The academic machine: flying again

The EC’s Sustainability Committee is very grateful to Adrian Friday for helping us kick-start a new conversation about the role of travel in SIGCHI. We warmly invite your participation in this conversation, either by commenting here or by emailing the Sustainability Committee at sigchi-sustain@acm.org.

A lot has been written about the relationship between academia and conference travel, and especially of late, its carbon footprint [4,5,9,14,17,19]. So why write more about it? Well, I think it’s useful to bring together some of my personal observations with some reflections from relatively recent academic literature on the subject, with the aim of moving the discussion on from a position of personal guilt and eco-anxiety, to one of more concerted reflection and ideally action.

Let’s address the ‘elephant in the room’: flying has enabled institutions to ‘think global’ and leverage long distance relationships. The exchange of ideas at ‘the best venues’, reliance on personal attendance at meetings on the other side of the country or continent, or overseas has become normalised. For a great many institutions, with aspirations to be globally significant, or at least measurably considered as such [5,7], this runs deep. It’s become embedded in the careers of academics, holds the keys to their progression by evidencing international profile, and is enmeshed in the practice of ‘being academic’ and the very construction of new knowledge. It also reflects on our institutions’ reputations, and of course, is linked increasingly to their very financial survival. While collaboration and travel can be fun and enriching, I think we often conveniently forget that the travel itself may include long hours in airports and being treated summarily like cattle, especially when it goes wrong.

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