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