Reimagining Higher Ed Conferences: Reflections on AERA 2023, Part I

In April 2023 I went to the American Educational Research Association Conference in Chicago. Conferences are always interesting, but this one was particularly interesting because it was 80 degrees outside. Coming from Southern California, where it’s been raining for 5 months, to a very warm Midwest, which should’ve been a lot cooler, was disorienting. I wonder how higher education might acknowledge the reality of climate change? 

The conference features several keynote speeches, and to be honest, I skipped them. Picking a keynote is hard — conferences typically want to have someone who has a mass appeal, someone who is relatively known, and someone who captures the zeitgeist. But in doing so, how do conferences reify the status quo? What might it look like to have keynotes from people who had actual solutions to pressing problems…. For example, someone leading policy work around climate change in higher ed, or public health work on gun violence, or campus-based organizing around the assaults on higher education? What if we could talk not just about the what, but the how… How we make change on any given issue, how we leverage the power of the conference toward direct action? Bringing that many skilled, educated people from across the country to talk about more of the same, or to talk about things in the same way, is a missed opportunity. 

Toward that end, I’m grateful for sessions that used their space to do that collaborative work. For example, participants in a symposium on Qualitative Evidence and Systemic Interrogations of Admissions Research, Logics, Practices, and Norms  used their time to have participants think about how they might use qualitative research in admissions work. The short conversation was generative and inspiring. I hope more presenters think about how they can reframe their time. 

I also enjoyed sessions that disrupted the traditional format in other ways. For example, I went to the business meeting for the Biography and Documentary Research SIG. I didn’t know it was the business meeting, because they had transformed their meeting into a session on Love Letters to a Transgressive Educator: Celebrating the Life of bell hooks. In this beautiful session, participants wrote letters to bell hooks, and reflected on her impact. Speakers used spoken word poetry, archival research and art to support reflection on hooks’ impact. The session was creative and revitalizing, and I definitely will be checking out the SIG. 

One thing that could’ve taken center stage is engagement with educational 3rd spaces. I love going to museums, and so I used the lunch break to go to a few of them. For example, the American Writers Museum was walking distance from the conference. There are several powerful exhibits on display there, including an exhibit called Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice.  The museum is a very tactile experience, which is very interesting for a writers museum. There are art displays, lots of things to turn and pull out, some  interactive digital writing games, collaborative story writing spaces, and even a room of old type writers. Interactive spaces like this have a lot of implications for teaching and learning, and so I wish conferences centered them more. 

The Museum of Contemporary Art was also provocative and insightful. I thought I was going to see a bunch of colorful paintings, but all of the exhibits throughly examined race, class, power and violence in both the American and global contexts. I was particularly struck by this image, that shows how quotidian harm and the need for help are in America. The picture next to it is actually something not in a museum, but on a restaurant I saw in downtown Chicago. The stark realism of the exhibit makes clear the need for Enter the Mirror. Other pieces in the gallery pushed on the “return to normal” in the “post-pandemic” area. It was honestly, bleak. 

The MCA’s exhibit Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today, was thought provoking. I appreciate the way it named the intersection of colonial violence, sexism and Anti-Black oppression. For example, this display of a palm tree, a symbol of leisure and also Caribbean tourism, being lynched, was quite disturbing and also generative. Other pieces of art asked us to reflect on colonial legacies, too. For those that wanted to go deeper into ideas of race, place and space, there were many ideas near the conference. It is great for conferences to advertise these places, but what if they took things a step further, partnering with educational spaces  to highlight exhibitions, hold receptions, and have dialogue in these thought provoking spaces? 

I have tons more ideas, but I’ll break that up into smaller posts. For now, let me know what you think about how we might rethink conferences.