The Layers of Social Justice Conferences

Academic or organizational conferences centered on social justice form a two-sided ecosystem, like the ocean on either side of an equatorial thermocline: the well-lit layer where professionals bask and sport about the dim reach of the slow-moving clients—or constituents or stakeholders, members or customers, special interest group or community, depending on the agency and the year. What never changed was the dynamic. The conference was organized around those at the top of the food chain, who made their living from those below. If you ran a nonprofit, or wrote papers about those who needed the services of a nonprofit, you floated in the warmth of power and influence. You were approached by corporate reps and interviewed for jobs, you hung out in the bar in good clothes and laughed with the journalist who had just sucked dry an angry, badly dressed member of the latest social justice struggle then tossed the husk back into the cold, oxygen-starved depths.

Nicola Griffith, So Lucky (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux: 2018), p. 85