coe125_displacements.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, there, everybody listening to cultures of energy. Welcome, welcome and welcome. This is our first summer edition. I feel like it's really summer now.

Speaker2: [00:00:32] This is the first edition where you have given your entire opening monologue on your side,

Speaker1: [00:00:39] Like laying down on my side. You may not like not my side of the story. Very creature lying, lying on my side. Not like because it could be my side of the story, which I guess it is also this. This is all on my side.

Speaker2: [00:00:54] It sure is. Well, we had some exciting news this morning. We've got what is a final or very nearly final cut of our glacier movie? That's right. And there'll be a lot more info on that to come

Speaker1: [00:01:06] As we're going to like saturate this podcast.

Speaker2: [00:01:08] Oh, it'll be saturated, believe me. But for those of you who are thinking about, well, you know, I'm not quite sure what I want to do on August 17th at five p.m., but I do so in the neighborhood of Reykjavik.

Speaker1: [00:01:21] I think my wife might want to be in Reykjavik.

Speaker2: [00:01:24] Yeah, yeah. So you should all come. Everyone should come.

Speaker1: [00:01:26] It's going to be August 17, five p.m.. More details to watch. Very nice cinema

Speaker2: [00:01:32] Space. Beautiful place. Beautiful people. Yes.

Speaker1: [00:01:35] So and there will be outfits to be had, too.

Speaker2: [00:01:38] Yeah. Oh yeah. Glacial cosplay encouraged. Yeah. More details on that.

Speaker1: [00:01:44] More details forthcoming.

Speaker2: [00:01:45] And the arms race of dressmaking that's going on.

Speaker1: [00:01:49] Yeah, but you know what it's like for for a while there. It was a competition around hats. Remember, it was all about the hats and then are very wise. Friend Faris Al Dadar pointed out to me a couple of days ago. He's like, You don't wear a hat to a film opening. And I was like, Of course you don't. He's like, Hats are to be worn outside because they're for protection from the Sun. I mean, that's a kind of conventional way of thinking of a hat, but it's accurate, right? Hats are for outdoor activities, but more than that, like if you wear a gigantic, you know, tall structured hat at a film opening, you're going to be blocking someone's view. So it's true. You should not, should not be worn to film openings. And I can't believe it. I can't believe I didn't realize that months

Speaker2: [00:02:37] Earlier, I actually had not thought of the vision obstruction.

Speaker1: [00:02:40] Me neither until faras pointed out he's like, You don't? Well, that wasn't his point, but his point was you don't wear a hat to a film opening because it's a singularly an indoor event. Anyway, so we're off the hook with the hats. I mean, off the hook as in not responsible for them anymore, which is good. So anyhow, but some responsibility was taken for an amazing conference that just happened.

Speaker2: [00:03:02] Well, that's what we're going to talk about. Yeah, in the majority of this week's episode, we are doing a recap of the displacements twenty eighteen displacements one.

Speaker1: [00:03:14] We're talking about displacements, too.

Speaker2: [00:03:16] That's true, and that news is broken later on in the podcast. So, all right, you have pre broken that news.

Speaker1: [00:03:21] I didn't mean to pre break.

Speaker2: [00:03:22] All right. It's all right. But I had a chance at the annual Society for Cultural Anthropology Meetings Board meeting, rather in Chapel Hill to sit down with Anand Pandian, with Andrea Mooloolaba and with our own Marcella Flom. All three of whom played key roles in the making of this event to talk with them about this kind of unique experiment in virtual conferencing. And I just want to explain the format for everyone here because I think it'll make help make more sense of the conversation that follows. So essentially what SCA did. The Society for Cultural Anthropology this year as an experiment was to try a kind of hybrid conference model instead of having us all go and gather in one place. We all uploaded ten minute videos based on presentations, and those presentations were turned out. First of all that there were way more submissions than anyone had anticipated ended up being 60 hours of content. Wow, that they streamed twice. So and they streamed it on different time zones so that people all over the world could get to

Speaker1: [00:04:32] Write so they could encounter it at a convenient time for them not have to wake up at 3:00 in the morning to watch

Speaker2: [00:04:38] A panel. It wasn't like watching like European football in the United States. The idea was to make it as possible to watch in a convenient time in Jakarta as it would be to watch it in Seattle.

Speaker1: [00:04:49] And I think one of the key things that I was impressed with is that there were groups viewing

Speaker2: [00:04:55] Yes, the notes,

Speaker1: [00:04:56] The note there called nodes. I was going to call them pods, but they're called nodes, the nodes where you get a group of people together to collectively encounter the presentations and talk about them so that you have a kind of live experience as well. And that was it's not just you and your screen, because that can be a little

Speaker2: [00:05:14] Alienating, right? And I think that was the brilliance of it is that it's not really a virtual conference. It's a hybrid conference that has. A kind of a broadcast online screening element, but then is matched up with these in-person gatherings of, you know, maybe as many as 50 people getting together to watch the presentations and then have a discussion and then sometimes local people, they some, some nude set up their own, you know, panels with their own local people on the same theme and talking about it. And some had kind of interlocutors. And it was great because every node kind of went its own way and they were quite experimental in how they set up their gatherings and adapted them to local circumstances, right?

Speaker1: [00:05:55] And even some people are doing some hybrid nodes where they were having sort of live encounters, but online, yes, while also screening the panels so that you could be in like a Zoom chat room kind of thing with, you know, five or 10 other people who would be watching the panel at the same time. And so you could chat and do text back and forth, right? So that's an even kind of more meta version of the live in person. I mean, it's not in person in that case, it's online, but at least you're having live interaction with people. And so I think that one of the other really impressive thing is is that there was at least one node, if not more, on every single continent on the planet except for Antarctica. But that's OK.

Speaker2: [00:06:38] Well, there may have been a penguin node. It just, you know, weren't able to communicate

Speaker1: [00:06:41] Where some were some, some some some scientists note over there. Maybe we just didn't know about it.

Speaker2: [00:06:48] This is possible

Speaker1: [00:06:49] Out

Speaker2: [00:06:50] There. There's one continent on this planet that needs 60 hours of original content. It's probably Antarctica because it gets chilly and boring down there anyway. So a very interesting conference in experiment in low carbon conference making also an experiment in trying to increase the accessibility of our conversations and the global city of our conversations. And as Simone was saying through the social media, people were keeping up a kind of conversation about what was happening on the streams. At the same time, this was happening in person. So it was very cool, kind of multi textured, layered, nuanced type of event. And we talk in the conversation that follows about some of the challenges of setting this up. Some of the great things about it, some of the things that didn't go quite as well. But the great thing is that for for those of you who are interested in low carbon conference making or in kind of decarbonising academic life, there's some really useful tips in what follows about how you can actually set up. And by the end, we get to the point you can do this conference. You could do a conference like this for less than $100. So just I just want to throw that out there. That's a teaser. Now listen on if you are at all intrigued by this model. Please get in contact with us at the Society for Cultural Anthropology because it's meant to be reproduced. It's something that we were really aspiring to do is not just do a one off, but create a prototype of a new

Speaker1: [00:08:10] Right look a little suitcase package that you could kind of just reproduce with different content year after year after year.

Speaker2: [00:08:17] Before we move on to that, though, I wanted to quickly shout out the Golden State of California. And you know why? Because there was some news this morning that the state of California, the very state that produced so many how fellow podcaster here has now put in as a requirement that all new buildings over three stories. And that includes also single family homes will now have to have solar energy. Great. We'll have some of some kind of some kind. And but it's really leaning towards rooftop solar. I think I'd have to look in the details more. And there's some complaint about, well, why aren't they prioritizing building big solar parks? But in terms of distributed generation and distributed usage, I think this is a great step forward and it should be a real boost in the arm for the rooftop solar industry, which has taken some hits with the Trump regime. Yeah, exactly. So isn't that cool? Yeah, good. So just how in the world? I think that's pretty cool stuff.

Speaker1: [00:09:13] Yes. Go, you

Speaker2: [00:09:14] Guys have some sun out there.

Speaker1: [00:09:16] I've heard, yeah, there's some sun. And you know, there's some issues with the big solar parks, too, because they take quite a bit of space. So it's a trade off. But rooftop seems the logical next step right now anyhow, because a lot of that space goes unused. So good for California. I thought, you're going to say something about Golden State Warriors, but that's probably next week. We'll just save that for

Speaker2: [00:09:37] A special basketball edition of the Culture Strategy podcast at some point in the future. Yeah, indeed.

Speaker1: [00:09:43] Maybe even next week, because I think next week we're going to go see a game, right?

Speaker2: [00:09:47] We are. That's just going to be kind of exciting. So, yeah, so

Speaker1: [00:09:50] Yes, I'm sure everyone's waiting with bated breath to hear our report.

Speaker2: [00:09:54] But yeah, the energy and environmental dimensions of professional basketball. Listen, and there was something else, something else in the news about Kinder Morgan. They had a shareholder meeting. You see that piece and now

Speaker1: [00:10:06] I had different

Speaker2: [00:10:07] News. But go ahead the shareholders. I'll just be quick because I actually am a little sketchy on the details. The shareholders approved a couple of resolutions that the company did not support, but the shareholders overrode them, and it was about creating a sustainability plan. For this pipeline company and trying to take the issues somehow of climate change and indigenous rights more seriously, but it seems it seems pretty un binding, it's probably it's like a symbolic step in the right direction. But what kinds of actual effects it will have? I don't know. But there were some First Nations folks from Canada who came to the Kinder Morgan board meeting this week and I guess made a very moving presentation.

Speaker1: [00:10:45] Good. Wow.

Speaker2: [00:10:46] Great. That's something. Excellent little bits of progress here and there. So what are you going to say?

Speaker1: [00:10:49] I was going to say that not at the Kinder Institute at Rice University, but within the Department of Earth Sciences. Remember, I was talking about that gigantic, that huge set of research grants that were handed out by the EU and the UK and NSF to do this really extended research on glaciers and the ice sheet in Antarctica? Yes. And so it turns out that some of our local glaciologists are part of that big grant. So that was really exciting. So it was nice to see their names in the Houston Chronicle. Julia Weller at University of Houston and a post-doc here at Rice University named Lauren Simkins. And it must be John Anderson must be part of it, too, although I didn't see his name in the paper. But anyway, I thought it's happy to see some of our local folks taking part in that big project.

Speaker2: [00:11:40] My dad just sent me a link to my news to a promotional video from the University of Chicago college admissions with him as a Lego figure.

Speaker3: [00:11:48] Oh, cute.

Speaker1: [00:11:49] Ok, that's

Speaker2: [00:11:50] Good. That's just random. Yeah, well, it exists.

Speaker1: [00:11:52] He is a character. He's become a kind of he has cartoon. He has many cartoon forms. Now, if you add his second one,

Speaker2: [00:12:02] If you're looking for iconic combinations of height, mustache and bicycle, yeah, I don't think you can go farther than my dad, right? Good point. That's what it's all about.

Speaker1: [00:12:12] What's his? What's that that viral thing with Dean Bouvier? But is that what they call him?

Speaker2: [00:12:17] Dan Boyer? Dan is a hilarious Twitter account, too, which is based on the Spider-Man meme that has got my dad in it.

Speaker1: [00:12:25] Spiderman, OK, I guess. Live. Or is that

Speaker2: [00:12:28] Old? I don't know if it's being added to, but it's definitely worth going back and checking out. I think it's due and b o y i r t l s, but there may be some other things in there anyway. Boy, you don't miss it. It is hilarious. Yeah. But with that, let's turn on to the inspirational life and future of low carbon academic conferencing, shall we?

Speaker1: [00:12:51] Yes, that sounds like

Speaker2: [00:12:52] A great plan. What are you going to say? Go boy. Yea, go what?

Speaker1: [00:12:56] Go there. Go go displacements.

Speaker2: [00:13:19] Welcome back to the culture's energy podcast, I'm speaking loud because of how I'm positioned relative to the shoe that's holding the microphone. You know who I am. I want everyone else to know who you are. Introductions, please.

Speaker4: [00:13:31] Anand Pandian.

Speaker5: [00:13:32] Andre, I'm Marcello Flam.

Speaker2: [00:13:35] And what are we here talking about? We're talking about the amazing success of the SCA. Twenty eighteen conference displacements, which broke ground in so many different ways, but particularly of interest to this group of podcast listeners, is its emphasis upon reducing the carbon footprint of travel and creating new innovative experimental modes of gathering and communication. And we are beat like we've been talking for. We had a 12 hour meeting. We just finished. So if anyone misspeaks, please, you know, have some mercy. So where are we going to start with this? I'm on you came up with this idea. I think we were there in Cornell University. Was it two years ago?

Speaker4: [00:14:16] Hmm.

Speaker2: [00:14:17] I feel like that's when you first pulled me aside and told me the idea, and I'm going to go on record as saying I was not one of the believers from the beginning. I only became a believer later on as the process evolved.

Speaker4: [00:14:28] Well, I was pulled aside and said, Hey, how about doing the next conference?

Speaker2: [00:14:34] Who too stuck you with that?

Speaker4: [00:14:36] Well, our our very devoted leadership at the Society for Cultural Anthropology, which is truly one of the most visionary, experimental and super cool spaces in our field of anthropology. We're pretty awesome. Yeah, we are pretty awesome. So, so we we explore, we explore all kinds of cool ideas and we do them in unusual ways. But it also does sometimes involve getting the work done. And some of that work involves putting this conference on every two years. And at that time, because really there was no one else on the board who was in a position to take on the next conference. It sort of fell in my lap and I started thinking about whether it would make sense to have everyone, to invite everyone to sort of show up who could show up in Baltimore two years from that point, or whether it might make sense to try something a bit different because

Speaker2: [00:15:36] The first idea you had was a wire, the wire themed SCA conference. As I remember, we're going to go to the vacants and just have the conference there, right? Right. And then, OK, so then. But that idea evolved a little bit over time

Speaker4: [00:15:49] Because Baltimore is also evolving. It is more and we're more than the wire.

Speaker2: [00:15:53] That's right.

Speaker4: [00:15:54] Of course you are. And we need every occasion to remind the rest of the world

Speaker2: [00:15:57] That that's the case. I'm just saying we are rewatching the wire right now and it holds up. Hmm. Obviously, this is sort of a new conference. Ok, just placements. That wasn't the title when you first came through, but it was an idea to do a conference that was virtual. And I can't remember exactly how you described it at the time, but I think you had the bones of it right from the beginning.

Speaker4: [00:16:20] Well, no, it wasn't really that. It was more just a sense of frustration and unease at the strangeness of the anthropological conference. Generally, that's where a lot of this came from. For me, the fact that we, as anthropologists take so much pains and work so carefully to put ourselves in these spaces that are unlike our own spaces and environments and circumstances in which people live, that are so dissimilar from the ones that we come from and and often involve putting ourselves in conditions of of great hardship and discomfort. And and and so much of the work that we do has to do with conveying what it's like to live in such environments and in such circumstances. But the way that we do that in the name of conferences is to all show up at a hotel somewhere or a convention somewhere, a convention center somewhere where it's so air conditioned that you're freezing, where you

Speaker2: [00:17:27] Have really eliminated where it's

Speaker4: [00:17:29] Where, where you're basically speaking under giant chandeliers, there are ornate carpets on the floor and ridiculous wallpaper on the walls, and you're surrounded if you're in the audience by hundreds of empty chairs and somewhere in front of you. In the far distance is a podium where someone very small from the standpoint of where you are is trying to say something very poignant and meaningful about what it's like to be in sub-Saharan Africa or in equatorial South America or in whatever in some other place that feels nothing like where you are. And yet you're somehow charged with conjuring up the sense of what it's like to be there and what it's like to live there and what it's. Like to bring insights from their back to this completely ridiculous place that you've been given to try to convey this in the form of knowledge, and this has always struck me as a little strange. And so a lot of it simply began with the question Could we do things a little differently? Would we have to just take for granted that if it were a conference, it would have to happen in a conference space?

Speaker2: [00:18:42] Yeah. All right. Let's open it up. When you two heard about this idea, what did you think first impressions?

Speaker5: [00:18:47] Well, I remember when you when you brought this to the board, we were we were in the snowy Twin Cities. But but

Speaker4: [00:18:54] There was there

Speaker5: [00:18:55] Was a setup, right? You didn't sort of foist it on us called, but you, but you sort of made a like a media object that you shared with us to kind of to kind of evoke what this might be like. And I think you sort of felt like like you wanted to sort of enact this thing that you were sort of imagining, like, do you like what? What can you talk about that that first sort of video that you made?

Speaker4: [00:19:19] Well, we read ethnography. We teach ethnography. We know because we are in the Society for Cultural Anthropology and in the Society for Culture Anthropology. We know that at some level we come in the wake of writing culture that we, you know, whatever it is that we do in the name of contemporary anthropology, is tied up with arguments and conversations around the history of writing and expression and anthropology. And we know because of all of that that there's something peculiar about the ethnographic medium that it asks of its readers a kind of immersion that it asks them to enter into another space, that it asks them to imagine themselves in this other space knowing full well, that that's fictive and yet asking them nonetheless to pretend that they're slipping into a different kind of space. I simply wanted to give you guys the sense that pursuing a conversation, sorry, a conference in this way might be another way of broaching that possibility that we might actually use an online platform, a multimedia conference platform, as a way of radicalizing and accentuating that endeavor to displace in sensory and sort of deeply felt experiential terms. Those are engaging with the material by actually using that content to take them somewhere else. And so I felt like the only way to kind of convey that possibility would be to take everyone on a walk through the woods near where I live and say, Imagine if we were conversing in a conference context that really involved all of us together walking down this path with me. Imagine conference presentations that could actually make that kind of movement through space. Part and parcel of the material itself.

Speaker5: [00:21:18] That's what I remember. I remember thinking that it that it wasn't more mediated than your sort of garden variety conference. That in some funny way is less mediated, right? That you were sort of inviting us into this space sort of sort of accompanying you through this landscape that you walk to work, but also that you're sort of thinking about critically. So, so right. But it's differently mediated, but it's not as though sort of one is is flesh and blood and the other is is ones and zeros, right? That it that it sort of it's staged the question of this sort of remove from these sort of spaces that that we write about and it sort of invited us to reflect on those and to write to tell those stories differently. Or it sort of gave us a chance to do the to do the conference to sort of convey that that thing that we came to sort of say in a different way.

Speaker4: [00:22:09] Well, Andrea, Marcel and I were sort of in the thick of it in terms of organizing the thing and helping to make it happen. You were a wonderful presence in terms of the conference in terms of bringing it home to another place. Right. You organize this amazing node in Toronto. As conference organizers, we were constantly looking out for the latest news from Toronto because it seemed as though so much was happening. Where you were was what we're saying, born out at all by your experience of it, like here is this conference. Where is it happening? It's hard to say at some level it's happening in the server rooms at Johns Hopkins University. At another level, it's happening wherever these different things were recorded, wherever people were, when they recorded them. And you've got them at your disposal there in Toronto. I mean, does any of this come through what it was like

Speaker3: [00:22:57] For you guys, maybe to go back to the question that Dominic us, I think which is, you know, what kind of drew you into all of this? And I first heard about it through your presentation of it. And when would we WASHINGTON at the last meeting in November and I mean, I was just immediately sold. By, on the one hand, knowing that it'll be a set of stellar panels, but then also by this challenge that you were sort of posing to us to sort of ground and in flesh and in place these papers that would be sort of floating around in the ether. And so I like this this idea of the challenge and the sort of hailing us into trying to create our own forms on the ground. And so like you said, the conference form itself was being exploded, but you were simultaneously also inviting us to create our own forms. And so I knew that I didn't want to do it in the Department of Anthropology at Toronto, precisely because we have a very, very dry, boring gray, you know, big kind of room where we have a colloquium and so on.

Speaker2: [00:24:04] It's like the worst room in all of anthropology. I just get it and never been there. And believe me, I was so terrible.

Speaker3: [00:24:11] Well, yeah, our department moved into what I think used to be the pharmaceutical institute. And imagine. Yeah. And so the key then was to sort of brainstorm with some of our wonderful students about where to have it. And I had a conversation with one of our students who was sort of in in the thick of it with me from the beginning, A. Solangi. And in that conversation, we realized, Wait a minute, our library has this amazing movie theater, and I don't want to go into too much detail here. But I think the challenge for me was exactly the question of in freshman like, how do we actually make it in the flesh thing? And then also to, you know, yeah, rethink the form itself. And what was great was that we not only had the movie theater where we sort of livestreamed these amazing set of panels over two days, but we had a series of other spaces where the conference itself could then take on its own form, so sort of exist in excess of the actual panels and people sort of spilled out and created their own little group. So we had an additional room that we had rented where suddenly, you know, the undergraduates broke off and said, We don't want to talk with the provost anymore. We don't watch the the ethnographic movies. So they did their own little thing for a while. Hmm. So it was this challenge in informed that I love from the beginning, and it was pretty amazing.

Speaker4: [00:25:29] But do you feel that stuff from somewhere else had landed in your midst and that you were then taken somewhere else while you were encountering that? Or did it feel more that this was just another occasion to have your own conversations where you were? Do you know what I'm saying?

Speaker3: [00:25:47] Yes, I know what you're saying. I think absolutely there were these moments of sort of transportation where, you know, they were 30 people in the room and we were watching the plenary. Jason de Leon, I think, was an all time favorite for a lot of us. And then there was some quite crucial moments where we absolutely managed. I mean, that was the thing. Like after every panel, we, you know, we had hosts, every panel had a host almost. And with this host, we tried to figure out, you know, can we can we pose a question to these, these panelists? And so we talked to the Greeks that that presentation about resistance to what was it called again, Kunst the the Kunst, the two Greek anarchists who took us through

Speaker4: [00:26:34] Athens, Athens, New Berlin

Speaker3: [00:26:36] And the new Berlin, where you can't, you know, Berlin, you can't find resistance anymore. And we shot them quick message afterwards and were like, This really resonated what? I can't remember what we said. But he responded immediately. And he said, Oh, I think we said, Are you responding to sort of the pornography of suffering that have descended upon Greece? Because of course, we know that lots of people are in Greece right now because they're fascinated by the abject nature of Europe's periphery, right? And he said, that's exactly what we were reacting against. And in fact, the Guardian. The newspaper just recently wanted to organize a poverty tour in Athens. And we said, Fuck you. And so it's always this was sort of a reaction to representations of of of of Greece right now, and they somehow felt the urge to convey this to us after protests as well. I thought that was quite poignant.

Speaker4: [00:27:27] And you're saying that you were watching what was passing through this conference portal that was coming out of Johns Hopkins University there in this cool room in Toronto, Canada and watching a presentation that had come to us shot in Greece and having taken it in, wrote to the people who are still then in Greece and they wrote, Right back to you. Absolutely. And you fed it right back into our conference piece that was still hosted. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:27:56] I mean, there were some cool moments where the whole rule room sort of collectively squealed a little bit like how they're responding to us. That's cool. We had a few moments like that.

Speaker2: [00:28:07] So tell us a little bit about, I mean, just to take a step back about the organization of the event. You said there was a lot of trial and error in this process. Do you want to talk about some of the highlights and lowlights of that, of that process, of actually making this thing work because, you know, it's a brilliant idea, but then actually figuring out the infrastructure to make it happen when this really has never been done before must have been pretty challenging.

Speaker4: [00:28:29] Well, Marcel had the most beautiful way of putting it, which he did on Twitter, that we built this road as we walked in. So I think that is really your question to feel.

Speaker5: [00:28:40] Yeah, it's Paolo Ferri. I insisted that I couldn't. I couldn't take

Speaker2: [00:28:46] It for a famous virtual conference organizer

Speaker5: [00:28:50] Will claim as part of the, you know, the lineage. What made it so interesting was sort of feeling as though we needed to invent a sort of format and kind of an infrastructure that was sort of adequate to to the sort of experimental nature of this. And so, you know, balancing things like liveness, right? So we talked a bit about sort of wanting it to feel like an event that was happening synchronously, right? So that wherever you were and you sort of had the sense that that this thing was sort of happening simultaneously elsewhere and sort of designing channels to sort of tap into that. But at the same time, we knew that that, you know, no one was going to sit by their computers or in the library sort of movie theater for four, four, three days, right? So there was this sort of on demand character, too. So how can we sort of kind of create ways of of accessing this that sort of worked around people's lives? We understood that if you go to a conference, you know, a useful thing about that is that you're away from your job and from your sort of family and from right, you've sort of carved out this time to be to be present and to be focused. And so, you know, even as we were sort of extending this invitation for people to to engage from where they were right, I think we knew that that we also had to sort of know to hook that up with the other things that would be happening in people's lives at the same time. I think for me, a real sort of interesting issue to think through was that of preservation too, right? So there was a sense in which, you know, there were ephemeral things that were happening and there were we wanted there.

Speaker5: [00:30:20] This part of this sense of liveliness is that you're in the room and either you're there or you're not. But I think what what I what I was concerned about, I used to be a librarian, as you know, and what what worried me was the idea that all of this stuff would just sort of live in the cloud somewhere and eventually they would change the password. Or we would just, you know that that that the fruits of this would just sort of dissipate. So I mean, I think a kind of a cool early decision was sort of, you know, looping in the libraries at Johns Hopkins University and sort of saying one, can you help us build this platform? But then also once it's a wrap, then what happens? Right? And sort of can we can we tap into your expertise and can we say, you know, maybe not everyone wants their content to live on, but for those who do? Can you sort of commit to working with us not just a year from now, but five years from now, 20 years from now? So when you're not at Hopkins anymore, right, there'll be someone there whose job it will be to make sure that that content is still accessible. That's the time horizon that sort of that that librarians are sort of equipped to think on in a way that I think we as scholars aren't always

Speaker4: [00:31:28] But in terms of what you were saying about not knowing what would happen and trying to kind of plan for that. One thing that really kind of pulls me over is that I still don't know what happened, and I don't just mean that as a way of saying, how the hell did we do this? I mean that very specifically in the sense that because this was a distributed conference, because it was a hybrid form, because we had put up this virtual platform but invited people to form their own local nodes, such as what you guys were doing in Toronto because so many of them arose because there were literally dozens of them, because they were in cities as dispersed as Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Ketzel Tango in Guatemala and Shanghai and Jakarta and Singapore in East Asia and in Southeast Asia and Kolkata and Delhi and Bangalore and India, and ever so many places in North America, including the fact that our conference was being streamed continuously at another anthropological conference where they'd set up a media room at the Southern Anthropological Society for people to kind of come in and out of that space watching what we were doing, wherever what we were doing was happening.

Speaker4: [00:32:42] We just couldn't keep track of all this stuff that was happening in all these places. I had no idea until you set it until now that you had hosts for these different. The idea never struck us, and I didn't even know that you would use that idea there. And this was actually quite unsettling, both just not knowing what people would do with it. Then, as it began not knowing what people were doing with it, not knowing what they had made of, what they had done with it, or what they hadn't done with it. There was so much uncertainty. Opacity around the form, but of course, that also gave it, you know, a tremendous amount of excitement in those moments when you would get these glimmers, these flashes, these connections between places. When people in Jakarta were giving us live videos via Twitter of themselves watching a plenary presentation that had just, you know, that had been shot in Colombia or people in Morocco sharing pictures of themselves watching something that had been filmed on the US-Mexico border and that presenter Jason writing back from Arizona saying, Hello, Tangier. These were some of those serendipitous moments that were really pretty cool.

Speaker2: [00:34:04] Yeah, absolutely. And not only were the nodes using their experimental space and all sorts of creative ways across the world self-organizing. Yet within this broader framework, also, you had the sense that you were part. And again, the way I experienced the event ness of it was through the social media feed because I had I was at home and watching it by myself, but I had the feed up in the corner of my screen and then I had another window open with Twitter running in it, and I was kind of able to like watch what people were saying in real time and that that made me feel as though I was at least eavesdropping in on a conversation. At the same time, I was doing other tasks that was kind of another way to experience this event.

Speaker4: [00:34:45] Now let me ask you two questions. Sure, you might answer with honesty. Or perhaps not. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:34:52] Well, I'm well known is perhaps not on this podcast.

Speaker4: [00:34:55] Yeah, exactly. So one, how much attention were you paying? And there to be conditions like physical presence to force people to pay more attention or people next to them will nudge them or notice that they're checking out and to given that you were there by yourself and it was no more than a window or two on your screen. Did you feel like you were in something? Because the conceit on our part was that you might write

Speaker2: [00:35:25] And you might not,

Speaker4: [00:35:26] And you might not.

Speaker2: [00:35:27] Yeah, exactly. Well, I'll say, I mean, honestly, I was able to follow maybe like three or four panels worth checking in and out. And this is again the problem of, as Marcel was saying, not having the excuse to get away from your daily routine meant your day is still filled with appointments and you're kind of having to jump in and out. But what I liked about it and this is what I found very affirming about the whole event is when I was sinking into it, I could also feel that other people were sinking into it too by watching what was happening in social media. So I could understand the enthusiasm. And when I wasn't on, I was kind of checking what was happening on social media that kind of still see what people were talking about and what they were excited about. So it was kind of the feeling of following, you know, some kind of a big sports event or some other kind of event that's unfolding. And maybe you're not like all the way connected to it, but still you're paying attention to what's going on. And I do think probably that's a more impoverished way than, say, being in the node and really being with like 20 other people. But because Marcel was building the site, he was not organising our node because he would have been to person to organise RAICES node. So there was actually no node and rice, believe it or not, which is too bad. That's something we should have done, I think.

Speaker2: [00:36:39] Hmm. Two things that are great about this model that seem to address things. We talk about a lot but don't always make a lot of progress on. One is how do you create greater accessibility to the types of intellectual production that we're all excited about doing in the global north. But all the circuits and information and exchange that go, for example, between the United States and Europe and or North America and Europe. You know, it's often hard for other countries where there are resources there for people to fly right and participate. So there's that accessibility side. But the other side of it, which is an increasingly I'm hearing in the kind of environmental studies conversations is the carbon issue. And just it's it is very carbon intensive to fly a bunch of people to a place for that experience. So then you really have to. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to move everyone to this place because it's not as though we're not distracted at the AA meetings, right or the regular? It's not as though we're not kind of half paying attention to what's going on there, too. My experience has always kind of being sort of pulled in a different direction, and maybe it was because this was exciting and different. I was paying more attention to it. I don't know. So talk to you about carbon. Talk to me about accessibility. How much were these things you were thinking about?

Speaker4: [00:37:53] Well, one of the inspirations for the conference was it was from an environmental humanities center at UC Santa Barbara, who had put on a nearly carbon neutral conference in the environmental humanities. Ken Hilton at UCSB had organized this. The previous. Here and not only organise this, but wrote a really, really helpful white paper, which you should share with your folks. Sure, if they'd be interested in looking at it about how to put on an event like this, and that definitely gave us a lot of insight into how we might put this forward and also frankly sensitized us further to the carbon impact of the kind of academic travel that we do so routinely. There is, in fact, a network of people who are trying to reduce the carbon impact of academic livelihood and academic travel. More specifically called the fly less network, they actually got in touch with us and interviewed us about the initiative because they'd heard what we were doing. It's something that people are beginning to get aware of, and it was one of the founding rationales for trying this out. Could we find a way of bringing people together without having to recapitulate this ongoing carbon footprint associated with getting together, most especially getting together for these short bursts of time in a particular place and then going back to where we come from, rather than the more immersive, longer term exposure to other places that we that we do when we do fieldwork. But of course, the other side of it has to do, as you said, with with access. And if we weren't expecting people to all show up at one place, could we open up this space of conversation to people who wouldn't be able to afford to fly out there to find themselves a place to stay, to feed themselves, for those days to play, to pay registration fees, which can sometimes themselves be really expensive to do all of that? For what? As a as a presenter, for the chance

Speaker2: [00:40:03] To wait in line for coffee for an hour at a Starbucks in a hotel,

Speaker4: [00:40:08] Right? Or, you know, to get feedback on a talk and then you walk into a room and don't we all have don't we all know this experience of walking into a room and just that slight disappointment

Speaker2: [00:40:22] Of, Oh,

Speaker4: [00:40:23] Well, all right, well, we don't have to start on time. Ok, all right. Yeah, I know. But let's just wait, a couple of you know, you'll just wait a couple more minutes and let's just circle.

Speaker5: [00:40:33] Yeah, yeah. Right? It's actually better anyway, right?

Speaker4: [00:40:37] We'll just have a nice close conversation right now. Forget about the fact here. I know there's an echo, but that's OK. There's just just moving a little, you know, who hasn't been disappointed by the gap between the promise of exposure and conversation and and and vivacity and the actuality of the empty conference room. We were gratified beyond measure to discover when we added up our numbers, when we added up the number of people who tuned in to the live stream. The number of people who tuned in to these individual videos on demand. The number of people who had attended nodes like the amazing event that you guys put on the series of events that you guys put on Toronto, our attendance numbers were through the roof. Our average panel attendance for the Society for Cultural Anthropology Biennial this year, the average attendance at a panel was one hundred and twenty five. Whoa. The SCA biennial typically draws two hundred people total. On average, every one of our panels was seen by one hundred and twenty five people. The lowest attendance was around 50. The highest for a regular panel was well over two hundred. The plenary over five hundred. That's amazing. These are impossible numbers for a face to face conference now. Where were these people? Where were they coming from, so to speak? Our presenters were from, I think 30 plus countries are conference registrants were from somewhere between 40 and 50. Ultimately, over the days of the conference, people checked out our website from 90 different countries. If you look at the overall numbers, more than half of the people who are actively involved with the conference were outside the United States. This again, would be impossible with a regular place based conference, and a lot of them were coming from countries in which people are much less likely to be able to afford to attend a conference in North America.

Speaker4: [00:42:46] This actually one of the greatest logistical challenges. We faced a lot of them through the process, but Marcel would remember really well a certain weekend. It was Easter weekend, in fact, a weekend where many Americans or North Americans are sort of turning into their families and so on. We we were on this timeline. We had to get this stuff going and and we had finally come to a point where we could finalize a schedule and put it online because folks like Andrea and Toronto needed to know what would be on. And we we really had to kind of figure that out as quickly as we could, and it was already Easter weekend and the conference was due to go online on April 19th and we were still getting to that point because it took a lot of work to get to that point. And until that point, our thought was that we would stream the material, according to a North American workday, because we figured that that would really be the only practical way to do it. But once we figured out that we could set the stream up to function almost automatically, the question then arose If your people are all around the world, if they're tuning in from all these different time zones, why are you privileging your North American time zone? So we had to. I called up Marcel that weekend. He was about to get on a plane and I was like, Look, he was doing

Speaker5: [00:44:07] This, be honest in the airport lounge. And I was like, Look,

Speaker4: [00:44:13] Let's just do it. 20 like, let's do it on a twenty four hour basis, let's do it so that no matter what time zone you're in, there'll be something going at that time. And. And that was a big kink in the works, right?

Speaker5: [00:44:25] It took me a minute. I'm going to be on it. I was back and forth in the lounge by the snacks, and I and I wondered, I wondered if that was biting off a little more than we could chew. But I but I listen to what you said and in the sense that we had sort of built this, this capacity to sort of invite people into the conversation in this dispersed way and that at some point we sort of needed to get out of our own way, right? We needed to examine the question of whether the fact that the servers were in Baltimore meant that everything else had to be sort of synched up to Baltimore. Right, right. And you sort of had this image of like, you know, folks tune into the stream halfway across the world and this site that we've taken such pains to build is just blank. It's just sort of, you know, it's down. It's sleeping for for most of the day, right? Only to go live after everyone sleep in the world is asleep. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, no, I think it I think the conference challenge is to think about accessibility in different ways. So temporarily. I think in terms of visa access, right, I made that short video about ways in which, you know, for scholars to come to the United States from different parts of the world, even if they can afford it right means getting on a visa list. And sometimes there are travel bans and there are sort of administrations that that aren't sure that folks need to go in for these conferences. So there's that dimension of it.

Speaker5: [00:45:46] I think the sort of disability study is sort of community really reached out to us and sort of asked. All right, you're doing all this amazing media stuff. Are you thinking about accessibility in those terms as well, right? They were upset with us. Yes, be honest. That was a really interesting moment with comradely critique. He sort of they were. I mean, yeah, I think it was a real for me. I'll speak for myself. It was a real moment of asking what accessibility means that I work on an open access journal. I assume that access is sort of front and center to what we do. But there was a way in which asking people to caption panels is something that I think many folks have never thought about doing. They've never taken that on board as part of their scholarly practice, you know, and they're, you know, so we so we managed it for part of it and then we didn't manage it on the stream. I think there were sort of, you know, because we were learning on the fly, there were sort of things that we could do and things that we couldn't pull off. But for me, that was sort of a reorientation of my responsibility as a scholar to say, is my work accessible? And if I'm presenting in this format where it's cool that it can be seen across the world. But if someone I don't know, but if someone can't access it the next community over because there's no captions on it right, then there's then there are limitations to the kind of commitment to access

Speaker3: [00:47:00] To more things about access so that that does get lost. One thing we discussed today is that a next iteration of this conference might entail a much more direct soliciting of panels.

Speaker4: [00:47:12] Yes, from

Speaker3: [00:47:13] Locations where one wouldn't expect them. So Anandi talked about one jewel of a panel was a panel that was made entirely in Ethiopia, and a lot of us watched. But of course, there are dozens of panels like that we could also do in different languages. I mean, I can think of my, you know, very precarious Italian, Greek or and and or Greek colleagues who are doing amazing thinking about all sorts of themes that would have fit very well into the defacement theme. And you know, all of this could have been translated and sort of transported into into the conference so that with regards to accessibility, I think we can work on more and will be done. And the second thing I just wanted to note about our node, I might be going out on a limb here, but I think it's true. I don't think there's really ever been an event like this at Toronto, where undergraduates and graduate students, our professors came together in in a conference node where we actually watched each other. Well, we also had the undergraduate panel. Mm hmm. And so where we came and sort of honored. Undergraduates watching themselves watching what was it like it was, it was it was really matter and delightful to see, you know, these these kids really sort of take delight in watching themselves on the big screen and also fielding comments and questions. And so to have that moment where we're actually preaching, appreciating each other's scholarly work like that, I haven't had a lot of moments like that.

Speaker4: [00:48:40] Why do you think it took something like this for that to happen?

Speaker3: [00:48:44] Well, that has to do with Toronto as an institution where like this completely anarchic rhizome institution with three campuses and you know, there's like 90000 students and we're all kind of constantly moving around. So we don't have lots of moments and chances where we actually get together across the three sort of generations of scholars. I think that's just maybe particular to Toronto. But the other thing also was that because we live in a large urban area, there were three universities involved. So we had a bunch of people from York University who is just at the tail end of a still ongoing strike, which is probably now ended, but very demoralizing. And we had a whole contingent come down from York, down to Toronto who were really happy about this opportunity for this kind of intellectual engagement. And then we had other people from other campuses come as well. So in terms of accessibility and sort of bringing people together who usually don't come together. It was an amazing

Speaker4: [00:49:38] Event for us. That's really gratifying to hear. But I have this small worry that some of this might have had to do with the novelty that because it was the first time because it was unusual, there was curiosity around it. To what extent could we expect it to happen that way again?

Speaker3: [00:49:58] I think it'll only get better. I mean, we can all talk a little bit about what we think we would change about it if we had had more time. I mean, Toronto is a supreme site for us to think about displacement. And for a moment, I thought, let's think about, you know, what are the art galleries doing? What are the, you know, what are the political conversations going on in this city about indigenous rights, rights and place and in placement and land and things like that? I mean, Canada right now is rife with questions about place and displacement. And, you know, we have huge, you know, refugee populations in the city. I mean, there's so much more that we could have done if we had had a little bit more time to think about moving the conference across different spaces in the city thinking about and I know there's other notes who did this. You know, they watched a panel and then they had another, you know, homegrown panel of other people who had something to say to the topic, not necessarily academics, but artists, activists and so on. So we I think that'll be the next stage for us is to embedded more. I think something beautiful about this is precisely how we can, you know, think ethically about, you know, the carbon footprint print, but also thinking very closely about where we are. Yeah, and and this this challenge of embedding ourselves more was what I think we can do a lot better and we will. So I think it's going to get better. I think it's going to draw more people in Toronto.

Speaker2: [00:51:22] Yeah, I think so, too in Toronto. But that's it. It's just going to be pretty much a Toronto based event.

Speaker3: [00:51:29] No, no. There was so many amazing notes. Talk about that. You have so much.

Speaker2: [00:51:34] Yeah. What are your favorite node stories? Favorite nodes, lymph nodes. My favorite is just, hey.

Speaker5: [00:51:42] So I want to talk about something boring, OK? And that's measurement. So so we, as anthropologists, I think, are often sort of pushing back against this kind of audit culture that says that it doesn't exist if you can't count it, if you can't, if you can't measure it. And right, I think I like what Anon said that that in a sense, we don't know quite what we what we created and set into motion. And I think, you know, being comfortable with that when there are so many moving pieces, there's a way in which not trying to sort of micromanage it or sort of have your your your fingerprints on all of it is great. But an interesting thing that I think we tried to do right is we brought on this sort of carbon liaison, right? And we sort of we invited someone to to use some numbers to sort of to to measure, if only in kind of a speculative way and kind of a rough around the edges. Way to say, let's compare this rate to the sort of traditional conference that we know how to do right, where we all get on a flight and we all sort of go and stay in the hotel. And to say, I mean, how? How notionally at least might this compare? So I mean, you know, I guess I'm curious to, you know, as I think that, you know, those numbers are still being crunched, but I'm sort of curious like who the audience for them might be. First of all right, I mean, it's for us, but sort of who else might be persuaded or sort of interested? Yeah. I mean, like what? How might those numbers circulate as another? Yeah, as another form of this conference sort of moving beyond the sort of circuits that it's traveled in so far? What do you think?

Speaker4: [00:53:09] Yeah, no. And that's Jerome Whittington is at NYU, who is actually. Trying to work on precisely this question and to figure out what do you compare it to? There are interesting questions here. Do you do you do you think about do you simply compare what it would have taken in terms of miles travel to get all the presenters to one place like Baltimore? Do you bring all the attendees into the picture as well, knowing full well that most of them wouldn't have attended had it been place based? Is that duplicitous to bring them into the picture as well? There are all these questions of that kind. What are we really comparing here? The Jarome is going to be working out for us and thinking through with us. One fascinating lesson for me was that this conference had an audience that was distinct from the population of its presenters. Typically, the overall audience of a conversation of a conference is composed of the overall pool of its presenters. You go somewhere to present, you are in the company of others who have taken a break from presenting and talking and so on to listen to what you have to present. In this case, it was actually a very different. We had a certain number of presenters say around one hundred and fifty, and we had many, many more times that number who were partaking of the conference, how many more this is actually itself hard to say.

Speaker4: [00:54:48] We had around six hundred and fifty people who registered for the conference, but we didn't even learn until several days after the conference had ended that we had just as many people, if not more, show up at these four dozen nodes as had actually formally registered. That is to say, there were just as many people who showed up to a node who didn't otherwise register for the conference that still shared in it in some fashion as we had actually registered for the conference. So when you add all of them into the picture, you wind up with probably at least 1500 people. Sure. Which is a fair bit more than the 200 we typically get at an CAA conference and verging on ten times as many as we had presenters. Which is to say, then, that this is ultimately beginning to feel like a different kind of thing. Is it just a conference or is it a different kind of academic media event where you have a certain number of people who are producing material and content, but then it feeds into this sort of distributed broadcast sharing mode that reaches out to an audience that's many times bigger?

Speaker2: [00:56:10] What do you think about the idea of calling it a festival as opposed to a conference that people like that

Speaker5: [00:56:16] It felt festive? There were moments that felt festive to me. I mean, I think that the I mean to me that that asking whether there was a moment in sort of asking about the folks who would just show up at the nodes. I feel like there was this other kind of moment of relinquishing control in a way right of saying, Well, I mean, if you're going to be a node, do you need 10 people to count as a node ready? We had this conversation like, is this is this a problem? Is this a is this a feature or is this a bug that there are going to be people who are sort of in contact with this content who sort of aren't, yeah, who aren't signed on the dotted line as sort of registrants? And I think at some point we sort of we relinquished control over that. We realized that it was just it was not possible on the scale to sort of worry about it, right? And I think it gave rise to I mean, do you have a sense of the Toronto node like what the ratio a lot of the graduate students registered? I know because I saw the registration emails as they came in. But I mean, did you ask, did you make a big deal out about it or was it sort of whoever was there? Was there like, how did the registration question we had?

Speaker3: [00:57:15] We had our own little registration system because we also had a little after dinner in Chinatown and, you know, things like that, a little bit of coffee and drinks and things like that, and only 30 people registered. But actually, that was fine because our semester was over at that time and everyone was grading or trying to get the hell out of Toronto because it was very cold and and de facto more people came. But my favorite parts were, you know, students from other departments just sort of wandered in because they had somehow seen this on social media and and one student actually specifically said, Oh, I work on on atmosphere and questions of air, and she wanted to see the Tim Troy panel and she said, Oh my God, I want to become an anthropologist. So those are the moments where, you know, the people who just sort of wandered in sort of made my day

Speaker4: [00:58:05] And they couldn't have wandered into a conference they

Speaker3: [00:58:07] Could never have wanted. That's apropos accessibility. Exactly. It's very informal, but apropos the festival in nature. I mean, we had a lot of comfort. Stations about the relationship between the image and the world, and we shouldn't we have mentioned yet that, of course, the Society for Visual Anthropology was also involved, so we had the whole parallel film festival going on on the side. But it was the very form of a conference that and the fact that we organized it with the Society for Visual Anthropology that demanded and also called for an intense visual, of course. So there was something about watching these images and the sort of sensorium that that generated the immediacy, the intimacy that the sort of the imminence of the image. Often they were only images, in very few words. So I mean, I'm trying to relate it to the question of the festival. I mean, there was something very sensorial about this particular version of the conference that I've never really felt before, and it generated all sorts of interesting conversations amongst our students about. In fact, we're going to have a follow up meeting in September where some of our grad students, we have tons of tech at the department that we never really use are saying, I have all this material from the field that I don't know what to do with. You know, maybe this is maybe we're actually going to begin to workshop some of our own films and images and try and think a little bit through like what we could do with them because we have the ethanol lab at the University of Toronto. Natasha Myers at York has her own kind of ethno lab stuff going on in front of the pot. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, they're doing sort of experimental stuff as well. They're at York, so. So to me, the festival atmosphere was the wandering in and out, but also the sensorial quality that the visual nature of the conference solicited.

Speaker2: [00:59:53] I just had this. I just had this image today of like setting up some kind of chat roulette system between the different nodes where they might just be like, just be like, you're on with Tangiers and you just like, Hey, just creating unexpected

Speaker4: [01:00:08] Encounters

Speaker2: [01:00:08] Between different groups. I don't know. Just I don't know something kind of random and serendipitous like that.

Speaker4: [01:00:14] There's a side of me that really wants to rebrand the whole system of the SCA Biennial as the SCA Biennale.

Speaker2: [01:00:25] And you started calling it that by the end, a nice way to see like subtly changes the word a little bit each time over, like 15 different iterations.

Speaker4: [01:00:35] That's usually always that way. Dsk Biennale, International Festival or anthropology coming to you wherever you are every two years or something along the streets along those lines. Where, where, yeah, where, where the where, the where the festivity has to do. Not with the content matter, frankly, which is often rather harrowing and difficult, but with the with the fact that what you are given, yeah, is this chance to enter into something.

Speaker3: [01:01:06] And then there were some interventions that were just completely exquisite and they were works of art in and of themselves. One of our favorites in Toronto was the assisted dying panel.

Speaker4: [01:01:21] What was it called again? Anthony stuff suffering losses and run.

Speaker3: [01:01:25] It was just completely exactly. It was exquisite. I mean, it was sort of a combination of hand-drawn images that he must have made of somebody who was going to Switzerland to die and then his own very philosophical reflections combined with the image. So we sort of reveled in these little works of art that that this conference allowed for anthropologists to create. Sometimes it didn't work as well. You're there. Wasn't your piece, by the way, was stunning. The plastic thing, it was so effective. So we also really the tarantula nerd really like that one a lot. So, yeah, I mean, definitely it ventured into the realm of art, which made it very festival like as well.

Speaker5: [01:02:04] And I think maybe sort of bringing in like to hear about the undergraduates, right? Sort of bringing folks into a space who might not be otherwise. So so for me, I mean, it's quite a personal sort of piece of it. So I mean, at the end of these three days, everyone was sort of exhausted and just sort of, you know, had had given all they had to give. And so sort of sort of the treat that I reserved for myself at the end of the day is one of the films and the film festival Exit zero Christine Walleys film. I was really looking forward to it. I read the book. I mean, you know, I really wanted to see that my partner is not an academic. I would never bring him to an academic conference. I mean, there would be no reason for him to go. But I said, You know this this piece of I've been working on this thing, I've been sort of up all night, but like, let's watch this right? The last night, this sort of beautiful yeah, story of of of place and of sort of what happens after sort of work is evacuated from it. There's a way in which I wouldn't bring my partner to a conference, but I would bring him to a festival.

Speaker3: [01:02:58] And by the way, I also showed my 10 year old daughter Olive, one of the clips plane watching one where I told her, Look, this is anthropology where we're really interested in just understanding the life worlds of other people. So these are people who will never fly. Planes, unlike you, you've been on planes so many times and just look at these 10 minutes and, you know, and just imagine what they're imagining a plane looks like on the inside. What does she say? And she said, that's really cool and also really sad. Hmm. Yeah.

Speaker4: [01:03:32] So. Well, I tell you, I because of the nature of the medium, because of the nature of this particular event, someone had to watch all of them to put them together the panels. And that happened to me, me this time around. And this was my spring break watching all of them. And because it was my spring break, but my kids were also on spring break. They were around a lot and it was actually pretty neat because they got into quite a few of them. And I'm talking about a nine year old

Speaker5: [01:04:04] And a five year old. Wow.

Speaker4: [01:04:06] And and I'm not saying all of it was equally engaging. I'm not saying all of it was equally engaging to them or even frankly to me. But there was a fair amount of it that was even engaging to them. And that's kind of neat. Which leads me to really wonder, honestly, in the way that you can in fact wander into a museum with your kids and be in the company of really interesting and challenging art. You might find it interesting and challenging in one way, and they might find it interesting and provocative in other ways, but you're still sharing in that experience. Is there this latent artistic potential in anthropology and ethnography? Is it already there? Is there something about the conventional modes of expression or the conventional spaces of expression that we have at our disposal that stifles or contains or restricts or dampens that latent potential? These spaces that we typically have to kind of art up, so to speak. Dominic and I were Dominic, and Simone had organized this amazing panel a Triple A last year on monsters. But we all told monster stories. But we told them with the lights down and when we told them with the lights down, we told them with little bits of light here and there.

Speaker4: [01:05:33] In that room, we had giant shadows. We had someone in the corner who was drawing. As we were speaking, the stories were in the air, the light from the image, sorry, the light on the images was there. There was the shadow in the back and everything felt different because we were able to forget for those few minutes that we were in that space. That was unusual for the Marriott Wardman Hotel, but it was that kind of thing that we were going for with these presentations. And it just I just wonder whether if we continue to experiment in this way, we might actually wind up with more interesting anthropological work. I was certainly gratified. We had these participant toolkit posts where we had folks who were conversant with these media write little how-to guides and so on. I was actually really surprised to see how unconventional a lot of the material was. I didn't expect it to that extent, right?

Speaker5: [01:06:36] It wasn't people sort of staring at their webcams and sort of reading seven typed pages in front of it. And it could have been.

Speaker3: [01:06:43] It wasn't. Look, that rose to the challenge well.

Speaker4: [01:06:45] And you know, and I think and it was it was uneven. I mean, there were still, I think there were a fair number of people who are reading a paper or who read a paper and then overlaid onto that reading a series of images. And I think that felt a certain way and that other presentations where there was, in a sense, more space for the visual itself to assume a voice or for sound, to assume its its voice independent of what was being said verbally. Those presentations, I think for

Speaker2: [01:07:17] The maximum length of a

Speaker4: [01:07:19] Presentation, we kept it at 10

Speaker2: [01:07:21] 10 minutes, which I think is already an advance. You know, 10 minutes, five minutes. Shorter papers are enough. And it's easier to keep your attention that way.

Speaker3: [01:07:30] I'd like to make a shout out for an article that a colleague, Kelly Gillespie, wrote. She's now at the University of Western Cape, but at that point she was organizing the Johannesburg Workshop on Contemporary Theory. I think it's called with a shield. Mbembe and she wrote this piece called the bus method, and she starts off by thinking about sort of the terrorist form of our conferences and how they're organized around, you know, certain temporality and a certain maximisation of space time and all of that. And how, you know, the Johannesburg workshop organised at least one of its conferences around movement and in a bus, and they move from city to city. They had all these people coming from all over. So I think what I'm trying to say is it's not just about the. Carbon footprint, although that's a big I think many of us are already dissatisfied for long, have long been dissatisfied with the conference form that we tend to pursue. And so I think this is a first step like I don't I think after this, I think some energies hope for me, at least energies have been unleashed that I think, yeah, we talk

Speaker4: [01:08:34] About Genie back in the bottle.

Speaker2: [01:08:37] So, so and on that note, and I just want to point out to everyone is listening and we've been engaged in academic business meetings for now. We did 12 hours, took an hour break to get some beer and now we've been talking for an hour or so. The fact that people are as animated as they are after 14 hours of academic work shows you that some magic is here. So to the people who are listening to this podcast who are probably environmentally minded, but they might be like the only person at their university who's who's really like in that space. Or, you know, they might not be in charge of a section of their professional association, but they think this is a cool idea. Do you have any thoughts on how to get started advice if somebody were interested in pursuing this model, could it be scalable to a smaller conference? I mean, how would you advise people get started or how they would advocate for it if they were to want to do something like this themselves?

Speaker5: [01:09:29] I love it. Well, let me start. So I just finished my my PhD under Dominic's tutelage at Rice University and I so while he was a rice, I organized a graduate student conference and it was a global reference. Well, well between. I helped organize a conference between two.

Speaker2: [01:09:47] I thought you were my student.

Speaker5: [01:09:48] All right, that was full on.

Speaker2: [01:09:51] I just timed it wrong. So go ahead.

Speaker5: [01:09:53] But I was raised. We organized this conference with with a fellow department up the road at the University of Texas, Austin. And so, you know, that was two and a half hours back and forth and we sort of, you know, made the drive back and forth and tried to sort of set up this relationship. So I mean, that was a much smaller scale thing, but it makes me wonder in retrospect. I mean, we tried it for a couple of years and then the fact that the distance between the two departments and, you know, different sort of departmental kind of intellectual projects. I mean, eventually we sort of laid it aside, but it makes me wonder what would it look like to organize a graduate student conference in this fashion? Right, right. And and if we had done that right, you wouldn't have had to have been a Texas sort of department up the road. I mean, as great as that experience was, but I mean, what if we had called up folks in the UK or in Australia or in another part of the world and said, you know, we as graduate students are interested in what you're up to, right? And and what would it look like to sort of create? Maybe it's not a full three day conference, but maybe it's a workshop, right? Maybe it's sort of I mean, you could you could scaffold that in a small way, but to say, how might this format allow us to sort of push outside our our department, right? But also the kind of proximate communities that it's easy for us to to think about having access to, right? So. So to me, that would be a place to start. And if you do that, let us know because to me that that would be a cool spin off of this model at a smaller scale to say, how might a format like this bring people into conversation?

Speaker2: [01:11:21] Who wouldn't be otherwise? And let me just follow up with that. It specifically, is there any of the infrastructure that we've built for this conference that could be made open access? Or are there analogous models out there that people could use so that they wouldn't have to build it from scratch? Because I think that's the most daunting thing as imagining how am I going to do this? Like what? What kind of support do I need to do

Speaker5: [01:11:40] Something like this? Absolutely. I mean, I think that our iteration of it had more bells and whistles because we we sort of took up the challenge and we got really interested in it and we were able to sort of recruit this big team to sort of help us out. But I mean, the site that it runs on is a WordPress site, right? Wordpress is an open source piece of software. It is free, right?

Speaker4: [01:11:58] So and it's built on a template. I mean, it started with a template. Sure.

Speaker5: [01:12:03] So, so you know, we layered on that. On top of that, this this sort of consumer sort of accessible kind of cloud based product, Vimeo. And you know, our conference was big enough that we paid for sort of a fancier package to load a bunch of videos. But right, and you could do this with a WordPress site and with a Vimeo account for for one hundred bucks. I mean, truly on that scale, it would be possible to do that right.

Speaker2: [01:12:27] Any department could probably do it. I think that's right. Yeah, that's right. That's correct. Other other thoughts like recommendations,

Speaker4: [01:12:33] I think I think a lot of it has to do with making possible forms of proximity that would otherwise be impossible. That is to say, we're all invested to varying degrees in the fate of people elsewhere. The fate of environments elsewhere. The fate of relationships elsewhere. And there's often a kind of disconnect between the place where we do our investigations and the place where we reported or the places where what we report about it circulates. And I think one of the neatest things about a model like this is that it might possibly. Sort of as a way of closing that gap a bit, so say, for example, that you tend to do field work in one part of the world, but you live in another and you know that there are people in that part of the world where you do your field work, who are interested in where you go and who you're normally around. Just as there are people where you live and who you're normally around who might be interested in what's going on wherever it is that you do your research. This is a way of building up potentially communities of conversation between those sites that would otherwise be really expensive to try to produce.

Speaker4: [01:13:59] There are a lot of people that I got to know very well, for example, in rural south India. Every time I'd sort of say goodbye, there would be this sense of well, when we see each other next and maybe when I come back next, will you ever come the United States? And and I don't know, I feel like the there's, of course, a lot of melancholy and anthropology that has to do with that. But it's also tinged with the frank reality that some of us in anthropology are more mobile than others. And I think this is really what for me, some of the more interesting moral or moral or ethical implications of something like this have to do with evening that out of it. And that is to say evening out the question of who can move and who can't move, and whether we can create other forms of conversation and interaction that aren't predicated on having access to the amount of money and time and flexibility that being able to move yourself vast distances requires.

Speaker3: [01:15:17] We could solicit for the next conference panels that deal specifically with this issue. So people who actually somehow organize panels with their main interlocutors in the field, for example, as a way to bring them together in one

Speaker4: [01:15:32] Panel, that would be amazing. They'll be amazing.

Speaker2: [01:15:35] And because we do nothing but break news on this podcast, I will. It's a soft news break that looks like we're going to try this again. Details TBD, but it looks like you're going to try this again. You heard it here first,

Speaker3: [01:15:48] Coming to your node soon.

Speaker2: [01:15:51] Exactly. Thank you all for staying up late up late at night. Coaches of Energy Podcast Displacements Recap Episode.

Speaker4: [01:16:00] Thank you.

Speaker3: [01:16:01] Thank you for having us.