"The Conference Manifesto"

"We have been one of two attendees at a panel.

We have suffered in silence while someone, for the duration of their talk, simply lists the appearances of a certain theme in a novel.

Our faces have twitched as our colleagues pretend they’ve understood a speaker’s academese.

We have listened for the first five minutes of the talk, just long enough to seize upon a word around which we’ll construct a pseudo-question in the Q. and A.

We have asked a panelist if they could “talk a little bit more about that” or “unpack this a little more” or “tease that out some.”

We have listened as colleagues ask questions related to their own research but that have no relevance to anyone but themselves.

We have passed or received notes during a particularly painful session that read “Kill me now.”...

Academic conferences are a habit from the past, embraced by the administrativersity as a way to showcase knowledge and to increase productivity in the form of published conference proceedings. We have been complicit. Until now.

We believe it is time to ask ourselves: What is the purpose of the conference?"

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/the-conference-manifesto/

This isn't a problem I had had with the (few) academic conferences I have been to, but I love this way of thinking about a system that is failing.

I do this a lot, and I see all of the insecurities in the writing and I wish that I didn't have them and I wish that the author of the essay didn't either. It's where the status quo is scary to question, where there are people who benefit who are vocal and who imply that those who aren't benefiting because they are failing to behave in a beneficial way. There are the people who don't think to question the system, who get sort of insulted when other people rock the boat, who follow the lead of the benefited to look down upon the unsatisfied. And then, there are the unsatisfied but crushed, who believe themselves to be failures and don't want to engage because they don't want to draw attention to themselves.

That's why these things can go on for so long.

Related: Why there are so many meetings