[Air-l] AoIR conference venues

[Nancy Baym]

Charlie Breindahl writes:

>
>All this is background and only periferally relevant to the question of AoIR
>conference locations. What really matters is this: I don't feel comfortable
>about going to the US anymore. I feel that my personal security is
>threatened and my dignity is violated in ways that are probably hard to
>understand if you are a US national.


I don't know. I'm a US national and I understand. When I go through 
O'Hare and see the instructions on fingerprinting, it turns my 
stomach. Many Americans feel our own security, privacy, and dignity 
are under threat from our own government via "the Patriot Act" (i.e. 
use the word "terrorism" and civil rights don't count anymore), no 
fly lists, and so on. In my own town the FBI sent people to knock on 
the doors of anarchists to grill them about whether they planned on 
committing crimes at the Republican convention or knew of anyone who 
was. In Denver, the FBI did this to a woman who works for the 
American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker organization committed 
to non-violent humanitarian assistance).

Most of us in academia view the visa issues as a tremendous threat to 
our well being, not just because of the issues coming up in this 
discussion but also because of the increased difficulty (and 
sometimes impossibility) of recruiting scholars and graduate students 
who are not US citizens.

So I fully empathize with the concerns expressed here. They make me 
really mad, because it is one more reason to be so disappointed with 
my own country.

Regarding AoIR conference venues, all of the sites we have discussed 
for 2006 are outside the United States.

Nancy

-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org