COVID-19 and Academia: Considering the Future of Academic Conferencing

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and measures taken to mitigate its spread have presented numerous challenges for academia. Conferences are one challenge for academia in a COVID-19 environment. The present study discusses the purpose of academic conferences and provides a case study of a virtual conference in criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) that occurred in November 2020. We extracted data from the virtual conference program, from data publicly available through CrimCon, and from a sample of 53 of the 96 panels that occurred. Using these data, we present information about conference attendance and participation. We found that there were 558 unique presenters across 318 presentations and roundtable discussions, and a total of 1,629 unique attendees over the course of the three conference days. While virtual conferencing solves some problems, it presents unique others. Important comparisons between virtual conferencing and in-person conferencing are provided.

Keywords:

• Conference
• annual meeting
• virtual format
• case study
• CCJ

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the presenters and attendees who took a chance and presented or observed research from practitioners and researchers from all over the world. The authors do not know if virtual conferences will ever “catch on,” but it seems like an intriguing idea; we look forward to seeing how the situation develops in the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In recent years there has been more attention paid to conference location; for example, the Western Society of Criminology (WSC) annual meeting in 2019 had a record number of conference submissions such that the WSC Board had to create a means of rejecting submissions. The record number of submissions is believed to be due to the WSC meeting occurring in Hawaii and in February. This selectivity is common in other disciplines, but rare in CCJ where conference exclusion criteria typically do not exist.

2 All three sources of data used in this study are publicly available. The first source is available at “https://crimcon.org/program,” and was accessed on November 13, the second at “https://crimcon.org/stats,” and the third at “https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-xWkwIVDTCu9Txv2iz4eOw/videos.”

3 The program was downloaded on November 13 and the downloaded program on November 13 will not reflect changes made to the program during or after the conference from November 18–20, 2020. The program at this date was used because it seems reasonable that participants and interested attendees look at the program a week before the conference occurs, and the program at that point informs their decisions about which panels to attend.

4 Data were collected for this study while the conference was occurring “live,” though for individuals unable to view the public conference while it was live, it has since been uploaded to YouTube.

5 The map is not to scale. It is not in the authors’ interests to engage in geopolitical debate; presenters indicated affiliations with Taiwan, Scotland, Ireland, and England, though the map only differentiates the Republic of China, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. The 25 countries with presenter affiliations include Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China (Taiwan), Cyprus, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, United States.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Reinhard

Daniel Reinhard is a PhD candidate at Texas State University and a research assistant with the Texas School Safety Center. His research currently focuses on crime mapping, crime prevention, and homeless income generation. Recently he is particularly interested in the pairing of geographic analyses with time series methods.

Mark C. Stafford

Mark C. Stafford is a Professor and interim PhD Coordinator at Texas State University. Some of his research interests have included deterrence, fear of crime, and knowledge generation within the social sciences. His research can be found in Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, America Sociological Review, and Social Forces, among others.

Troy C. Payne

Troy C. Payne is an Associate Professor and Director of the Alaska Justice Information Center at the University of Alaska. He typically works with police departments to define, analyze, and solve community problems through the application of crime prevention and quantitative data analysis. His recent research can be found in Crime and Delinquency, Security Journal, and Crime Prevention and Community Safety.