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October 19, 2018 9:07 PM Subscribe
Academics, what was it like for you to go to a conference outside of your main disciplinary field?
Having gone to different academic conferences through the years, it can be really interesting and bewildering to present at one that is new to me, where familiar topics are addressed with very different sets of questions.
I would love to hear from anyone who has had the experience of going to, and presenting at, a conference that is somewhat related to what you do, but not one you go to often.
What are the ways in which you have to code switch in order to be intelligible to a different discipline?
What are some of the specific barriers that you've bumped up against?
I'm thinking about the humanities/arts/social sciences, but would love to hear how this plays out throughout a wide range of different fields in this age of supposed and actual interdisciplinarity.
Having gone to different academic conferences through the years, it can be really interesting and bewildering to present at one that is new to me, where familiar topics are addressed with very different sets of questions.
I would love to hear from anyone who has had the experience of going to, and presenting at, a conference that is somewhat related to what you do, but not one you go to often.
What are the ways in which you have to code switch in order to be intelligible to a different discipline?
What are some of the specific barriers that you've bumped up against?
I'm thinking about the humanities/arts/social sciences, but would love to hear how this plays out throughout a wide range of different fields in this age of supposed and actual interdisciplinarity.
I (non-anthropologist) gave a paper at an anthropology conference once. I flew in for one night because of time constraints. An anthropologist friend showed up at the talk. She was angry and wanted to know why I hadn't contacted her. We went for a walk around the downtown area of the city to discuss the issue. Then I went to the book exhibit. I ran into my editor, who not surprisingly already had dinner plans. So I ate dinner alone, sitting at the bar of a local restaurant. It was delicious, and was probably the best part of the entire experience. The next morning I flew home.
posted by Morpeth at 4:08 AM on October 20, 2018
posted by Morpeth at 4:08 AM on October 20, 2018
I work in policy relating to renewable energy technology and have been to a few conferences that were basically engineering with 1 or 2 social science focussed sessions. I tend to go through the conf diary and pick out any relevant sessions outside my focus to see but then I also mark out sessions where I can't find anything as sessions I can skive off. I think it's actually a good thing for an academic to remind themselves they don't have to attend everything at a conference, as plenty will be irrelevant and/or uninteresting. You can even bail early and save some money. If it's a five day conference with nothing happening on the first day think of it as a four day conference.
The other thing that has happened to me is that someone starts making suggests for policy without knowing much about what has worked and what hasn't. It presented an opportunity for engagement and also an idea about what the people from the wider field though of the kind of thing that interests me.
posted by biffa at 5:18 AM on October 20, 2018 [2 favorites]
The other thing that has happened to me is that someone starts making suggests for policy without knowing much about what has worked and what hasn't. It presented an opportunity for engagement and also an idea about what the people from the wider field though of the kind of thing that interests me.
posted by biffa at 5:18 AM on October 20, 2018 [2 favorites]
When I've presented vision science research to human factors audiences, there's just a total disconnect - both areas are looking at similar questions (at least in my corner of both), but the approaches are so different that communication is hard.
I get a lot of questions of "you made subjects do how many trials?!?"... when the answer is something tame like 400.
Note that the experiment with the largest number of trials (collected over a month) that I know of personally was 25,000...
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 7:47 AM on October 20, 2018
I get a lot of questions of "you made subjects do how many trials?!?"... when the answer is something tame like 400.
Note that the experiment with the largest number of trials (collected over a month) that I know of personally was 25,000...
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 7:47 AM on October 20, 2018
Best answer: I'm in philosophy, I went to speak at a conference about music. I was the only philosopher, it was mostly people from music / ethnomusicology / cultural studies / critical theory. I totally enjoyed it – I was surprised at differences in our approaches. It was a breath of fresh air in many respects. Philosophical conferences can fall into predictable types of exchanges, people make a lot of assumptions about each other and it can feel kinda claustrophobic after a while. Here, most of the people didn't really know about how other people approach their subjects, so everyone was out to learn new ways to engage, and if they fell back on 'typical' Q&A topics or strategies it wasn't obvious because it was all relatively new.
I came away slightly more confident about my relationship with my subject, because it confirmed to me that I'm primarily interested in a particular range of conceptual questions – questions that only I asked and which other people didn't seem that interested by or hadn't thought about – but I hadn't recognised that about myself until I'd seen that there are other approaches here which other people take seriously but which don't really interest me.
Philosophy conferences can be bad for my confidence, and quite often I come away thinking that I don't ever want to go to one again; I can only take so much oneupmanship, preening, sneering and blinkered egos. So yes, it was a pleasant surprise to go to a conference which made me come away feeling that I do have some sort of stake in the field that I work in.
(It helps that it was an excellent conference-topic, held in an excellent place, with lovely people speaking – hard to think how to make any generalisable points since so much can be attributed to these all-important variables).
posted by Joeruckus at 6:05 AM on October 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
I came away slightly more confident about my relationship with my subject, because it confirmed to me that I'm primarily interested in a particular range of conceptual questions – questions that only I asked and which other people didn't seem that interested by or hadn't thought about – but I hadn't recognised that about myself until I'd seen that there are other approaches here which other people take seriously but which don't really interest me.
Philosophy conferences can be bad for my confidence, and quite often I come away thinking that I don't ever want to go to one again; I can only take so much oneupmanship, preening, sneering and blinkered egos. So yes, it was a pleasant surprise to go to a conference which made me come away feeling that I do have some sort of stake in the field that I work in.
(It helps that it was an excellent conference-topic, held in an excellent place, with lovely people speaking – hard to think how to make any generalisable points since so much can be attributed to these all-important variables).
posted by Joeruckus at 6:05 AM on October 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
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Also I have an established reputation in my own field and it doesn't carry over as easily in a different field.
The payoff of going outside my field is rarely worth it, especially given the costs of going (and I have fairly good travel funding). I get invited to be on panels in other discipline conferences a few times a year and almost always say no. I do go if it is my city though. Also if I'm trying to get more into that field in an effort to get some funding I might. If I go, I also try to find someone I know and politely try to hang on to them.
With the research itself... Sometimes I'm annoyed, sometimes I'm intrigued. It varies.
Presenting my own work in another field is often tough. I try to have a collaborator in that field to help me better understand the theoretical frameworks and current conversion. I try very hard to grasp their theories to the best of my ability. I do politely apologize for my ignorance of things and I work hard to justify my contribution. Conferences are easier than publishing in a different field. The bar is higher.
posted by k8t at 9:30 PM on October 19, 2018 [3 favorites]