Interesting Conferences At the Intersections

October 20, 2023 7:34 AM

I am looking for academic, semi-academic, not academic at all conferences at the intersection of two different fields or two different subjects. Examples of what I'm looking for below.

Graphic Medicine - The intersection of Medicine and Comics.

Bridges - The intersection of Math and Art.

Mostly intrigued by these intersection of two field types of conferences, but still curious about other interesting conferences so feel free to share.

posted by azalea_chant to Education (12 answers total)

The Society for Mathematical Biology holds yearly conferences.

The Society of Ordained Scientists also has meetings and conferences, and is another that group that occupies an intersection that outsiders often overlook.

The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies is the meta on this, they hold two conferences per year.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:27 AM on October 20, 2023

AIES gets an interesting mix of AI papers and philosophy papers and sometimes other sorts of papers too. But I guess there are a lot of "philosophy of x" conferences.
posted by potrzebie at 8:30 AM on October 20, 2023

Maybe a stretch, but I think conferences that are about a region or culture would sort of fit this bill. For instance the Appalachian Studies Association has an annual conference where you could attend tracks on linguistics, music, policy and politics, anthropology, sociology, history, and so on. It's sort of a tautology to call this an intersection of disparate topics because what else is a regional culture but an big ol' intersection?

Great Ask, btw. Love the answers so far.
posted by AbelMelveny at 8:42 AM on October 20, 2023

The Society for Music Perception and Cognition holds conferences at the intersection of musicology and psychology.

The Society for American Baseball Research holds annual conferences at the intersection of baseball and statistics.

This may be out of scope, but the discipline I work in, Alzheimer's disease, has a huge conference every year that includes work from chemistry, biology, medical physics, neuropsychology, nursing, and other fields. It's not so much a surprising confluence of ideas, like the examples you cite, as a practical problem space in which they're all required -- so it's both narrow and broad.
posted by eirias at 9:12 AM on October 20, 2023

You just missed NACIS, the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society. Aside from practical design and map construction this group pulls together scientific and cultural disciplines in some fantastic ways. Here are all of last year’s talks on Youtube.
posted by migurski at 11:51 AM on October 20, 2023

City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. They're part of the City University of New York system, this is their 8th annual symposium (archive of previous years), and this year's theme is Science Fiction, Gender, and Sexuality. This year's conference (virtual) is on Nov 30th.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:38 PM on October 20, 2023

Too specific to be what you're looking for, to be honest, but there's Combinatorial Algebra Meets Algebraic Combinatorics, which has a fun palindromic acronym that works in both English and French.
posted by hoyland at 4:17 PM on October 20, 2023

I went to the first 100 Year Starship symposium and it was so good.
posted by teremala at 6:03 PM on October 20, 2023

Are there lesson plans for OP's subjects available to primary and/or secondary high schools? I would be interested in knowing.
posted by parmanparman at 4:54 PM on October 21, 2023

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) is a blended scholarly/creative conference associated with most all stripes of the fantastic, in popular, literary, mythological, or other cultural/artistic traditions. I attend semi-regularly, and it's always an interesting blend. The core of the conference does tend to rotate around contemporary fantasy and science fiction, but it always contains elements from elsewhere. Attendees come from many fields, and there's typically a healthy attendance from outside the U.S., where it's based (Florida). Other orgs do "genre con + a scholarly track," but ICFA doesn't feel like any of those to me -- it's scholars, students, artists, writers, and the curious public.

The Popular Culture Association, as well as its regional groupings, has a conference about all things "popular culture." The offerings are as diverse as you could imagine, when it comes to pop culture.
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:37 AM on October 22, 2023

Maybe of interest, in a tangential way way: PancakesCon is an online cybersecurity conference that isn't on the whole about the intersection of two particular fields, but requires each individual presentation to have a cybersecurity half and a non-IT half. Some of the presenters use that format to draw parallels or contrasts between their two topic halves.

PancakesCon is a non-academic online-only conference that popped up recently during Covid, driven (I think) mostly by infosec folks on Twitter (at the time).
posted by apjanke at 1:59 AM on October 24, 2023

Computers and Writing is a great small academic conference. I was one of the organizers when it was at my university in 2014.
posted by vitia at 1:39 AM on October 25, 2023