“Location: Tasmania”. There was just no way I would be able to travel to the Conference on Communication and Environment, or COCE for short, arranged by the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). What a shame! Of course, the pandemic taught us that it is possible to have conferences online. But it is not really the same, is it? Something is missing. It is something about actually being there, sharing a space with the other attendees. Experiencing the location, the place. But what if you cannot bring people to a place? Can you bring a place to people?
This year, COCE 2025 offered the opportunity both for onsite and online participation. I got the opportunity to serve on the virtual conference committee, which was responsible for arranging the online part of the conference. Taking part in a conference that was happening literally on the other side of the world from my own study in Uppsala meant some late night working hours, and to say “good morning” to people at 11 pm. One of the great challenges when arranging an international conference where you invite people from all corners of the planet to join from their own home is time zones. The solution from the conference committee was to arrange “Virtual only” Zoom sessions twice a day, starting twelve hours apart. These were scheduled for 7 am and 7 pm local time in Tasmania, so right before and after the onsite sessions. The idea was that wherever you were in the world, one of these time slots would be within normal waking hours, and they did not clash with onsite activities.
We did indeed have people joining from all over the globe. In the sessions I managed, we had presenters joining us from the US, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, and from the onsite location in Australia, to name a few. Telling your fellow participants in the session where you were, and what time it was there, became a recurring way of connecting and making small talk in the sessions. I believe that this contributed to a feeling of meeting actual people in a shared space, rather than just faces on a screen. We were not physically in the same space, but by sharing a little of our respective here and nows, we got a small glimpse of the other’s world beyond their screen.
One of the sessions which I would like to highlight from the conference encouraged us as online participants to do exactly this: extend the conference beyond our screens. Psychologist Carly Dober led a guided mediation, asking us to look out of the window, or to imagine and connect to a loved place in nature. This way we got a virtual version of a guided nature walk, which can help calm down feelings of climate anxiety, and spur us to what Carly calls mindful activism. Another highlight was the session on place-making through augmented reality artwork, where researchers Shumaila Javed Bhatti and Madeeha Bhatti brought us an intensive experience of a severe flooding. The artwork allowed us to move around, virtually, in a three dimensional landscape surrounding a flooded river in the Pakistan mountains, including videos of local people telling how they had been affected by the flood.
Bringing an exotic place to people through stories, images and videos is of course nothing new, but the session made me reflect on how new technology can create a more immersing experience of places which we cannot physically visit. And the conference reminded me of how the little things, such as telling people which time zone you are in, or including an embodied exercise such as guided meditation in the conference program, can help us feel closer to each other in time and space, even when physically remaining at our office desk.
"Bringing places to people – a reflection from virtual participation in COCE 2025"
“Location: Tasmania”. There was just no way I would be able to travel to the Conference on Communication and Environment, or COCE for short, arranged by the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). What a shame! Of course, the pandemic taught us that it is possible to have conferences online. But it is not really the same, is it? Something is missing. It is something about actually being there, sharing a space with the other attendees. Experiencing the location, the place. But what if you cannot bring people to a place? Can you bring a place to people?
This year, COCE 2025 offered the opportunity both for onsite and online participation. I got the opportunity to serve on the virtual conference committee, which was responsible for arranging the online part of the conference. Taking part in a conference that was happening literally on the other side of the world from my own study in Uppsala meant some late night working hours, and to say “good morning” to people at 11 pm. One of the great challenges when arranging an international conference where you invite people from all corners of the planet to join from their own home is time zones. The solution from the conference committee was to arrange “Virtual only” Zoom sessions twice a day, starting twelve hours apart. These were scheduled for 7 am and 7 pm local time in Tasmania, so right before and after the onsite sessions. The idea was that wherever you were in the world, one of these time slots would be within normal waking hours, and they did not clash with onsite activities.
We did indeed have people joining from all over the globe. In the sessions I managed, we had presenters joining us from the US, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, and from the onsite location in Australia, to name a few. Telling your fellow participants in the session where you were, and what time it was there, became a recurring way of connecting and making small talk in the sessions. I believe that this contributed to a feeling of meeting actual people in a shared space, rather than just faces on a screen. We were not physically in the same space, but by sharing a little of our respective here and nows, we got a small glimpse of the other’s world beyond their screen.
One of the sessions which I would like to highlight from the conference encouraged us as online participants to do exactly this: extend the conference beyond our screens. Psychologist Carly Dober led a guided mediation, asking us to look out of the window, or to imagine and connect to a loved place in nature. This way we got a virtual version of a guided nature walk, which can help calm down feelings of climate anxiety, and spur us to what Carly calls mindful activism. Another highlight was the session on place-making through augmented reality artwork, where researchers Shumaila Javed Bhatti and Madeeha Bhatti brought us an intensive experience of a severe flooding. The artwork allowed us to move around, virtually, in a three dimensional landscape surrounding a flooded river in the Pakistan mountains, including videos of local people telling how they had been affected by the flood.
Bringing an exotic place to people through stories, images and videos is of course nothing new, but the session made me reflect on how new technology can create a more immersing experience of places which we cannot physically visit. And the conference reminded me of how the little things, such as telling people which time zone you are in, or including an embodied exercise such as guided meditation in the conference program, can help us feel closer to each other in time and space, even when physically remaining at our office desk.