Crises bring habits into focus. For a scholarly discipline like ours, the practice of gathering by the hundreds or thousands somewhere in the world each year is a habit that merits some scrutiny. Sharing work and meeting colleagues and potential collaborators is essential to the development of a field. But is a regular conference that demands physical travel to a single place the most effective and ethical means of meeting these needs? What would it mean to approach this moment not only with precautionary reaction, but also as an occasion for speculative work, a chance to devise the kind of meetings we would like to see?
