If you tuned into #distribute2020 last week, you know it was amazing. I've been thinking--say we look ahead, imagine other conferences in the space of everyday life, what might make them even more engaging and artful? A speculative thread, please share your ideas too. 1/ 
We caught glimpses of domestic life: #PetsOfDistribute2020, #PlantsOfDistribute2020, #CompanionsOfDistribute2020. How to engage such textures of life more thoughtfully in a virtual meeting? How to build relations between a meeting portal and the local worlds beyond? 2/
People have companions, parents, kids. Imagine a channel for kin, as a component of a conference streaming platform, engaging others (pets and plants too??) with anthropological content, not necessarily original by source, but curated to resonate with the conference. 3/
Not everyone can sit at length in front of a screen and keyboard. So imagine other channels of engagement that acknowledge bodily disability, and household responsibility, that meals must be cooked, dishes and laundry done: podcasts, playlists, audio chat functionality. 4/
The #distribute2020 team curated powerful multisensory works of image and sound. Imagine ways of engaging other senses beyond a screen and speakers: a recommended recipe list, games and crafts, guided meditations, walks outside, kinesthenic exercises. 5/
Say we kept moving toward more collaboration. Could a distributed conference sustain a collective burst of multisited research, the way that bird counts or beach cleanups happen in many places at once? Imagine the virtual conference as a network for knowledge production. 6/
Could such conferences evolve more fully, in other words, toward two-way channels between distributed places, occasions for a reciprocal movement of insight and example, activist engagement, rather than treating the places of participants as passive receivers of knowledge? 7/
How to build more spaces of refuge into the conference form? Smaller "rooms" or spaces for marginalized scholars, students, makers, activists to talk and collaborate. More support for dialogue in as many languages as possible. Design features meant to acknowledge difference. 8/
And what about collective energy, savor, fun? The #distribute2020 party thrown by the #GreekNode, the music and singing, an amazing experience. Let's have more experiments with affective effervescence, with music, film, performances that close the gap between here and there. 9/
A loopy vision, I know, verging more on a weekend #AnthroCamp than a proper professional meeting. But my question is this: as we drift further from the convention center model, as @4sWeb and @theAAG and other societies do too, how faithful to the paper/panel form must we be? 10/
More modestly, here's a recent @culanth post I wrote about how deliberate experiments with virtual and alternative conferencing like #distribute2020 or #displace18 can help us reimagine the conventional annual academic meeting. 11/
culanth.org/fieldsights/re…
culanth.org/fieldsights/re…
