I find attending conferences personally rewarding in terms of making contacts and keeping up on research, but there’s a definite value add if you’re presenting. Now that I’ve gotten tenure, I generally only go to one national conference a year — I’ve started making it CSA as I’ve found it to be the most useful in terms of contacts/research presented.

My time-honed tips for saving on conference costs:

1. Submit a paper proposal. It’s always much easier to get funding if you’re a speaker rather than a spectator

2. Use air miles and hotel points to cut down on travel expenses. There’s no law that says you have to stay in the same hotel as everyone else. Get online and find a cheaper one nearby, and a few roommates to share it with.

3. You can sometimes get a discount if you volunteer at the conference or serve on the board of the organizing body.

4. Many conferences offer special rates or scholarships to students and presenters; CSA has regional scholarships as well as the national Adele Filene Award.

5. There are also some independent conference travel grants out there, like the Pasold Research Fund. Depending on your subject area, you may be eligible for grants in other disciplines—history, art history, material culture, conservation, gender studies, etc.—that can be used for costume conferences.

6. Alternatively, you can target conferences in those other disciplines that offer funding to presenters—you’ll meet new people, broaden your horizons, challenge your preconceptions, and get really interesting and useful feedback, and it will look just as good on your CV. I don’t agree that publishing outside of the field—or giving papers at conferences outside of the field—is a bad thing. If anything, it strengthens our field by raising awareness and drawing new people in, not to mention enhancing one’s own scholarly profile. We’re a pretty small field, after all, and wouldn’t you rather publish in a journal read by thousands rather than one read by hundreds, most of them people who already know you and your work? It seems like every journal is backlogged these days, but any halfway decent researcher with JSTOR access will be able track down your article whether it’s published in Dress or The Journal of Social History. No, wait, on second thought, Dress isn’t archived on JSTOR. Neither is Costume, Textile History, Fashion Theory, or the CTRJ. Online access to even the most basic bibliographical information for the major “scholarly” publications in our field is limited or nonexistent. Hmmm….why would you want to publish in any of those?

OK, end of rant. To conclude, I don’t think giving papers at conferences enhances your CV much—publications are still far more impressive. And there are plenty of easier, cheaper ways to get feedback on your work. But it’s valuable in so many other senses. Obviously, it’s important to keep up with your colleagues and new research (and gossip!) in your field. Presenting a paper is a highly effective way of forcing yourself to do research, which can then be parlayed into a publication. Also, almost every conference paper I’ve presented has led to an invitation to speak or publish somewhere else.

But costs keep going up, and our budgets keep going down. The most helpful thing conference organizers can do, I think, is to negotiate rock-bottom prices from venues and vendors (which shouldn’t be hard in these lean times) then offer varied and flexible pricing plans—like giving student discounts, charging per day rather than requiring attendees to commit to a whole four-day conference, or making meals, entertainment, and excursions optional. I don’t mind eating Cup-o-Noodle in my hotel room if it means I don’t have to shell out for a banquet or reception I don’t really want to go to anyway. This is already happening to some extent. But totally getting rid of all the extras (like the fancy hotels and banquets and study tours) would just make conferences less attractive to the people who CAN afford them, thus hastening their own demise.

As to whether it’s worth it to go to conferences, I think it depends on the individual and one’s career goals. For example, is attending and/or presenting part of reaching tenure at an institution, or is it simply something that looks nice on one’s CV, or is it for professional enrichment, in terms of an enhancement to one’s professional responsibilities? How worthwhile the expenditure of attending a conference would be depends on the weight of the reasons above, I suppose.