Where should we be holding conferences?
Health and safety are top priorities, and many places in the US are unsafe.
Things have gotten rough for many of us in the United States. A bunch of states have restricted access to reproductive health care. Moreover, many of these same states have legalized discrimination against people based on their identities. Many colleagues, friends, and family members have found themselves living in places that are legally hostile to their existence. The prospect of a life-threatening medical emergency arising from, say, an ectopic pregnancy that cannot be legally treated is quite scary. My heart goes out to all the trans people living in places where discrimination against them is downright legal. This state of affairs is a tragedy. Life is complex and people can’t just up and leave unsafe conditions as they worsen.
While it sounds secondary to the daily state of affairs for people living in those places, it’s also a concern for those of us who are traveling to conferences. Is it okay to send employees, colleagues, and trainees into places where they are at risk of discrimination, violence, and lack of emergency medical care?
This is not a new discussion, and I think the dialogue ramped up by a Californian law.
In 2016, California passed AB 1887, which prohibited the use of state funds for travel to states that enshrined anti-LGBTQ discrimination into their laws. When the law was enacted, four states were on the no-travel list: Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The following year, four more states were added (Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Texas). And so on, until the list grew to 23 states in 2023. Here’s the map:
Wow. This is quite an illustration of what’s been going on over the past decade.
This California Travel Ban prompted a lot of concern within our professional societies, not so much about missing Californians, but about the wisdom of hosting conferences in places where some members do not have full legal rights and potentially are unsafe. When such conferences were held (often because the legal status of LGBT folks was downgraded after contracts were signed), a lot of conference organizers went rogue and did what they could to make bathrooms more accessible by changing the signs on doors. Some societies said they wouldn’t schedule national meetings for places that were subject to the California Travel Ban. As this list of states grew, this must have been getting more and more difficult.
The discussion about avoiding travel ban states was contentious. There are good arguments on both sides. We shouldn’t put people at risk, we shouldn’t exclude people who won’t put themselves at risk, and we shouldn’t endorse states financial support into states w legalized discrimination. And also, we can’t abandon the people who live in these places, and the more progressive jurisdictions where the conferences are located need the support, activism, and funding of conferences to support equity work. When a society uses funds to support equity and access of conferences, how (geographically, and in terms of identity) should it be focused?
A bunch of folks, including myself, landed at the conclusion that it’s best to avoid holding conferences in states that have laws that are actively discriminating against people on the basis of their identity. So far, I’ve passed up meetings Florida, Texas, and Indiana. (It wasn’t about the funding, because my institutional allocation would have covered a smallish fraction of attending one conference anyway. And federal funds were not subject to such restriction.)
Two recent events have changed this picture, and I’m not entirely sure where things should stand now.
First, our Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. As a result, there are a lot of places (I mean, a lot of places) where access to emergency reproductive healthcare is also a dicey proposition:
Second, California is repealing the travel ban. The primary sponsor of the original ban (Toni Atkins) led the effort to shut it down, simply because it wasn’t achieving its goal to work against anti-discrimination laws throughout the country. While California’s economy is larger than all but a few countries in the whole world, this travel ban didn’t manage to harness that economic power to coerce other states from putting new hateful laws on the books. Instead, California will invest into a new nationwide program promoting the value of anti-discrimination laws and practices. At this writing, the repeal passed handily through the legislature awaits governor’s signature.
Where are we now on policies to hold conferences in safer locations? Any academic society that might have had a policy to honor California’s travel ban no longer has that policy to work with. But we still have a lot of places that are bad for meetings, with respect to respect and safety for LGBT folks, and now we have a lot of places where emergency reproductive healthcare is not a right.
I noticed that one of my professional societies has a meeting in three years in Ohio, and the year after that, in Florida. As a person with all nearly all the privileges you can count, I don’t feel personal risk going to these places. But would I bring trainees to a place where you can’t get emergency contraception, have access to PrEP, security that ER doctors will have the legal authority to take care of uterus-related medical issues, and also where LGBT folks aren’t second-class citizens with fewer rights. And I wouldn’t want to support a conference if I knew that there are colleagues of mine in this society who would not be safe there, or would not feel safe enough to go. I mean, 1-2% of all pregnancies are ectopic. This is a small fraction but every human being on the planet is the result of a pregnancy. Current and potentially pregnant people often travel to conferences. What if a medical emergency happens during the conference in a state that won’t provide treatment? I realize that everybody living in that state is living with the same risk, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for introducing even more people to that risk. And that’s not a risk I want to expect of others, especially junior colleagues who might feel compelled to attend conferences for career advancement even though they might have misgivings about safety.
But on the other hand, is it reasonable to continue to hold conferences in a relatively small number of states while requiring people from all of these places with toxic laws on the books to travel substantial distances every year? While nobody could reasonably expect a national conference to take place within easy driving distance on a regular basis, spreading the geographic location to increase accessibility for long-term members and to reach local people who otherwise would not attend is a good thing.
I understand that some fraction of people who are affected by these discriminatory laws are okay with visiting these places for professional or personal purposes. But that doesn’t necessarily make it okay for everybody. And I realize that a much bigger concern is what’s going on in these states every day for people who are not attending conferences.
What are your thoughts about holding conferences in these states with harmful laws on the books? Do you think whether or not you live in one of these states is affecting your perspective?
This is such an important discussion, and we'll have to work hard to find an out of the box solution that keeps visitors safe while not abandoning the scholars who stay in those states to fight. I wrote about this question on my own substack, from the perspective of a "red state" scholar: https://unprofessoring.substack.com/p/red-state-blue-state-part-2.