Don't drop the mic: Reflections on CCCC '18 (Kansas City, KS)

Again, delays. So much stuff to do. But I don't feel I can ride off into the summer without adding these reflections.

I've commented on my experience at ATTW 2018 here and here. CCCC 2018 met immediately afterwards, as I noted, across the river in Kansas City, Kansas. To be fair, I was all conferenced out after ATTW, but had been accepted to present at Cs and was looking forward to many of the scheduled presentations.

All the issues that made ATTW fraught, the question of where to have the conference, whether to have it at all, all weighed equally heavily on Cs, perhaps more so because they had chosen to keep the meeting in Kansas city, despite the NAACP travel advisory.

I've never been responsible for conference logistics so I have no idea what's involved. I imagine it's a lot. The demand that plans be made years in advance probably only compounds the challenge.

As an early career scholar, I'm still trying to find my place in the world. I have not been certain that Cs is where I "belong" as a researcher or teacher. But I've met good people there, the work is interesting, the diversity of interests generative. So I was looking forward to the experience, but I was uncertain.

CCCC 2018 Program Cover. Design by Sasha Bingaman

The day began with me not realizing (despite someone explaining to me that it was the case) that the conference sessions were held in two major facilities in downtown KC that were quite a ways a part.

Consequently I was late to the opening session (along with others) as I had to hike what felt like a half or 3/4 miles to the auditorium. Program Chair Asao Inoue was in the middle of a moment of silence for those colleagues who were not present for whatever reason when I and a number of us burst in, out of breath, sweating. He later asked us write down a single word describing our current state and that could be used to propel us in to the conference. For me it was "discombobulated."

This set the tone and laid a frame on the conference experience I had not been prepared to think about: the question of "accessibility."

It actually began with a pre-conference email from Asao asking us to be sure to have texts of our talks and handouts for our sessions to help meet the accessibility needs of our colleagues. This struck me hard and I was stunned that it hadn't ever framed itself that way to me. 

Like many grad students I'd always been in a desperate state going in to a conference presentation. I was always That Guy working on the PowerPoint in someone else's session, desperately trying to fit the WHOLE WORLD CHANGING THING in to 15 mins.

I have a BA in Theater Arts. So I hate presenting from a text. I want to get up there and just improv/stand-up routine my way to a compelling presentation. It had never occurred to me this was a problem for colleagues with hearing/seeing impairments. Nevermind colleagues' with "invisible" disabilities, focus and attention issues, that my presentation "style" might not serve.

I realized that failure to provide a text was an accessibility failure on my part. Even before we consider that slamming together the final draft of a scholarly presentation the week of the conference is just unprofessional...

Thinking about what it meant to make a document "accessible" led me to discover the "accessibility checker" function in Word. I began thinking about alt text for my complex images/diagrams. I didn't succeed fully, but suddenly I realized this needed to be part of my process from here on out.

This realization gave me a new lens for thinking about conferences. I suddenly began paying attention to how the conference environment might be experience by someone with any kind of body- or neuro-atypicality. Suddenly rows of chairs were painfully close together, difficult to move around in if you aren't rail thin or using some kind of assistive technology to get around. A visual-impaired colleague was led around one room, bumping in to chairs left in total disarray by previous conference attendees. I no doubt had done this myself.

The "culture" of engagement among scholars is not always conducive to inclusion. Little things, like our exasperated disdain for the microphone--"I don't need the mic, do I? Y'all can hear me, right?"--immediately puts the hearing impaired individual (or, hell, even people like me who are just kinda getting old and losing our hearing) at a profound disadvantage. We either have to disclose a disability. Or sit there catching little or nothing of what you're saying. It also makes it hard/impossible for ASL interpreters to do their jobs. I no doubt have done this repeatedly before and never given it a second thought.

That all this would be an issue, conference-wide, should have been clear at the outset when Chair Calhoon-Dillahunt got up to address us and declared at one point she was having trouble seeing her text in the dim stage lights. That no one seemed to recognize this and help, was unnerving. If the chair can't get accessibility help on the biggest stage at the conference...

Image of Conference on College Composition & Communication

All this was on top of the question of inclusivity around race that hung over the conference, just as it had ATTW. Except that where ATTW had addressed the question directly, Cs struggled, perhaps due to its size, to present a coherent, programmatic response to the issue.

At the all-attendee event held on Thursday, three speakers, individuals doing compelling work in KC presented about their work, lives, and initiatives to help engage around the racial disparities in education, policing, economics, etc. They were interesting and compelling. But as an attendee it wasn't clear how they fit together. Worse, it was not clear what we were supposed to do in response to what they shared.

Planners had set up a breakout, workshop-style response to these presentations. Each table had handouts and facilitators at each table to aid our discussion. It was soon clear that the handout was a lengthy document that was supposed to be read before the conference. This was probably shared in an email and then got lost. I was not conscious of seeing it before. We had no facilitator which was a problem probably exacerbated by the fact that we ended up being a table of white-passing, early career scholars who didn't know how to proceed in a programmatic context like this anyway. I left before the report out session. It felt like a missed opportunity.

One session which I was excited to attend involved members of the local BLM organization in KC. I noticed in my addendum sheet to the program that the session had been moved to the accessibility room. Sitting in the room at the appointed time with perhaps a dozen others, I realized the time had passed and the panel was not there. It occurred to me that perhaps the panelists had not known about the change. I ran down to the original session location and sure enough it had begun there. The dozen or so upstairs had to relocate, disrupting the panel, and, it should be noted, excluding those who needed the accessibility room to attend (whether for disability reasons or because they could not attend in person and had to stream it online).

This was repeated the next day when another set of panelists had not been directly told about their change to the accessibility room. Thankfully we caught it sooner and everyone was present.

That these particular issues both involved early career scholars and graduate students of color either attending or in one case supposed to be presenting, was especially disheartening. 

I should be clear, the conference wasn't a waste or a disaster from my experience. I call attention to these things, not to denigrate those who took the time to coordinate, as best they could, a massive logistics program under less than ideal conditions. I'm sure there were major issues and things that had to be dealt with at the executive level on down that you couldn't pay me enough to try sort out.

But I take note of these things precisely because they are part of my view "from below."

They are the things I want to remember going forward as I participate in organizations, local and national.

I've already begun to re-think how I design my documents to be accessible to readers, reviewers, students. I have been thinking about the spaces we inhabit, how we think about people different than us in those spaces, how our own use of space is exclusive, erasing, or domineering.

My awareness about the experience of others is being widened. For whatever reasons we are just now collectively beginning to pay attention to the voices of those who have been telling us all these things for years.

It seems like we are forever on the precipice of creating a more just, inclusive world. Which makes the distance we have to travel all the more frustrating. 

I don't know that the answer lies in massive organizations and institutions. They provide the resources certainly for us to be able to afford the space and tools to make those spaces more inclusive. I am certainly grateful for those opportunities.

But we can't technologize our way out of the problems humanity faces. We have to become attune to and listen to the world outside, the bodies and voices we so often ignore.

And let's be honest, by  "we" here I mean mostly white, able-bodied, economically stable people. Everybody else knows. Because they're the ones who have been accommodating our ignorance for far too long.

As I said in the last reflection and others have noted, we probably need to rethink conference "culture." There may be better ways to do this, to accomplish what we want from conferences.

At the awards ceremony on the last night, one winner described our work at Cs, as scholars of language: "dangerous work." This is a compelling thought. One I need to sit with longer.

But if it's dangerous, we need to do it ever more carefully and thoughtfully.