Academic conferences are prime sites of exchange in global science. As events where face-to-face or digital encounters occur, they represent important nodes of knowledge circulation, and serve as spaces of research communication, academic identity formation, and networking. ‘Conferencing’ is recognised as an essential activity for building an academic career, which is manifested through the inclusion of conference participation and organisation in recruitment and promotion criteria.

Conference participation, however, frequently requires access to resources that are distributed highly unequally – such as funding, visas, work-place permission, family support, and freedom from care responsibilities for the duration of an event. As such, academic conferences are sites of privilege and disadvantage, which may reproduce social inequalities in relation to gender, nationality, race/ethnicity, social class/caste, disability, language, and other intersecting dimensions of difference.

This panel critically interrogates conferencing as scientific practice and its structuring effects in academia. It invites contributions that offer a) theoretical conceptualisations of academic conferencing/conferences; b) analytical syntheses of pertinent literature; c) empirical studies that examine how conferencing/conferences reinforce inequalities; d) methodologically-oriented explorations of researching conference inequalities; e) reflections on prevailing/changing conference practices in the light of a climate crisis and global pandemic.

Despite growing interest in conferences and an expanding evidence base revealing their adverse social and environmental effects, they remain a niche subject in the social studies of science. This panel seeks to provide an integrative discursive space to stimulate the formation of a scholarly network for future exchange, linking STS with higher education research and gender studies.