Invisible Barriers to British Studies: Unequal Mobilities of Academic Conference Participation

At the very start of my PhD, I was accepted to present a paper at an overseas academic conference. Although I had recently studied for four years in the country where the conference was to take place, I was no longer a resident there. Aware of the long visa processing time, I, along with my parents and our visa consultant, did not wait for my official acceptance to begin preparing the ridiculously long list of documents required, including, but not limited to, all our bank statements, proof of family relationship, diplomas, academic transcripts, university enrollment certificate, scholarship letters, employment records, and detailed travel and residence histories. Any documentation not in English required translation by a certified agency. Despite submitting the application six months in advance of the event, I did not receive the visa in time to attend the conference. It was not until almost six months after the conference that the visa was eventually approved.

Whilst I was extremely grateful for the generous understanding and sympathy from mentors, peers, and conference organizers on this occasion, I was also startled by the general lack of awareness among scholars of British Studies about the visa challenges faced by me and many other scholars. Oftentimes, academics I speak with have never encountered a visa barrier when attending conferences. Some are shocked by the extensive list of documentation required, and how the labyrinth of documents inconveniently differs for each trip and country. Others are bemused when I explain why I must spend months constantly scrambling for scarce open slots to secure an appointment to travel to another city to submit the application or attend an interview.

A travel visa granted to Gorgios Grivas by the British government for temporary residence in Cyprus, a British colony until 1960. Image from The National Archive, Kew. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14540307

Although visa barriers are just one example among the numerous obstacles to conference participation, they pose a deeply discriminatory yet underacknowledged challenge for passport-disadvantaged scholars, particularly in today’s ever-changing and ever-more demanding immigration systems. As scholars of British Studies, we have all encountered structural impediments to access within contemporary and historical contexts. As such, we are well-equipped to identify self-perpetuating cycles of spatial exclusion. Although scholars born and raised in the “Global South”—those most likely to face visa barriers—remain a minority in British Studies in North America today, it is imperative to enable a more inclusive future, starting with paying more attention to the passport-based visa barriers to attending conferences, especially in “Global North” countries with stringent visa policies.

For scholars without first-hand experiences, these challenges can be difficult to comprehend, in no small part because the visa system is inherently complex. There’s no standard procedure—a lot depends on where we’re born, where we’re applying to go, where we’re applying from, our travel and family history, field of research (and even our supervisor’s), and above all, the financial, employment, and immigration records of our family and ourselves. How well these records fare in the immigration system is often far beyond our control, sometimes determined long before we start our academic career, even before birth. Moreover, countries with quicker processing times often have bottlenecked appointment systems, where merely securing an application slot can feel like winning a lottery. Others, despite streamlined online application systems, can take months—or sometimes years—to process temporary visitor visa applications. Much about the processing or waiting time remains uncertain, and the suggested timelines on official websites are often inaccurate. Above all, the system constantly evolves, with sudden changes in rules, processing times, and additional requirements, adding more demand and uncertainty to an already unpredictable and highly labor-intensive process.

Most international academic conferences have been designed for and by scholars with privileged passports. Historically, humanities scholars from structurally-disadvantaged countries had only rare, if any, access to international academic conferences. While British Studies in North America have become more diverse and inclusive in recent years, the structures and expectations of academic conferencing have not kept pace. The result is a pervasive yet often invisible form of academic gatekeeping, where scholars with “Global South” passports, who already have to overcome significant hurdles to access the same academic spaces as their peers from the “Global North,” have to additionally expend extraordinary amounts of time, money, and emotional energies in navigating opaque visa systems, mostly on their own and at their own cost, and sometimes only to face delay, rejection, or humiliation. Increasingly, visas issued for conference trips cover an inconveniently short period and are often single-entry only, meaning such an arduous exercise usually has to be repeated for each trip and conference. Consequently, many passport-disadvantaged scholars become highly self-selective about to which overseas conferences to apply, further excluding themselves from many spaces of vital intellectual exchanges.   

Although a lot is beyond our control, there is still much we can do, as scholars and conference organizers, to help one another. Advocacy is key. It can start with simple yet meaningful gestures, such as acknowledging the realities of visa barriers in opening or closing speeches at conferences. For scholars who have experienced visa obstacles first-hand, this means speaking up—sharing your challenges with peers, mentors, and conference organizers. Always be ready to offer insights and suggestions for potential support. For those without such experience, be an ally. Listen and learn about the structural hurdles your colleagues and students face. There are many ways to spread awareness about visa justice, such as initiating panel sessions or displaying posters discussing visa challenges at major conferences in your field, or inviting scholars with first-hand experience of these challenges to share their stories.

Leading international and national conferences, such as the NACBS, are well-positioned to promote awareness of visa justice and advocate for change. Conferences could consider consulting and involving passport-disadvantaged scholars in planning and venue selection. At the very least, organizers should be aware of and consider visa timelines at every stage of the conference planning process, and notify scholars requiring visas early on of their acceptance. Besides offering letters for visa purposes, organizers can help further by allocating additional funds for visa applications and liaising with the immigration offices of host institutions to provide tailored support. It is also important to recognize that while hybrid conferencing seems to be a convenient solution, it risks creating a two-tiered participation, one that puts online participants at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to networking, while rewarding academics with the means and mobility to travel and further encouraging unsustainable long-distance travelling. A more inclusive and environmentally-friendly approach would be to integrate hybrid with live conferencing across multiple “hubs’’ where participants at different sites can access all parallel sessions while interacting in real-time during sessions and breaks, both in-person and through videoconferencing. In the future, such multi-site conferencing can be further enhanced by incorporating virtual reality (VR) to create an even more immersive experience. In the end, while we as academics cannot fix the system alone, we can start by listening, advocating, and building a more inclusive academic community where no scholar is repeatedly left out because of their passport. 

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Estella Chen is a second-year PhD student at the University of Oxford. A Clarendon scholar based at the Faculty of History and The Queen's College, she is broadly interested in the cultural, social, and legal histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Her doctoral dissertation examines the attendance, habits, and experiences of the public as spectators in trial courts across England from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

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