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'Tis the season for major academic conferences, with which I have a love-hate relationship. I love them because there's always the promise of being inspired by new ideas or of meeting interesting people--and especially someone, anyone, who might point me in the direction of a tenure-track job.
Why can't I stand conferences? Oh, let me count the ways.
In my humanities field, people read papers. Yes, they avoid making eye contact as they very carefully articulate words that are much too big for the role they're serving in any given sentence. By keeping their eyes on the page, they can ignore the growing disinterest on audience members' faces and those of us who get fed up and walk out of the room.
At the last conference I attended, I confided to my mentor that I had conference ADD, that I'd become a session hopper, but that I felt bad getting up and leaving in the middle of someone's paper.
"Oh, but you're supposed to do that," she said. "It's a way of telling people that their work is boring."
Niiiiice.
Every academic conference, I hit a point where I'm about to have an emotional breakdown because of at least three of the following reasons:
- my own interests don't fit into the new direction the field has taken;
- everyone seems to know everybody else, and I don't;
- I don't understand, and therefore can't use gracefully, the latest academic lingo;
- I didn't land a preliminary job interview at the conference;
- university presses don't appear to be publishing new work in my subfield;
- I ask a question in a session and get smacked down for my naivete by some bigwig in the field;
- I'm over-, under-, or otherwise inappropriately dressed;
- my blood sugar is low and there's no good, affordable food to be found at the (usually crappy) conference hotel;
- I say something enormously jejeune to someone whose department is hiring this year;
- I need a nap, and I'm not staying at the conference hotel because it's too expensive or I waited too long to register and there weren't any rooms available.
In other words, I get hit with a big ol' case of imposter syndrome and fatigue. Good times.
Is it any surprise that I'm not much of a conference-goer?
Worried that I'm some kind of academic freak, I wandered the academic blogosphere in search of validation of my feelings and experiences.
As usual, Maryanne, AKA the Queen of West Procrastination, delivered. She shares the bad (such as that "When you're a brash, upstart PhD candidate, some faculty types feel comfortable scolding you for your controversial claims") and good (such as Big Names sharing their humor with Little Names) of her latest conference experience. I love the comment from Limon de Campo: "Yay for academics who aren't full of themselves!"
Liz Losh of virtualpolitik addresses the issue of academic conferences where women are underrepresented.
Danigirl suffers a crisis of confidence after presenting at a conference:
I served up some fluffy, lightweight stuff compared to the fascinating research put forth by my friends.
Lilian of Mama(e) in Translation writes of conferences and the job search,
When it gets to a point like this I start to see all of this like a game, it's just a very artificial and set up game, only those who know the rules can have any part on it. I think of all the things Articulate Dad has written about his fruitless searches. I think of the negative thoughts I have at each academic conference (I need to post about that sometime), and I just feel very sad and even disgusted. I do not fit in, that's clear enough. I may be talented, but I'm not really a player, I haven't been properly trained, I did take the "dissertation seminar" from my dept, which does prepare us for the market in a way, twice (second time I just audited), but that wasn't enough, and not being there doesn't help me much.
ArticulateDad gets depressed at a conference:
I'm sitting at the conference, in the lobby outside the exhibitor's hall. Little ups... mostly down. It's rather depressing for me to be here. There was one paper this morning (ONE!) that was interesting. I had a lot to say in the discussion section, felt that I had much to contribute. Three or four people sought me out after the session to talk about things. It was exciting to hear their interest, to take their questions, to give citations and
