In early fall of 2021, the American Anthropological Association introduced a new set of guidelines and obligations for panel organizers for the upcoming November meeting. Among those guidelines were several measures intended to improve the accessibility of online and in-person conference presentations. The guidelines were developed by the AAA staff, including Nell Koneczny, a staff member with extensive disability access expertise, including a related MA degree, and lived experience of disability. Nell’s presence on the AAA staff was very important to many members of the AAA community with access needs. For several year’s prior to Nell’s hire in 2019, I served on an ad-hoc committee of the Disability Research Interest Group (a sub-section of the Society for Medical Anthropology) devoted to improving accessibility at the annual meeting. The committee came about in direct response to several members of the interest group threatening to forego AAA meetings in the future altogether after years on end of not having their access needs met, and having to start from zero explaining their access needs to temp workers hired by the org in the lead up to the conference. The subcommittee initially developed a document, Guidelines for Accessible Conference Presentations, which we circulated on our listserv, through the SMA, and eventually as part of the AAA “know before you go” information. Our strategy during this period (~2015-2018) was to slowly implement and develop a culture of access from below, colleague to colleague. We also advocated for change with the AAA as an organization, sending letters and holding meetings, that eventually led to the inclusion of accessibility in job description hiring for the position that Nell eventually filled. With Nell in place, we were hopeful that more would be done in the AAA office.
One unfortunate outcome of this advocacy work was that some elements of accessibility praxis were introduced to the broader AAA community through top-down mandates, most prominently in the fall 2021 communication about presenter and panel organizer responsibilities. On the heels of the pandemic, many anthropologists felt overwhelmed that not only were they trying to figure out how to safely attend a conference, they were being asked to shift their conference presentation habits and preparation practices with very little notice, in a way that put an unanticipated demand on presenter time in a year when everyone was already stretched thin, burnt out, and working through the experience pandemic disaster capitalism. Many anthropologists, reading the new guidelines took to Twitter to raise legitimate concerns about how when the new guidelines were introduced, and to wonder how to reconcile the inconvenience of shifting their planned conference preparation timelines weeks earlier that ever before including the preparation of new access elements that many had never implemented before. In spite of efforts from the AAA office to offer education and the politics of access as an ethos of non-exclusion an important diversity practice for the betterment of the scholarly community, the top-down nature of the changes struck overwhelmed anthropologists as too much to handle.
Observing this moment with other disability anthropologists on a group text thread, we tried to figure out how to conceptualize the conundrum. Many of the tweets circulating carried an unintentional air of ableism: why should I be inconvenienced by changing my presentation preparation timeline and practices just so that someone with hearing impairment/vision impairment can participate? For those of us in disability anthropology where access is an essential part of our scholarly praxis, and we are often eagerly awaiting the comments and feedback of our peers and mentors attending the conference, the benefit of these practices was clear. But how could we win others over to this point of view? What had gone wrong? What could be done to salvage the important politics of access while also acknowledging the real overwhelm and burnout the communique unearthed?
With this conundrum in mind, in a flurry of concern and righteous indignation, I wrote a Twitter thread (again in 2021, so well before the Muskification of Twitter) addressing the issue. As of this writing, the first tweet in that thread has been retweeted nearly 150 times, bookmarked 380 times, and received nearly 600 likes and nearly 50 quote tweets. Other tweets in the thread have likewise been liked, retweeted, and commented on. Now that Twitter, under Elon Musk’s leadership, made the site unsearchable for those not on the site, the thread is less accessible. However, anyone can access the original thread here on the Thread unroll site, although the comments and likes aren’t reflected there.
What, then, of the time-honored tradition of writing your paper en route to the conference, or over stale coffee on your hotel room desk mere minutes before the presentation? If that isn’t our disciplinary culture, I don’t know what is.
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It doesn’t help that these requests come via impersonal email from the AAA head office: it’s easy to forget that there are actual colleagues w/ access needs and access workers behind these requests.
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ASL and captioners need materials in advance in order to prepare. Especially, they need to know how to spell names; what unusual jargon, terms, places names, etc. you will be using; and something about the rhythm of the presentation overall.
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Plus, staff need to organize these materials & get them to the access workers. You may know that @AmericanAnthro hired an access specialist two years ago after decades of lobbying from disabled anthropologists who had persistently experienced exclusion at our conferences.
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But the great news is that while disability access practices for conference presentations are new to many anthropologists, your colleagues over here with research cross-over with disability studies have been immersed in a totally different conference culture for years.
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So how do we do it?
It is totally possible to make a slide deck before you write your paper. I like to think of it as an outline. Here’s how I do it in 5 easy steps.
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Step 1: I pick 1-4 key images that I know I want to talk about. They each get their own slide. I know that talking about each image, including describing it and discussing its significance will take 1-2 minutes, so I almost never use more than four images.
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Step 2: I look back at my paper abstract as submitted. I make a list of proper nouns, including author and interlocutor names, theoretical terms, and place names that I know I will need to use in my presentation. Hey look, an access guide!
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Step 3: I look at my list of words. How can they be represented on slides? If there is a key concept or theoretical idea, I put it as a stand alone word or phrase in the middle of a slide. If there is a place name, I put it on a slide with a map. …
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… If there is a sequence or timeline or set of ideas, I put those things together as bullet points or in a graphic on a slide.
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Step 4: Look at these slides. What order would they need to be in to make a coherent presentation? Reorder accordingly. Consider if you’ve missed something.
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Step 5: Add a cover slide (with your name and affiliation) and an end slide. Check for any other “favorite” slides you like to include in presentations about your research that you’ve missed.
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There! Done! This is a flexible slide deck that can now be used for your 15-20 minute AAA conference presentation, or repurposed for a longer talk in another venue. You can upload it in October for a November talk you haven’t written yet.
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Congrats! Welcome to access culture. It’s not so bad.
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One of the insights of disability studies is that access practices actually create aesthetic and theoretical opportunities that we might otherwise miss. So dig in: what new connections and aesthetic possibilities will making a slide deck this way prooffer?
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Access practices are not empty virtue signaling. They are a way to ensure that your colleagues have an opportunity to comprehend your ideas, colleagues whose input on your work you may be missing otherwise.
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And, well, getting feedback from colleagues is… the point of conferences.
And if you’re unsure as to why you’re being asked to engage in a particular access practice, that’s totally fair. Changing habits is uncomfortable and takes time. Access practices require culture change. AAA has suggested new habits faster than our collective has changed…
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Ask one of your colleagues with disability access knowledge for input. Or spend a little time learning about disability access & disability justice.
Or, you know, just submit your slides using the steps above & feel confident about being ahead of the game come November.
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And hang in there, everyone. Pandemic life is tough.
Addendum: If you’re reading this thread as a non- anthropologist, it is relevant to know that the standard practice at anthro conferences is to read aloud from a written script. The text takes primacy & is expected to be of written-article quality. …
… many of us were trained to wordsmith our written presentations down to the last second, and only add slides as a bonus if we have time. …
… thus, asking anthropologists to make a slide deck before writing then presentation script goes against years of disciplinary training and common practice. More so than in fields on which presenting data without a script based on slides is the norm.
cassandra hartblay 