We have secured additional funding (60.0000 Euro) from KONE Foundation under their special funding call ‘Environmentally responsible encounters’. This is to extend on our commitment to low carbon research activities with a carbon low conference at the end of our project in 2021. With this extra funding we extend the planned conference in Tampere, Finland with 4 other satellite conference locations. We will post more about the conference in 2020. See the initial plan:
Sustainable encounters and dialogical alternatives to knowledge exchanges need to develop in a framework that, first, minimizes carbon dioxide emissions of travel and other carbon producing academic and artistic activities. Second, challenges continuing inequalities in knowledge production emanating from epistemological hierarchies, unequal distribution of academic infrastructures and discriminatory geopolitics and, third, reconfigures existing forms of conferencing that reproduce academic enclaves, exclusion and a culture of fast research. Following these principles, we develop and experiment with Decentered Satellite Conferencing (DSC) in the second half of our ongoing project. DSC enables participants to connect on a local level at one of five selected physical sites (=satellites) as well as globally on an online conferencing platform. We select five satellites to run conference synchronically and sustainably. Participants may choose conference modalities ranging from paper presentations to artistic engagements. Conference contributions are pre-recorded and shared on the conference platform that also provides media for dialogues before and after the main conference period (2 days in May 2021). During and after DSC experiment we facilitate discussions about developing DSC further. Surveys in different languages seek participants’ views on the conference model and ask them to calculate their carbon footprints to estimate the actual carbon cost of blended DSC conferencing.