I’m not going to lie – I miss the energy of conferences in real life. I’ve given a lot of talks this year, and while I’m grateful for the opportunities that virtual participation gives you, I find it increasingly hard to focus during these marathon online conferences.

A happy exception to this trend was the session organized by my friend Dennis Pauschinger at this year’s Swiss Geoscience Meeting in virtual Geneva. Dennis hosted a session called “Policing the city: State violence in the age of far-right populism and digitalisation.” Here, I returned to virtual / material Russia to explore how the rise in authoritarian practices results in certain impacts across different populations of ‘ordinary’ people: urban explorer/bloggers, stand up comedians, and aspiring instagram models.

The overall session was a success, I think, because of everyone contributed some energy – both presenters and audience alike. I remember that that element of participation doesn’t always happen in person, of course, but I think it’s notably harder at a distance when most of us seem rather starved of the feedback of in-person connection. This time, however, Dennis set us off on the right foot by marrying a topic of immediate empirical importance and interest with the kind of theoretical rigor that elucidates more than it obfuscates (which is what I think theory should do, of course). And that, combined with a happily active audience, made for one of the most engaging virtual conferences I’ve had during this long year.

So, building on my on-again/off-again tradition of blogging on what I learn about hosting conferences, one of the lessons here I think is to figure out ways to draw the audience into more active participation. I’m not sure what that looks like exactly, but I certainly wouldn’t mind trying something more novel than the standard conference format, transported to zoom format.

Anyway, next step is to turn this talk into a proper paper. More on that in 2022 I hope!