ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

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  • James Montalbano
    James Montalbano Posts: 161
    edited November 6
    FWIW 
    The first professional conference I attended was 1987 ATypI's TYPE '87 conference in NYC. It was the only time ATypI was held in NYC. My employer at the time paid my conference fee. I wonder if anyone here was at that event.

  • Miles Newlyn
    Miles Newlyn Posts: 289
    edited November 6

    I find my own typographic work supporting a liberal order whose assumptions are so pervasive that they pass for reality itself. Alternatives become almost impossible to see, and voicing them can carry a real cost.

    The British state I have worked for sends people to prison over social media posts. In 2025 alone, courts in England and Wales handed down 443 immediate prison sentences across four communications offences.

    I agree with Nadine's point about judging governments by the same standard. I’d carry that principle through to the choice of speakers. Consulting Ukrainian colleagues makes sense, and the decision to use the Russian flag deserves scrutiny in its own right. (I saw the British flag there too, a flag that some perceive as an inherently racist, colonial, and white-supremacist symbol). What I question is the suggestion that accepting a Russian speaker should itself have raised a red flag. What, specifically, about the speaker’s work, institutional role or proposed talk should have concerned the board?

    Consider my own record. I have given the state’s machinery of compulsory extraction a calmer face. I have helped mass news media give editorial judgements the appearance of reality. I have made concentrated financial power look like responsible stewardship and helped corporations with colonial foundations present themselves as caring. I have worked for cultural institutions that decide what deserves attention and for corporate philanthropy that turns human suffering into reputational capital.

    These commissions are celebrated as professional achievements. They were also paid services to institutions that exercise power.

    If ATypI were to consider institutional affiliation grounds for excluding a speaker, and were to apply it flatly and without prejudice, my record of work ought prohibit me from speaking.

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,897
    edited November 6
    In reading your list I'm like, check check check.
    I should have clarified that I meant imprisoning people for their political opposition to the regime, not just locking up vast numbers of people for being poor and black.
    Dark humour aside, I think there is a significant difference where a country has a functioning internal opposition, freedom of speech and protest, and working mechanisms to remove a government, even if its constitution puts those mechanisms on a fixed four-year schedule (I don’t think many US citizens realise just how weird that seems to people in parliamentary democracies). As Chris alluded to, and as Nadine’s comparisons pointed out, a democracy can produce a pariah government, but that isn’t the same thing as a pariah state because the government is not a fixed entity that maintains power through repression. It may certainly have leanings that way, and the rule of law can be weakened under such a government, but civil society has a tendency to persistence in democracies (cf. Hungary and Poland).
    This is why I think there has to be some kind of decision matrix for an international organisation traveling to different locations and managing speakers from many different countries. I think things like the Freedom in the World index to which Christine referred can be part of that matrix, but there are also specific geo-political situations within and between countries that need to be taken into account, as well as more obviously, as Boris pointed out, open concerns within the community that the organisation represents.
  • jfporchez
    jfporchez Posts: 14
    edited November 6

    “Decision matrix”

    Some comments, in order to suggest the organisers to ask the right questions, without necessary to follow all ideas of a single individual posted on a Friday 6 November 2026.

    It is difficult to judge individuals; an association and the organisers of a conference are not a court as it can function in a democratic country, with a defence that has rights, following an investigation that follows democratic rules. Therefore, we may have a personal opinion about this or that individual, or about his company. But this cannot be a determining factor in the refusal of participation following a Call for entry launched by the organisers.

    My thoughts go to Alexei Navalny saying this: If this individual is the subject of condemnation by a court (in a democratic country, rather than from a Russian, North Korean, or Afghan, to take basic examples), the organisers should think twice. 

    If this individual would have had proven dubious practises (disclosed by the serious press and cross-cut by several sources) in the exercise of our profession, concerning copyright (for example), these elements would deserve to be taken into consideration by a representative panel of the organisers.

    More broadly, the recommendations of the country in which the association is located (including the recommendations of the "Foreign Affairs" website), and/or Freedom in the World indexes published by non-governmental organisations deemed reliable can push organisers to ask themselves questions. But these elements do not say whether such a person is a persecuted minority in his own country. Nor if it is so close to power and validates practises worthy of authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, absolute monarchy, using religion or not, in order to oppress part or all of its population outside the circle of power.

    In our present cases, the subject of this long discussion, the sanctions against Russia have been issued since 2022 and extended each year by the democratic country (as well as many other countries) in which the association is currently based. Therefore, the precaution of organisers is to acknowledge sanctions and don’t search for excuses. They should ignore the proposals to the Call for entry made by citizens (ignoring who they are, as organisers cannot judge individuals, see first paragraphs above) who have an address in this country and who/or pay their taxes in this country.

    The idea of sanctions is to bend this country, put pressure on the regime, knowing that the citizens of the country in question may suffer. In short: Putin can stop the war today, move away from Ukraine, and sanctions will be removed soon after.

  • Maurice Meilleur
    Maurice Meilleur Posts: 68
    I really struggle with eliding individual and state in cases like this one. The seeds of my objections to Jean François’s position on this point—which I haven’t fully resolved—are:

    First, the reality of contemporary states is that we can’t assume pressure on individuals will result in meaningful pressure on a regime, even in the aggregate. Here in the US, for example, our institutions and processes of government are notoriously poor at translating citizens’ preferences into policy or representation, even when they’re working at their best. And again in the US as an example, there are no mechanisms in place at present or even imaginable that would allow even huge numbers of citizens to topple a government at the state, let alone the federal, level—except, and with important limits, through periodic elections. Instances of sea changes in public opinion that capture the immediate attention of representatives and officials and prompt them to respond are historically rare.

    Second, even if if this pressure were so straightforwardly effective, citizens don’t choose for or among tactics of non-participation or resistance in a vacuum. Tax resistance, for example; or strikes, or protest marches in the face of violent repression, or out-migration and exile. The means for individuals and groups to engage in these tactics, and to withstand their consequences, aren’t evenly distributed even in stable democratic societies as we find them today. They always require a lot of community and organizational and professional support that not everyone can access.

    Third, there’s an affirmative case to be made for sanctioning states—and complicit institutions and organizations and firms—but allowing and even encouraging their citizens (those who don’t support or who aren’t complicit in the state’s policies and actions) to engage with their international peers, and for supporting their work. It provides them support in the form of alternative resources and networks and venues to the ones their state provides or permits. More broadly: even if these folks can’t change the(ir) world, it gives them the opportunity to serve the values and interests that make life in the world worth living—and so, to imagine a better world worth fighting for.

    I recognize my own position here: making these distinctions is going to look a lot different to me than it will to my Ukrainian fellow humans and professional colleagues who are confronted with the horrifying realities of war and occupation. And there are important professional norms that would make vetting a person, as opposed to their state, ethically questionable. I’m learning a lot from this conversation.

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