(said sotto voce through a hotel conference PA system) In this paper I shall tease out a possible problematization of the sociological dynamics of academic conferences

I went to MESA this year and it was fun and all getting to see twitter friends, celebrities in the field, and go to panels on magically obscure topics, but spending 80% of each panel hearing recitations of papers rather than getting to democratically talk about them and have real conversations was life sapping. I understand that people have severe anxiety about presenting their work to a room full of the people who have to most potential to also know something about one's own obscure topic (I thought a friend of mine, updating their power point presentation for the 15th time was about to have a panic attack) and as someone who doesn't suffer from stage fright, I have to admit I have a hard time sympathizing with those who don't just shoot from the hip and ramble on about their project with vernacular ease. But at the same time, it does a great disservice to all of those who want to actually use an academic conference to get honest, constructive, usable feedback. What kind of an atmosphere is a post-modernist hellscape conference room at 9 in the morning with a bunch of jet-lagged strangers who have just had their brains inserted into a bowling ball polisher for an hour at listening to paper recitations for intellectual camaraderie?

three things in particularly have made me think recently that there has to be a way, culturally, to retool the conference in a way that makes it more lively and useful. A way to both encourage new habits of interaction, and a way to phase out all of the stupid dinosaur ways of doing things that we are passively adopting from baby boomers rather than leveraging our digital nativism and generational propensity towards sharing and real talk.

1) "liberal rational discourse"- The first was R.L. Stephens Twitter thread in October in which he discussed all of the ways that the Democratic Socialists of America meetings, while trying to appeal to egalitarianism, actually reproduce stultifying power dynamics centered around who feels comfortable in large meetings, who gets to speak, and what topics are centered. Here is the gist of his argument.

He reserves special ire for Robert's Rules of Etiquette which, when you take a step back and think about it, is the whitest thing ever. I remember my last DSA meeting when Robert's Rules were wielded by basically the only person in the room who understood how they worked to outmaneuver and shut down an awkward conversation that they didn't want to take place. "You don't have the quorum!" they condescended, or something like that, I don't understand how Robert's Rules work. It is the same thing in the academic conference. I went to a panel in a largely empty room that was delayed 10 minutes to give time for the moderator to show up, and then eventually the discussant begrudgingly took on the role. That's right, they had both a moderator and a discussant, as though the task of collecting questions from 4 people and managing conversation between 4 other people needed a full-time staff. The decorum was silly, but still controlled the room "let's save questions until afterwards" Why? If time was spent beforehand familiarizing ourselves with the papers, or if reading papers didn't gobble up all of the time in the room, then questions could be asked at any time, in a way that captured the Kairotic moment. You know, like a conversation does... Here is a quote that R.L. Stephens use to juxtapose the stodgy etiquette of Robert's Rules meetings to that of the "mass meeting"

Sure, the academic world is full of hordes of middle-aged "this is more of a comment than a question" conference attendees who need to be ruthlessly subjugated, but a crowd can do that much better than an anonymous moderator can. Also, rather than trying to equally dole out sterile questions so that each panelist gets a turn, why not let the conversation move to those things which are actually interesting, controversial, or challenging? The papers are supposed to be sharing a panel so that they can interact and clash, not to have their individual moments in the spotlight like pageant contestants. As it stands, panelists are so wrapped up in the minutiae of their own presentations — zombie-eyed edits on their laptops in the hotel lobby until the last second — minutiae that will not be picked out in the 20 minute drone of the read academic paper, that they barely acknowledge the other work they've been curated with. It's weird and bad. I think a lot of it doesn't have to do with the talent, confidence, or thoughtfulness of panelists, but with the awkwardness of the whole exercise, which makes people defensively become even more stiff in response. What would it be like if everyone just read their abstract to the crowd, the panelists had each read and sent feedback prior to the talk, attendees could immediately obtain copies of those papers that they'd like to look more closely at, and the bulk of the time spent with actual humans located together in physical space was spent in human conversation? Maybe even some interrupting and clapping for a change?

2) Hard feedback - Which leads me to the second thing, which is how pitifully considerate people's feedback is, especially the audience's, during academic talks. "You might want to consider.." "have you happened to read...""I am not sure that is what Said is saying..." are the most hardcore slam-dunking harsh things I have ever heard someone say to someone else during an academic conversation. I'm not saying academic conversations should become real-life comments sections, hotel conference room flame wars, but amongst a certain community so closely tied together by their intellectual background and interests, people could let their guards down and be actually helpful. I once interviewed at a think tank where a person couldn't get through a sentence before someone else on the team tried to completely undermine every one of its assumptions. "Why are you assuming rational state actors?" "How is this any different than the situation in 1980?" I thought at first that the whole office was about to come to blows before realizing that the office culture was just naturally combative. They were producing knowledge as a team and so they all reserved the right to poke around at someone's conclusions. I was blown away. I could watch arguments getting better in real time, using a weird type of ornery group think. It made me sad thinking about the times I've tried to tepidly give feedback to peers, people who I respect and whose work I like. I wish I could have a greater investment in their work, and them in mine, by being more ruthless. Of course we are now too used to approaching each other this way, and there is already such a bad problem with solidarity among graduate students, but imagine how much stronger our work would be if we pushed each other more. Maybe if there were certain projects that people worked on together, to eliminate a sense of defensive ownership, so that we could learn better habits of harsh feedback. Something where the stakes and goals were different. A different product like a piece of public scholarship rather than a peer-reviewed article (God, don't even get me started on this dinosaur fossil sucking up all of our time and energy). 

3) Use the internet, that's what it's there for - There are so many aspects of the academic conference as something you do in person which are irreplaceable: The serendipity of walking into a random panel, the face-time with old colleagues, the awkward cocktail hours. But getting 10 minutes once every few years with the only people on the planet who get or care about your work, 10 minutes that frankly you're going to spend existentially commiserating rather than giving specific feedback, doesn't seems like enough time for camaraderie. Also, all of the logistics and hubbub and carbon to go all the way across the country and exhaust yourself, to hear someone monotonically read a paper they could have just e-mailed and you could have marked up in google docs. But we don't do that more than one-on-one, peer-to-peer (if we're lucky), or editor-to-author (if we hit the jackpot). It would be completely different if people did it in groups according to their interests. I think Academia.edu tries to do that with its "sessions" where you can give feedback on new papers, but have you ever done that? I've never done that. Also, I don't want to give any credit or traffic to that for-profit scummy website. How would we instead, solicit amongst our peers their feedback on work in a digital way that people would meaningfully be involved with and contribute to. That also seems like a cultural thing. We have all these great digital tools, like social reading, and google docs, and hell even Skype — this year I organized a series of Arabic authors who Skyped in and we had a series of amazing, thoughtful, useful conversations and were able to give every penny of our funding as an honorarium for some grad students and working millennials who never ever get paid anything for their work — but we don't leverage them as a way to keep up with each other, and to work together. I ask people to send me their work to look at, and they act excited, but then they never send it to me. How do we get over the hump that other digital things like MOOCs suffered from, the impossibility of getting people to show up. It would have to grow organically from a shared project, probably something that's digitally focused to begin with, as a way to build practices. 

Anyways, I wish people worked more collaboratively, gave more raucous and critical feedback, explained rather than read their papers, used digital tools to interact outside of annual conferences, and that etiquette gave way to interaction. Also I wish peer-reviewed academic journals would go extinct.