I. The costs of academic conferences
For today’s PhD students, conferences are still upheld as vital opportunities to share their research, network for potential job prospects, collaborate, and build their CV. In reality, these excursions impose a variety of costs on individuals who feel they will be left behind if they do not attend. Given the precarious financial position of PhDs and early-career academics, who often endure deep financial and emotional insecurity (Lopes & Dewan, 2015), the academic community should be concerned about the imposition of additional, seemingly superfluous costs on this group. This post is devoted to summarising the various costs associated with academic conferences, collating potential solutions to reduce those costs, and more importantly expressing the need for both cultural and institutional changes to usher in new forms of connecting that benefit people and the planet.
This year marked my first foray into applying for academic conferences, admittedly a bit late as a third year PhD student. With little thought toward the reality of acceptance or the logistics of attendance, I blindly applied to two conferences in mainland Europe, having heard that funding was available through the university. I assumed the funding would fully cover these costs, at least for PhD students who are surviving on notoriously low incomes.
To my astonishment, registration fees alone for these conferences were several hundreds of pounds each. While flights to Northern and Eastern Europe might be quite cheap, trains emitting on average 6 times less GHG emissions appeared to cost roughly triple the amount that flights do, and could take around 10 times as long. I quickly realised that between financial, environmental, and/or temporal costs, there was no “low cost” option to attending a conference. And yet, I kept hearing how invaluable they were for future academic career success, particularly for networking purposes. To make matters worse, financial assistance for PhD students at LSE does not cover the full cost, requiring out-of-pocket spending to secure your career.