Blog post #12 Cripping Breath abroad: Conference attendance and considering access

• This blog focuses on my recent experience of attending a large international conference in Germany.
• It includes reflections on the presentation I delivered about our work in the Arts Stream of Cripping Breath.
• In the piece I consider just how accessible conferences are, and whether organisers need to do more to establish inclusive ways of participating. 
• I also try to demystify some of what goes on at an academic conference, as very often researchers are expected to work out what is expected of them and what will happen for themselves, and this can be very stressful. 

Between 9th and 13th June, I attended the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) annual conference in Cologne, Germany. The conference is held in a different country each year; last year, it was hosted by the University of the Philippines and, the year before that, by the University of Ghana. This was my third year participating as a member of the Performance and Disability working group, and my first time doing so in person. In previous years, I’ve joined online, since the working group has special dispensation for remote participation. This is for access reasons: an acknowledgement that travel and conferencing is often difficult, sometimes impossible, and also (more) expensive for disabled scholars. It’s problematic that Performance and Disability is the only hybrid working group, though, of course – not least because disabled scholars work in every research area! IFTR is also a particularly intense conference, with hundreds of attendees (known as ‘delegates’) and taking place over 5 days. Nonetheless, I was really pleased to be able to attend in person this year – and to be able to travel by train all the way from London to Cologne! – and really enjoyed meeting colleagues in person for the first time.

In this blog, I’ll share a bit about the presentation I delivered during the conference, which was about our explorations in the Arts Stream of Cripping Breath. I also want to demystify some stuff about academic conferencing! I’ve so often found that academic activities are really opaque; there’s very little explanation of how things work, and it mostly feels like you’re expected to figure it out by attending anyway and piecing the information together. 

Sometimes, but not always, conferences have ‘working groups’, which cohere around particular themes within an academic field. People join a working group either by presenting with the working group (as I did with the Performance and Disability working group at IFTR), or by attending their sessions during the conference and engaging with discussion – by listening, or by sharing ideas. Working groups ideally form networks of support and conversation for scholars working in a particular area, from postgraduate researchers (known as PGRs) to senior academics. Between annual conferences, working groups might organise interim events or joint publications, and find ways of keeping in touch with their members. 

Sessions during the conference often take the form of panels, during which a few people will present on an aspect of their research, and respond to any thoughts or questions. However, some working groups – at least in the field of theatre and performance! – hold practical workshops and other participatory activities. The working group convenors curate the sessions; they organise the schedule, correspond with the central conference committee, and sometimes chair the panels (by announcing the speakers and asking or inviting questions). Attending the sessions of a working group can provide a throughline of conversation, intergenerational support, and shared ideals in a smaller group setting during the conference. This becomes especially important when conferencing is overwhelming and generally inaccessible (see Cassie Kill’s blog ‘The Complex Hospitality of Conferencing: Visiting the Welcome Hut’ for a discussion of these issues!). 

The panel I was presenting on this year was called ‘Crip Worldmaking: Extended Access and Disabled Futures’. This was my first time presenting about the work we’re doing in Cripping Breath, and I was really excited to link some stuff I was thinking about during my PhD, which was on access and aesthetics in disabled-led performance, to our collaborative creative processes with ventilated artists. These processes haven’t started yet (we’re recruiting for our Artist Collaborators at the moment, and we’ll soon be opening recruitment for our Performance Collaborators!), but it was a great opportunity to bring together some of our ideas around access. 

In the presentation, I expressed the way that our art-based research might allow us to think in new, expansive, and anti-ableist ways about access in art and performance. By centring the experiences of ventilated people, we’re opening up access in art to incorporate multiple human and technological supports: access workers and mechanical ventilation, alongside audio description and captions, for instance. We’re hopeful about the idea of access as something which can continue to develop and expand – not towards a final correctness or accommodation, but as a complex and relational practice.

I generally really enjoy attending conferences; I feel lucky to be able to experience new places, in the UK and beyond, and I love learning about new research in the field, and the people doing the work. However, conferencing can also be really intimidating and inaccessible – I’ve experienced this first hand, too. Some of this difficulty could be resolved by clear explanations of what’s involved in attending a conference, including about accessible and inaccessible spaces. And, of course, it’s important that conference organisers take calls for hybridity, and access more generally, seriously – if conferences are about developing new knowledge, we have to think about who isn’t able to be there, contributing, as well as who is.