An Introduction
By Shilpa Viswanath, PhD and Jamie Levine Daniel, PhD
Academic conferences, an
essential component of academic life, contribute a whole new element to
the parenting and caregiving challenge. Academic conferences are a hotbed for
professional networking, career collaborations and for advancing one’s
research. Attending conferences are especially indispensable for graduate and
doctoral students as well as junior faculty members, given the opportunities to
further their academic careers. Yet, conferences are notoriously long-drawn,
involve travel and are expensive to attend. For parents and caregivers in
academia, the barriers to conferencing are further complicated with sparse or
absent childcare support. This blog symposium series on ‘Equitable
Conferencing’ conceptualizes conferences as an extension of the workplace, and
brings together students parents/caregivers, faculty parents/caregivers and
practitioner parents/caregivers in the field of public administration to share
personal narratives of struggles and strains involved while attempting to
conference and also be a parent or caregiver.
Our symposium
contributors, ASPA leadership, doctoral students, and faculty, approach issues
of conference logistics, costs, (lack of) facilities and other barriers to
conference participation (including childcare and dependent care
responsibilities). Contributors also discuss frameworks to achieve an equitable
conference environment, and means of financing conference childcare and
dependent care support. This symposium also sheds light on new initiatives
implemented by certain professional organizations in the field such as Association
of Public Policy Analysis and Management
(APPAM) and Law & Society Association, both, who offer conference childcare grants (between
$250-$500) in the form of monetary compensation to participants with children.
These grants help cover extra expenses incurred for caregiving services. Other
organizations such as the American Political Science Association (APSA) provide on-site conference childcare support at
subsidized rates for children between 6months to 12 years of age.
To begin this series,
Dr. Elizabeth Berkowitz highlights the needs of nursing mothers who attend
conferences. In her blog post, she explores the idea of nursing pods at
academic conferences which create a secure space for nursing mothers to pump
and store milk, while participating in a conference. This is intended to be a
productive dialogue, we welcome further online discussion and practical
suggestions to address equitable conferencing. To contribute to this symposium,
kindly send a 500 word blog post to wps@jjay.cuny.edu. If you have any questions, please contact one of the blog
series editors: Shilpa Viswanath, sviswanath@uwlax.edu and Jamie Levine Daniel, jlevined@iupui.edu
Dr. Shilpa Viswanath is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. And, faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin - Madison’s Center for South Asia. Her research and teaching engage in themes of gender and social equity; and, are rooted in her identities of being an immigrant in the United States, a faculty woman of color and a mother. She presently serves on the executive board of American Society for Public Administration’s Section for Women in Public Administration.
Dr. Jamie Levine Daniel is an assistant professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Her research focuses on the relationship between nonprofit resource acquisition and program service delivery, with particular interest on the relationship between earned revenue and mission.
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