The academic machine: flying again
The EC’s Sustainability Committee is very grateful to Adrian Friday for helping us kick-start a new conversation about the role of travel in SIGCHI. We warmly invite your participation in this conversation, either by commenting here or by emailing the Sustainability Committee at sigchi-sustain@acm.org.
The academic machine: flying again
by Adrian Friday, Prof. of Computing and Sustainability, Lancaster University, UK
A lot has been written about the relationship between academia and conference travel, and especially of late, its carbon footprint [4,5,9,14,17,19]. So why write more about it? Well, I think it’s useful to bring together some of my personal observations with some reflections from relatively recent academic literature on the subject, with the aim of moving the discussion on from a position of personal guilt and eco-anxiety, to one of more concerted reflection and ideally action.
Let’s address the ‘elephant in the room’: flying has enabled institutions to ‘think global’ and leverage long distance relationships. The exchange of ideas at ‘the best venues’, reliance on personal attendance at meetings on the other side of the country or continent, or overseas has become normalised. For a great many institutions, with aspirations to be globally significant, or at least measurably considered as such [5,7], this runs deep. It’s become embedded in the careers of academics, holds the keys to their progression by evidencing international profile, and is enmeshed in the practice of ‘being academic’ and the very construction of new knowledge. It also reflects on our institutions’ reputations, and of course, is linked increasingly to their very financial survival. While collaboration and travel can be fun and enriching, I think we often conveniently forget that the travel itself may include long hours in airports and being treated summarily like cattle, especially when it goes wrong.
But there’s a problem. Academics are effectively asked to make a choice: participate more or less fully in a system underpinned by (for many) justifiably affordable international travel; or opt out [5,15]. There are myriad reasons one might choose not to travel of course, and we’ll come back to some of those. But I would strongly argue, with a global climate emergency, environmental concern should be a key rationale [17,19]. That is not to say that academics are of course the only air travelers, but the timing is good or indeed overdue for considering the relationship between the pursuit of knowledge, and flying in particular.
Air travel is a significant emitter of greenhouse gasses [6]. With high altitude effects [10], while certainly a source of some ongoing debate, that could even amplify this to as much as 5% of global emissions [2]. Whatever this estimate, it definitely excludes the myriad of emissions associated with airports, their supply chains etc., and broadening out further to the conference centres, hotels, technical societies, and their footprints… you get the picture.
Rockstrom’s ‘Carbon Law’ marked 2020 as a turning point in which emissions need to halve each decade to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, as per the Paris agreement [11,13]. The question I’d like to ask is whether our community is on track to halve our emissions due to academic travel every decade? I think I know the answer.
ACM and SIGCHI are of course only a fraction of the conference scene, but ACM claims to enable 170 events worldwide for ‘the open exchange of ideas’ [1]. SIGCHI sponsored events now number 26 annually! Some back of the envelope counting of digital library proceedings’ data leads me to estimate very approximately a doubling of the number of conferences from 1990 to 2000, which more than doubles again by 2010 — there were 8 times the number of events of 1990 in 2019, just before the Covid pandemic! So this seems to be growing. SIGCHI’s largest conference, CHI, is growing in scale and carbon footprint year on year, with a 10 fold increase in the number of papers accepted over the last 2 decades! [9]. That’s just ‘our corner’ of the ACM, a single technical society, which is only a part of the global conference business.
So, is this our choice? Well, we should look at academic ‘business as usual’ and recognise that we sit in an ever changing system of practice and expectation from our peers, institutions and colleagues [14,16]. This has also changed over time. We learn what it is to be an academic from our peers and mentors, and publication strategies and success frameworks surround and inform this development too. Before long distance air travel of course, it was not possible or time efficient for academics to ‘jet’ to an airport for a short meeting, nor was there an expectation that we should expect to be able to publish a paper at least annually, and share this personally by presenting it to our global colleagues (well, let’s be honest, a small subset of them who may or may not be doing their email). We can argue I imagine whether we think there is a good relationship between the production of worthwhile knowledge, and the grinding regularity of conference paper deadlines. I wonder if my academic heroes were frequent flyers?
Flying in fact, has enabled a system of practice where a privileged ‘knowledge elite’ (myself absolutely included) could get to use travel to marshall sparse networks of contacts [5,16]. Participation at which is a global game, linked to expectations around reputation, citations, collaboration, opportunity, and academic progress [3,17]. There is an exchange of social value at these events [14], amplified by the power of the network reinforcing ‘networked sociality’ [16]. The vast majority of those reading this have been enculturated to expect this, and it’s hard to see it as anything other than normal.
We’re right to be concerned about who can participate and what the barriers to access might be. The affordability of participation differs greatly based on geography and local, national, and international funding opportunities [5,7]. It will likely always cost more in real and relative terms to travel to an often US-based conference from India than Indiana. There are also many other asymmetries and injustices embedded in this current normality. Studies of academic travel have found there is considerable inequity among those who do fly, just as there is with air travel in all strata of society [4]. Expectations and norms vary widely about the ability to be able to take the time to participate, which may involve time away from family, caring or work responsibilities — and yes, there is often a gender difference in such caring work [12]. The working language or writing style expectations may give hidden advantages to authors from particular backgrounds or to native speakers. Wider still, conferences help govern the acceptability of certain styles of work and their methods. More troubling still, epistemologically, are certain avenues of research or methods of inquiry even prevented by being ‘unacceptable’ or ‘out of scope’? This is not, as it might appear, a pure meritocracy of ideas, nor a level playing field.
A small percentage of academics fly the most, and there’s ‘a long tail’ of those with progressively and relatively less impact. This is broadly correlated, perhaps unsurprisingly, with seniority and status [2]. In reconsidering academic practice then, we need to be thinking about how flying and in person participation internationally became the expectation and perhaps even aspiration for many [17]. Now we are thinking about halving our emissions from flying every decade, how do we even account for those people who have not yet had the chance to play this game?
Is flying needed, and should academia care? It is perhaps easy to feel that academia has sufficient societal value to be disassociated from its impacts, including environmental ones. The long admired and venerable pursuit of knowledge, enjoys a special place in society. This stems from a heritage of seclusion and focus, posited to derive from Universities’ monastic origins [12]. But this separation from society, exempting our work and practice, is an argument that can be applied to other domains. It will lead to an exceptionalist paradox in which ‘no one moves’ to curb or reconfigure their activity to reduce emissions; allowing environmentally damaging practices to be justified, persist and continue to accelerate.
It is, and it isn’t about choice. Online and ground first travel policies, such as that followed by the Tyndall Centre in UK [15], respond by changing the expectation that air travel is justified, favouring local events and ground transit options. Local and satellite structures like PDC’s Places reduce the need for air travel and increase opportunities for participation and diversity [20]. We have roles as advisors and supervisors, organisers and mentors — can we change expectations towards frequency of participation? As many already seemingly adopted during COVID, what about a more journal focused publication strategy, as is common in many other disciplines? [8,17] But, can we ask the hard question? What is it we hope to achieve with our conferences, and if we set ourselves hard targets to limit and reduce air travel [11], are there just too many? How would we shift our practice to reflect this? Presumably, we’d draw the distinction between those who’s field work necessitates global travel, and those for whom it is just desirable? [19]
Given that conferences in some sense persist from a pre-web era in which conferences were ‘the way’ of socialising papers and ideas, and we now make extensive use of search engines, recommender systems, online archives and video platforms, are conferences really the most effective mechanism for all the things we wish to achieve with them? In ‘carbon budget per day’ terms, there are clearly less environmentally wasteful ways in which we can get the message out there, socialise and build our relationships and communities, and of course reputations. For the technical societies and SIGs that exist to serve us, yet for whom conferences are the order of the day, can they become powerful agents for change? I would argue they can, but only if we demand it, volunteer, and make the change happen by facing up to our environmental responsibilities.
The COVID pandemic gave us pause because we simply couldn’t travel. We bounced into new hybrid conferences and technologies, allowing people living in the Global South to participate far more numerously than ever before [18]. Journals saw an uptick in submissions [8]. We even reconnected with local issues, families and had time to question the demands and pressures academia places upon us. In part, this illustrates that change is possible. But, I can feel it bouncing back: instead of solving the technical issues, someone pressed ‘play’ and restarted the machine. New conferences are being created, pent up desire to reconnect with ones’ global network rejustified…
It’s time to ask these harder questions about what an environmentally sustainable academic practice should be [11]. And we don’t have any time to delay.
Bibliography
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