Our current cultural moment is undeniably one of great tension. A collective breath on a global scale held a beat too long. There are signals coming in from all imaginable directions indicating an overwhelming need for systemic change and new ways to forge honest, meaningful connections with one another. Hopefully, this conference is one such connection.
While in-person academic conferences are engaging, they have always necessarily stymied participation for scholars with families, scholars with medical issues that make travel difficult, scholars with no university affiliation, and scholars who don’t receive departmental travel funds, either because their position is not considered to be a privileged one or because their department does not receive such funds. Zoom has opened up the world of academic conferences beautifully, and it has allowed so many more scholars to participate who couldn’t have otherwise. It has become clear that those of us in the academic and information communities have a strong desire to connect not just with our immediate community, but with our global community as well.
There is, however, a need for engagement beyond the screen. While this conference will certainly make use of discussion boards, social media, and perhaps video chats, we hope to create a meaningful connection through physical and digital zine objects. Our participants will be sharing not only their ideas, but their creativity as well in how they choose to present the materials. We hope to create an opportunity to engage with scholarship outside of the box—to provide a platform through which to engage with ideas in a new way on the page.
It is our hope, too, that this format will invite thinkers who do not officially identify as scholars to join the conversation—we’d like to break down the invisible barriers between academics and artists, underground writers and scholars whose work typically appears in peer-reviewed journals. These conversations feel pressing, and we need to hear every voice.