Our 2022 conference will take place online, organised and hosted by University College London. This conference adopts justice and equity as central normative lenses to explore just futures in an urbanising and mobile world, facing a climate and ecological crisis in a pandemic or post-pandemic context.

Virtual again in 2022

Following DSA’s successful online conferences in 2020 and 2021, DSA2022 will also be online. This enables us to maintain the high levels of participation of recent years, particularly of colleagues based in the global South. It will also mean we can ensure equity of experience and a small carbon footprint.

However, DSA2022 will adopt a range of different approaches in order to get the most from the online format and make it even more inclusive. There is growing evidence about zoom fatigue, shorter online concentration capacity and the need for online sessions to be shorter. Lengthy synchronous online attendance has been proven to have negative effects on our wellbeing. In contrast, there is extensive pedagogical evidence to show that the quality of engagement between participants in synchronous sessions is greatly improved when all have been able to access the content to be discussed in advance and that this approach is more inclusive of a broader range of learning styles.

Inspired by the digital pedagogy expertise of our conference hosts at UCL, we want to reduce the downsides of spending too many passive hours on screen and maximise the time we have together to discuss and debate new evidence, approaches and ideas, from across different time-zones. DSA2022’s methodology will therefore exemplify some of the values underpinning the theme, including: equitable access, global engagement, knowledge exchange (across disciplines and geographies), and climate action.