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To cite this work: Kill, C. (2025). The Complex Hospitality of Conferencing: Visiting the Welcome Hut. Disability Dialogues. ��«Ӱҵ: iHuman, University of ��«Ӱҵ. 
 

Dr Cassie Kill researches matters of participation, diversity and inclusion, in particular in cultural and educational institutions. She is currently researching ableism in the academy. Cassie previously worked in participatory arts for over a decade. 

I recently attended the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2025 in Edinburgh. The conference was brimming over with warm Scottish hospitality, including great food, a walking tour of Arthur’s Seat, and even some traditional Scottish folk music and storytelling. I met some wonderful people, enjoyed sharing my research and hearing about other people’s new work, and developed some new theoretical and methodological insights. Nevertheless, at ECQI I found myself thinking more critically about the phenomenon of the academic conference itself. In this blog I consider practices of academic conferencing with theories of hospitality and ableism, to unpack some of the complexities and contradictions involved in conferencing. 

Theories of hospitality provide a useful critical lens on conferencing. Writers such as Jacques Derrida and Sara Ahmed have compellingly argued that, whilst there is an ethical duty to welcome outsiders in, the act of hosting is always complex and conflicted in practice (Ahmed, 2012; Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000). Such ideas offer a way of thinking about what conferencing, and academic participation more broadly, do, both for those who are securely positioned as hosts, and for the “others” who participate as guests. As I whizzed southwards on the train home, I watched the waves break over the beautiful East coast of Scotland and reflected on my experiences at ECQI.

The main conference was jam-packed with exciting talks, workshops and social activities. The organisers had even provided informal art space for relaxation. And of course, there was no obligation for attendees to be at the conference all day, every day. However, I found there was a powerful pull, especially perhaps as an early career researcher, to attend as many sessions as possible. It was – as academic conferences often are – equal measures of exciting, intense, stimulating and exhausting. At a particularly overwhelmed moment, I went for a walk and found myself at the threshold of the Welcome Hut, being welcomed in by its steward, Christian Hanser. 

ECQI was last hosted in Edinburgh in 2019 and Hanser has written about his experiences of attending that event with the hut. He suggests that the format of a large academic conference can itself reinforce academic conventions (Hanser, 2021, p. 142). In 2019, he sought to make a ‘disruptive experimentation’ (Hanser, 2021, p. 142) by attending the conference with the Welcome Hut: a small, wooden Shepherd’s hut, featuring a wood-burning stove, blankets and small seating benches. When ECQI took place in Edinburgh again in 2025, he brought the hut back again. 

As Hanser (2021) highlights, norms of academic conferencing are shaped by the performative logics and power dynamics of the wider sector. Mainstream conferencing often demands a certain sort of academic performance, including a particular genre of verbal communication, an interaction with a set of visual slides, and either reading or recalling from memory a 10–20-minute presentation, in front of an audience. These dominant practices of conferencing have had a role in reproducing the neoliberal-ableist figure of the hyper-productive, autonomous and independent individual thinker as the ideal academic worker (Goodley, 2024). It is important to acknowledge here that mainstream conferences often fail to provide even the most basic of access for some disabled people. And for those who are enabled to attend, Hanser (2021) argues that the “game” of conferencing often involves less powerful participants playing “visibility roulette”, suggesting that conferencing involves risk, and often, disappointment. 

The Welcome Hut instead experimented with an alternative space of hospitality, and another set of relations (Hanser, 2021). The main conference was exciting, offering a busy programme of stimulating talks and workshops, and sessions were often hot, busy and noisy. We were expected to sit still and pay attention for extended periods of time. The question-and-answer element of the main conference demanded complex social understanding and high levels of impulse control and self-management. At odds with the wider conference, the hut was often quiet and calm. There was no preplanned protocol or set of timings: the rules of engagement flexed according to who was there. The hut thus offered a very different relational space to the main conference, which offered a powerful metaphor for the challenges of attempting anti-ableist hospitality within ableist academic institutions. Positioned as a conference ‘fringe’ (Hanser, 2021), the Welcome Hut was a more emergent and space of open-ended encounter, which sidestepped some of the neoliberal-ableist norms of the main conference. It provided a space in which to embrace missing out, as a counterpoint to the temporalities of academic hyperproduction that can go into overdrive at conferences (Hanser, 2021). I do not mean to suggest that the hut provided a perfectly welcoming and inclusive space for all disabled people, nor that within its walls we were magically released from our academic subjectivities. Nevertheless, in a small and fleeting way, the Welcome Hut offered a contrasting model of hospitality to the wider conference, which I found generative.

My experiences of the Welcome Hut shaped my thinking about attempting anti-ableism in academia more widely. My experiences in the main conference were great and will continue to inform my research and teaching for months and years to come. However, as I experienced the joy of missing out and embraced powerful moments of undirected encounter in the hut’s small space of hospitality, it surfaced the idea that striving towards anti-ableism is not just about saying yes, but also, sometimes, about saying no. To use a spatial metaphor, anti-ableism is not just about providing tools which overcome barriers to inclusion (although the hut does have a ramp), but also about creating bounded spaces within powerful institutions where we can create solidarity and community. These smaller hospitable spaces can, potentially, allow a more intimate, connected and trusting set of relations which resist the underlying ableist logics of large neoliberal institutions. Whilst – as Derrida has argued – striving towards unconditional hospitality is an ethical duty, such an arrangement may, paradoxically, be hostile to some disabled and neurodivergent people, whose needs may not be easily met in large group spaces. Instead, in this instance, creating a small space on the edges of the institution enabled a different mode of hospitable conferencing to fleetingly emerge. 

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham and London: Duke Univeristy Press.

Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond (R. Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Goodley, D. (2024). Depathologising the university. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2024.2316007

Hanser, C. H. (2021). Collective Temporal Activism as a Game changer for the Academy: Reframing Conference Hospitalities Among Colleagues Under Pressure. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(1), 137–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720968207