papers and more time for dialogue, formats that encourage listening.

Cultivating conferences as communities also means building infrastructures of care that enable all participants to be present and known, not only those who can afford to outsource care work or whose bodies conform to ableist assumptions. Care is constitutive of knowledge, not auxiliary: without attention, responsibility and reciprocity, knowledge does not circulate. We must treat childcare, translation, visa restrictions and accessibility as priorities that determine who can participate in scholarly life at all.

The temporal logic of conferencing is currently ritualistic: two or three days of acceleration, followed by dispersal and silence until the next cycle. Conferences increasingly follow the boom-and-bust rhythm of neoliberal cycles: intense investment and hype around a single edition, then abrupt withdrawal of attention until the next call for panels and papers. Once consumed, they leave little behind beyond a line on a CV and, at most, a connection for another research commodity.

The dominant conference model has normalised the expectation that attendance is worthwhile primarily when accompanied by a presentation and not participation. This increasingly reduces conferences to platforms for showcasing research rather than spaces for listening, learning, dialogue and sustained scholarly exchange. Already, a number of professional associations, such as Middle East Studies Association (MENA) and Federation of European Risk Management Associations (FERMA) are reconsidering the frequency of academic conferences, whether annual or longer intervals, to foster productive dialogue and allow attendees to build on the relationships and collaborations established at previous academic meetings.

If we are serious about community, we must treat continuity as integral rather than accidental. This could be done through quarterly reading groups, newsletters, peer‑mentoring circles, open salons, co‑authored reflections, federated conference model and shared repositories.

There are also good examples of conferences that emphasise continuity and social justice. For example, scientific associations can curate Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) activities that diversify participation and explicitly address how whiteness structures inclusion. In the same vein, EADI’s (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) Gender Justice Working Group uses social media to foster justice for women. Two different Development association working groups have also merged together to become the Joint EADI-DSA (Development Studies Association) political economy and political ecology of land, labour and food working group and co-organize seminars in-between conferences. Lastly, the Rural Geography Research Group (RGS-IBG) has established recurring online coffee meetings for postgraduate researchers focusing on conversation and peer support.

Beneath structure lies epistemology. The dominant format treats knowledge as performance while feminist, decolonial, Indigenous and relational epistemologies insist knowledge is situated, partial and co‑produced. Haraway’s situated knowledges resists the illusion of neutrality and bell hooks frames knowledge‑sharing as a practice of freedom. Taking these insights seriously means shifting from stage to commons: ideas are lived with, interrogated and revised; disagreement is practiced as care; the aim is collective transformation, not individual accumulation.

Based on studies about academic complicity in the genocide in Gaza, conferences must consistently link disciplinary expertise to global and social issues. For example, beyond issuing statements on major global pressures, as some associations have done, including the  International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) and EASA’s (European Association of Social Anthropologists) statements on Gaza, – conferences should produce collective outputs, such as manifestos, co‑authored reflections and repositories, calls to action and commitments to translate conference discourse into institutional and societal change. Conference‑as‑a-community recognises scholarship as ongoing practice oriented to social change.

Conclusion

Taken together, our perspectives converge on a common argument: reimagine academic gatherings not as rituals of accumulation but as ongoing communities of practice and care. Concretely, this means designing formats that enable slow dialogue; building care infrastructures as epistemic conditions rather than optional extras; and committing to afterlives that keep communities alive between editions. Politically and epistemically, it means resisting the equation of speed with value and performance with knowledge. Organizational change is necessary, but insufficient without a companion shift in how we understand knowledge itself—relational, contested, situated and common.

Driven by neoliberalism and academic capitalism, the commodification of conferences represents the fundamental structure of contemporary higher education that cannot be sidelined. However, with less involvement from government higher education policy levers, conferences offer more space for rapid radical-transformation. If we can align formats, infrastructures, epistemologies and temporalities with that understanding, conferences can cease to be a yearly commodity to living commons where scholarship is created, shared, received, questioned and transformed together.