The Conference Is Not Dead—But the Version We Built It Around Probably Should Be
The annual pilgrimage to a convention center hotel, the badge lanyard, the overcrowded session rooms—these rituals have defined scholarly community for generations. But as hybrid and fully virtual formats demonstrate their capacity to reach broader, more diverse audiences at a fraction of the cost, the academic community faces a genuine reckoning about what conferences are actually for and whether the traditional model serves those purposes any longer.