This is a very useful reply, thank your Salvatore. I'm less excited by Hillary's bracketing unwaged people along with feudal peasantry, but I'm sure it was well intentioned. What I really meant was that many conferences allow low-paid and unwaged people to pay the postgrad fee. As to proving one's status and freeloading, I'm naive enough to assume that people who define themselves as "critical" don't cheat radical initiatives and we need to exercise an element of trust.
By the way, this wasn't personal - I've earned (just) enough this year to regard myself as obliged to pay the full fees; but being on the outside gives one a different viewpoint.
Pam
Salvatore Engel-DiMauro <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Dear all,
This is a most welcome critique, Pam, and so is the suggestion below,
Hillary. As one of the conference organisers, I too find difficulty with
this issue, along with the rest of the organisers. We will be discussing
this matter at length for the sake of future conferences. We are,
however, trying to accommodate low-wage and even unwaged non-academics
as best we can, given no monetary resources at all except our individual
pocket books and some minimal funding sources from two or three
institutions.
In my view, part of the problem is also ensuring that people that
receive low wages or unemployment welfare in, say, Kigali, are not
treated as if they had the same income as a low wage or unemployed in,
say, New York City. Affiliation and academic status is one way to verify
and differentiate income level, but it is clearly not sufficient, nor
necessarily justifiable (some might also find our geographically-based
fee-differentiation problematic, too). However, given the exiguous
resources at our disposal, it certainly helps us as organisers to have
those problematic academically-centred categories in place and make
exceptions as the need arises. The point, in the end, is to redistribute
received funds in such a way as to be able to help those with much
lesser economic means.
But I feel obliged here as well to counter assumptions about what
constitutes "costs" and "abuse". Unlike mainstream academic associations
(RGS, AAG, etc.), we are actually very few, unpaid, and overworked with
logistics. So, costs may be marginal if only counted in conventional
terms, as money/assets (and even those kinds of costs are hardly
marginal to us!); they are certainly not marginal in terms of time we
devote to organising the event (and when necessary a bit of our personal
dosh). The matter of potential "abuse" is inapplicable here, since the
conference is already "uneconomic" in mainstream economic terms. In a
context of an often murderously abusive global system based on surplus
extraction to benefit the few, the least we can do is to have those that
have more economic means contribute more for the benefit of those with
less. I would be more worried about the sort of abuse Hillary describes
in a context of economic equality.
I hope this clarifies the problem we are facing as organisers and more
such constructive critiques and suggestions are certainly welcome.
saed
Dr Hillary Shaw wrote:
> I totally agree.
>
> What are the marginal costs of an extra person at a conference -
> surely pretty low, especially if no food is provided. Even if they
> get a conference schedule, the marginal cost of printing an extra few
> can't be large, and they usually print a few extra to make sure all
> paying delegates have one anyway.
>
> Of course if loads of 'low paid / unwaged' turned up, or many waged
> abused this, the whole thing would become uneconomic.
>
> Maybe conferences could adopt a policy of - once the paying list is
> full - having a few places, limited in number, for the first few
> 'unwaged / low waged' applicants free. Say up to 5% or 10% of the
> total conference paid places. A bit like the ancient idea of gleaning
> fields, leaving the edges of your field unharvested, so the poor didnt
> have the indignity of begging.
>
> Dr Hillary J. Shaw
> Business Management and Marketing Group
> Harper Adams University College
> Shrewsbury Road
> Newport, Shropshire
> TF10 8NB
> www.fooddeserts.org
>
> In a message dated 15/08/2007 16:06:53 GMT Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> Has anyone else wondered why the fees charged for the Mumbai
> conference assume that everyone is either Faculty or Postgrad,
> with no provision for low-paid or unwaged? Given that both
> Faculty & Postgraduates are liable to be able to shift all or part
> of their fees, travel and subsistence onto their departments,
> whereas unwaged people have to find the whole sum themselves, it
> seems a bit thoughtless to assume that all non-students can afford
> to come at the higher rate. I tried writing to one of the
> organisers back in April, they said they'd think about it ...
>
> Pam Shurmer-Smith
>
>
> Pamela Shurmer-Smith
> Portsmouth
> UK
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> For ideas on reducing your carbon footprint visit Yahoo! For Good
> this month.
>
>
>
--
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
Department of Geography, SUNY New Paltz
1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, NY 12561
tel: 1/845/2572991, fax: 1/845/2572992
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Senior Editor
Capitalism Nature Socialism: A Journal of Ecosocialism
Editor
ACME: An international e-journal for critical geographies
http://www.acme-journal.org/
Pamela Shurmer-Smith
Portsmouth
UK
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