What is This Event For? Lessons from Conferencing at 3am in Amsterdam, and Other Venues

• In Event: Critical and Reflexive Perspectives on Conferencing as Scientific Practice - II

Abstract

Academic conferences are usually hailed as prime sites for knowledge production and exchange. But they also perform multiple auxiliary functions beside research presentations, round table discussions, and author-meet-the public sessions. Large conventions typically accommodate book exhibits, professional membership meetings, job fairs and recruitment events, award ceremonies, and, of course, massive networking. To a novice, this abundance might look excessive, but to a seasoned scholar, they constitute an infrastructure indispensable to the maintenance of professional identities as knowledge makers.
With the onset of COVID-19 and restriction on in-person gatherings, it is important to ask what provisions, features, and affordances can be leveraged to sustain this relational infrastructure. What new formats can help create spaces and opportunities that sustain feelings of belonging to a community of scholars? Which conference experience cannot migrate online? And what these affordances and solutions teach us about the contexts and conditions of contemporary knowledge production?
My presentation seeks to answer these questions by analyzing programming choice of eight virtual conferences convened in 2020, ranging from national conventions of professional organizations to graduate student symposia. It examines them from three perspectives: as a speaker/presenter; as an attendee; and (to a lesser degree) as an organizer – and draws on theories of information and communication behavior to highlight the constants, the variables, and the currently unknowns of the ongoing adjustment of conferencing as a knowledge practice. The presentation will conclude with tips on how to make the most out of conferencing in the “new normal.”

Author

• Natalia Kovalyova, iSchool UT Austin