I was thrilled when it was announced, a few days ago, that the next Digital Arts and Culture conference will be held in Perth!!! My home town! Yay! Andrew Hutchison will be chairing the conference, it has support from all four universities in Perth and all the administration will be done by BEAP, which will be hosting the conference. It sounds fantastic. So, DAC2007 is being held in September in Perth. Wildflower season! Spring!
Then today I noticed that the next Association of Internet Researchers conference is not being held in Europe, as I’d assumed, but in Brisbane! Yes, Australia, again! AoIR 7.0 will be held Sept 27-30 in Brisbane. Reading this note from a Brazilian about the difficulties of aquiring a visa to come to the US if you’re not lucky enough to be a citizens of the handful of rich countries with a visa waiver, I reckon it’s wonderful having the conference outside of the US. I’m not sure Australia’s visa policies are any better, but both Brisbane and Perth are close to Asia, which should lead to new people having easier access to these gathering.
I probably won’t make it to Brisbane, but certainly hope to be at DAC07.
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KF
Actually, of the six AOIR conferences that have been held thus far, three have been held outside the U.S., which is a pretty good track record for such a young organization. And that’s actually three of the last four, which is even better. This is the conference’s first venture outside of North American/Europe, though, which is a very exciting development for the organization’s diversity…
Elin
But not Australia again! That’s so expensive, isn’t it?
I do agree that conferences should be held outside the US because of the visa politics. It would send the US a MAJOR message if all conferences were to be held outside their borders and might have an impact on what happens with their policies in the future.
I’m sure they would think twice when they realize they would be taking away their own citizen’s opportunity to participate in important research.
KF
I do agree with you Elin, except that within the US, the same scholars whose opportunities for participating in such conferences would be threatened by the move of those conferences outside the US are the ones organizing the conferences *within* the US. I can’t tell if that sentence makes sense. What I mean to say is that no matter how much US scholars are in agreement with such a position, and no matter how much we/they want to send a message to the government about its visa politics, self-interest will likely win out. (Not to mention that the government would be all too likely to say “great, don’t go to or hold conferences; you guys are just troublemakers anyway.”)
Jill
Oh, of course we need to arrange conferences wherever we can. And yes, I know it’s expensive getting to Australia – for those of us not already there or in Asia, anyway. Really the goal ought to be to spread em out, ya know, some here, some there. And of course we need regional and national conferences as well as international ones 🙂