{"id":45809,"date":"2018-10-30T13:51:06","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T20:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=45809"},"modified":"2018-10-30T13:51:06","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T20:51:06","slug":"the-ethics-of-conference-speakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-ethics-of-conference-speakers\/","title":{"rendered":"The ethics of conference speakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

In March 2018 Stanford University in California held a two-day conference in applied history. There were 30 speakers.\u00a0Every single one was male and white<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like most academic fields, applied history is dominated by white men. However, there are also many women and people of colour who work and study within the discipline. No doubt there are also queer historians and historians with disabilities. To be fair to Stanford, three female historians had been invited to take part in the conference, but each of them declined due to previous commitments. To be fair to women, I\u2019m sure that more than 10% of historians are female. Stanford inadvertently made history itself by ending up with the biggest manel ever. (For those who haven\u2019t heard the term before, a manel is a panel comprised entirely of men.)<\/p>\n

Of course the media, as usual, reported this event as though gender is binary. While there is some point in prioritising women, who still face structural discrimination in professional life, this also risks further marginalising trans and non-binary people. Their voices are equally important, as are those of people from different sexual orientations, belief systems, and so on.<\/span><\/p>\n

As an occasional event organiser, I find it difficult to ensure that panels are suitably diverse. There are a number of reasons for this. First, in the UK, there are about four times as many women as there are people of colour. Another is that someone\u2019s ethnicity is not always obvious from their name or their voice. There are white Jamaicans, black Scots, and so on. It doesn\u2019t feel right to ask a potential panellist, \u2018Are you a bit brown-skinned at all?\u2019 in the hope of ticking the diversity box. Yet trying to be \u2018colour blind\u2019 isn\u2019t right either, because meritocracy ignores the structural inequalities in our society that keep many people of colour from reaching a career stage where they are offered speaking opportunities.<\/p>\n

Second, like Stanford, I have experienced women declining invitations; also, those who do accept have sometimes dropped out at the last minute. Of course men may drop out too, but despite efforts to achieve equality there are still fewer women in the academic pool than men, especially at senior level, which makes it hard to find women in the first place and harder to find female replacements at short notice. Also, women may drop out for different reasons from men. For example, anyone can get sick, but\u00a0recent research from Carers UK<\/a>\u00a0shows that women are still much more likely than men to have to prioritise caring for family members in need.<\/p>\n

Because of the number of people of colour in the UK, if you put together a panel of five people and they\u2019re all white, that in itself is not outside the curve \u2013 particularly if you\u2019re outside London or Birmingham. However, if you put together a second panel of five people, and they are all white too, you need to start asking yourself some serious questions. The proportions where you are may be different, but the principle is the same \u2013 and it also applies to other oppressed and marginalised groups.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a good solution to this problem, but I do think it\u2019s the responsibility of all of us to work towards finding such a solution; particularly those of us who are privileged. People who are disadvantaged, marginalised or oppressed already have too much to do. If you\u2019re not sure whether you are privileged you can check\u00a0here<\/a>. Like gender, privilege isn\u2019t binary. For example, I am white and English-speaking British, which confers privilege; I am also female, bisexual, and living with disabilities, which does not. These elements don\u2019t cancel each other out; they mean that some aspects of life are much easier for me to manage than they would be for others, while other aspects are physically and\/or emotionally draining.<\/p>\n

Ethically, I think I have a responsibility to identify and do what I can to address structural inequalities in our society. After all, it\u2019s long past the time when manels or all-white panels should be thought of as acceptable. If you also feel this way, here are some ideas for what we can do. If you are invited to speak at an event, you can ask about the diversity of the speakers before you choose whether or not to accept the invitation. (A young white male researcher recently told me he does this, and mentioned that one of his life\u2019s ambitions was never to speak on a manel. I love that the next generation is getting so much right that my generation got wrong.) And something we can all do is to make a point of finding and using the work of women, trans\/non-binary\/queer people, people of colour, Indigenous people, and people with disabilities who are working in our fields. If we find ourselves on, or listening to, a non-diverse panel, we can cite their work in our presentations or our questions \u2013 and we should be citing it in our own scholarly work too. Also, this should also raise everyone\u2019s awareness of more potential speakers for our events.<\/p>\n

I believe these are actions that can help, but again I doubt they\u2019re all we need to do to solve this problem. Perhaps you have more ideas?<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0Dr Helen Kara\u00a0has been an independent researcher since 1999 and writes and teaches on research methods.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In March 2018 Stanford University in California held a two-day conference in applied history. There were 30 speakers.\u00a0Every single one was male and white. Like most academic fields, applied history is dominated by white men. However, there are also many women and people of colour who work and study within the discipline. No doubt there […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":45810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[224473],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-45809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-conference-speakers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe ethics of conference speakers - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-ethics-of-conference-speakers\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The ethics of conference speakers - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In March 2018 Stanford University in California held a two-day conference in applied history. 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