First, consider the
excellent reasons not to go to a
conference. As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, Let me count the ways.
1. It’s too expensive. 2. It takes a sizeable chunk of your time and energy. 3.
Most of the papers are not exciting, and some are downright terrible. 4. The
buildings are usually ugly. 5. Wandering around for days among a mass of
strangers is alienating and lonely. 6. You can have toxic experiences: harassment,
bullying, or other aggression.
So why go at all? Let’s come
right out and say it: conferences are labour markets. At the first one I
visited in the USA, in 1970, I discovered a back room known as the Meat Market.
Here, young folk desperate for jobs left their resumés in plastic folders for
all to see; and older men (it was almost all men) with safe jobs at the less
prestigious colleges read the resumés and held job interviews.
Years later I discovered the
market behind the market, the invisible college where the more prestigious universities recruited new academic staff from
each others’ graduands. Selectivity and patronage were the essence.
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| The party frock, and go networking... |
What can a conference do for
a career? You can give a paper, a small but definite step. A conference is a
useful deadline on the way towards journal publication, which is a bigger step.
You can join a committee and begin a life of inch-by-inch Service To The
Profession. You can meet important people (important in your discipline’s
little world, that is). At a big conference you can visit the book and journal display
and you might meet a commissioning editor, a step towards a book contract. And
you can crank up the smile, put on the party frock, and go networking around the
social functions.
I am being sardonic, but
this really is serious business for young people starting to work as
academics. Academic labour has got
desperately precarious in recent years (while higher education has been
expanding worldwide, funny about that!).
Then there are the
intellectual reasons for going. Conference are supposed to be about circulating
knowledge. Everyone hopes to hear recent developments in the field, interesting
theories and important studies. Some of this really does happen.
It’s hard to pick the
sessions where it will, even when you know the ropes. I evolved a two-paper
theory of conferences: if I heard two really good papers by the time I left, it
was a good conference. A
suggestion: look in the programme index for people who have written papers you
admire, especially non-famous people. Probably the presentation won’t be as
good as the paper you know, yet sometimes it is even better.
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| The plenary, from the speaker's point of view |
The big plenary sessions
with famous names strutting their stuff are not
intellectual cutting-edge. That is not really a keynoter’s task. Her task is to
zoom across the sub-fields with their different cutting edges, stir up
everyone, and somehow pull the conference together. (Count the mixed metaphors
in the last sentence, and see what the poor keynoter is up against!) Think of a
keynote as crazed mountaineering – the Matterhorn, K2, the North Face of the
Eiger. Will the heroic effort reach the summit, or plunge into the abyss? You,
the democracy of conference-goers, will decide.
Conferences have a lot of
organizational business, less visible to newcomers. Many are, technically, annual meetings of a discipline
association. In that case, the sub-sections will have business meetings, ceremonies
for the award of gongs, and elections for committees. The editorial boards of
journals often meet at conferences, because they can’t pay travel costs any
other way.
In the USA particularly,
university departments hold receptions for their graduates. Publishers’ receptions
and book launches happen. Corporate sponsors hold events proving how honest and
generous they are, offering food and drink. The food looks like crashed
hummingbirds on flattened bottle-tops, and is not a reliable source of
vitamins. The drink is OK.
You don’t have to go to any
of this. But if you plan to work long-term in research and teaching, go to some
of it, and see the machinery at work.
At your next conference, join in and lend a hand.
Finally, there is the social
life, and this is important. Have
breakfast (don’t forget breakfast!) or coffee with other people in your field.
These discussions can be better than the papers. Older academics spend a lot of
their time at conferences meeting friends and colleagues. Your connections
build up from one conference to another.
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| Social life at conferences: families too |
There is a myth that a
conference is a modern Sodom & Gomorrah. A charming myth, but generally speaking, a conference is not
a very practical place for an affair. There are other sides of social life. Gaggles
of friends come, and families too. For young parents, decent conferences provide child care.
There is serious eating and drinking. Good conference convenors provide lists
of restaurants nearby; word-of-mouth will tell which ones are cheap and good.
And then: the parties. There
are risks here. I once gave a plenary talk at a conference famous for its
last-night dance. That year, the party had a disco format. Among hundreds of
younger conference-goers, I happened to dance past the DJ’s stand. He took one
look at me, and put a new record on the turntable. It was ‘Love Me Do’. (War
Babies and Baby Boomers will understand. At least it wasn’t ‘Hound Dog’.)
The socializing can be a great
pleasure, but also a source of stress. Younger people can feel they are
constantly in a market. Since the power structures don’t go away, younger women
especially are exposed to sexual harassment or exploitation. There’s a need for
collective responsibility to make conferences safe spaces.