Scholars of minority politics are found across disciplinary boundaries, including in political science, sociology, economics, and psychology. They also can be found across countries and continents because the study of groups and their oppression has relevance cross-culturally. A key challenge for the field—and, indeed, for most fields in the social sciences—is the creation of intellectual connections across disciplinary and national boundaries. Historically, however, numerous constraints restricted interactions and scholarly dialogue across large swaths of the field, further siloing scholars in their already-narrow communities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, invitations to scholarly presentations, attendance at conferences, and opportunities for presenting papers were largely dependent on financial resources and personal networks that often are available exclusively to individuals at elite institutions that are proximate to one another geographically. Indeed, the costs of attending a conference vary greatly among participants. These costs are particularly high for academics from low-income countries, scholars from countries located far from the conference destination, those who must secure visas to be able to travel professionally, and many who are caregivers and disabled individuals. These costs also are problematic for graduate students who are in precarious non-tenure-track positions and academics who work at institutions that provide minimal or no travel funding (Nicolson 2017).

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, gave rise to a unique opportunity to begin to address and remedy these inequities. Talks, seminars, and conferences were canceled. Scholars who anticipated sharing their work and receiving feedback instead were faced with scholarly isolation. The Minority Politics Online Seminar Series (MPOSS; https://minoritypolitics.netlify.app) was developed to fill this void and broaden participation in the minority politics subfield.

MPOSS is a seminar series on minority politics and intergroup relationships in political science and social psychology. Social scientists have long studied the ways that groups define themselves according to national origin, ethnicity, religion, race, caste, tribe, region, gender, and/or class markers. Yet, this research proliferated in different ways in different disciplinary silos, as observed in the different names that this subfield has for different disciplines. The aim of MPOSS is to bring these social scientists together to share and discuss new research on minority politics. Importantly, the online format “inspired” by the pandemic has opened the series to people from around the globe.

MPOSS was co-organized by three Michigan State University assistant professors. To build a listserv, they each contacted approximately 100 scholars in their subfield and asked them to share a link with their department and colleagues where people could sign up to receive information about the talks. The listserv link also was advertised on social media. Our listserv has since grown to include more than 1,200 people, including members from multiple disciplines and from inside and outside of academia, who receive information about all of our upcoming talks.

Between June 2020 and May 2022, MPOSS will have hosted 64 talks in ten different sessions by political psychologists, Americanists, and comparativists. Between 30 and up to 200 scholars regularly attended the seminars each week. In addition, people who could not attend the seminars at the appointed time watched videos of the talks at their leisure: some of the presentations were viewed at a later time by more than 700 individuals. This allowed us to further expand our viewership, particularly to areas of the globe where time-zone constraints make real-time engagement with the series impractical.

In organizing the talks, we intentionally highlight a wide variety of scholars and prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in the identity of the speakers, their career stage, and subject matter of the presentations. We have hosted a series of talks by scholars on the job market (e.g., Hui Bai, Christine Slaughter, and Jangai Jap); early-career scholars (e.g., Davin Phoenix, Adeline Lo, and Calvin Lai); and established scholars (e.g., Colin Wayne Leach, Efrén O. Pérez, and Yoshiko Herrera). The talks covered topics relevant to minority politics in the United States as well as India, Kenya, Myanmar, Slovakia, Somalia, Russia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. We use several approaches to identify potential speakers, with the goal of increasing diversity in terms of race, nationality, gender, and career stage. First, when individuals join our listserv, they indicate whether they are interested in presenting at a future MPOSS session. Second, because graduate students often are not yet widely known in academic communities, our professional networks of scholars are particularly helpful in identifying those who are close to completing their program or are on the academic job market. Third, we take advantage of resources such as People of Color Also Know Stuff, and we scour department websites to find potential junior speakers.

The online format provides three key benefits. First, the webinar enables us to reach a global audience. Currently, our listserv includes participants from 40 countries. We schedule the seminars so that scholars from time zones across the Americas, Europe, and Africa can comfortably attend. Importantly, and to be less US-centric, scholars from institutions across the globe have presented (e.g., Thekla Morgenroth, Prabin Khadka, and Maja Kutlaca). They also regularly attend these talks, and every continent (except Antarctica) is represented in the MPOSS audience.

Second, we record and post videos of most talks, with few exceptions, which allows them to live on after the presentations. More important, the talks have been used in college courses (e.g., Vanderbilt and Michigan State University), making it easy to expose students to new scholars and original research about minority politics. During the first year of MPOSS talks, we hired an undergraduate student to live tweet and communicate findings to ensure the visibility of the work.

Third, we use the platform for panel discussions. We convened book editors from five academic presses as well as journal editors from four journals to discuss and answer questions about the book- and article publication processes. In Spring 2021, we hosted six leading activists and scholars to discuss and answer questions about China’s Uyghur genocide. In Fall 2021, we organized a panel on Roma communities with leading Roma scholars, activists, and practitioners from several European countries. The flexibility of the online format helps us to reach a large audience and make connections among people interested in common topics—whether academics, editors, or activists—who otherwise would have been difficult to reach.

The online format does introduce challenges. For example, whereas a typical university presentation is unlikely to attract (the worst) trolls, the open online nature of MPOSS requires that we remain vigilant. We avoid trolls primarily by using the Zoom webinar format and by changing the link and passcode weekly. This format does not allow audience members to interact with one another and therefore limits the reach of the trolls. In specific cases, it has been necessary to remove abusive audience members from the webinar.

Whereas the webinar format allows us to minimize troll encounters, it is less conducive to community building than the regular online meeting format. Our webinar format does not allow audience members to see who else is attending, chat with one another, or read Q&A questions that other attendees have posed. There also is no space for including attendees in informal discussion before and after the presentation. Given that trolls are more likely to seek events that feature underrepresented speakers or topics that center race and ethnicity (cf. Collignon and Rüdig Reference Collignon and Rüdig2020; Gosse et al. Reference Gosse, Veletsianos, Hodson, Houlden, Dousay, Lowenthal and Hall2021; Rheault, Rayment, and Musulan. Reference Rheault, Rayment and Musulan2019; Tiede et al. Reference Tiede, McCarthy, Kamola and Spurgas2021), we suspect that not all online seminar organizers must face this particular tradeoff. For us, however, creating as safe a space as possible is paramount. Finally, the online format—webinar or meeting—also does not engender the socializing and unstructured conversations that are valuable for building relationships and developing ideas and collaborations. To the extent that the pandemic is managed in the future, MPOSS meetups may be scheduled for in-person conferences.

Although MPOSS has been able to include speakers and audiences from many different countries, it experiences some of the same limitations as many conferences. For example, our speakers are primarily from the United States and Europe; scholars from non-Western states are underrepresented. The dominant methodologies in MPOSS talks also re-create the dominant methodologies of the disciplines that MPOSS represents. We are working actively to give more explicit attention to methodological and national pluralism to strengthen the MPOSS contribution to the field.

The online and interdisciplinary MPOSS format may be useful for other topics that span traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries, as well as those topics that would benefit from insights beyond national borders (i.e., most topics). The MPOSS format makes these connections low cost and accessible, which allows for cross-fertilization of ideas across both national and disciplinary borders. For example, we expect that scholars who want to explain similar phenomena (e.g., climate change policies and legal decision making) or use similar methods (e.g., ethnography and text analysis) but who come from different disciplines will benefit most from the MPOSS format. Learning how scholars from a different background work to understand a topic of personal interest is one point of entry into a more interdisciplinary social science.

MPOSS creates a vibrant space for scholars to learn about research on minority politics and intergroup relationships from multiple disciplines, countries, and contexts. This space lives on in recordings of the presentations, which serve as a resource for educators. This benefits the field of minority politics by making research- and education-based connections with our neighboring disciplines.