Is This a Humanities Conference?
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The New York Times has a painful write-up of what a humanities conference is like, The Conference Manifesto. My question is pretty straightforward: is this really representative? E.g., reading line-by-line from papers? Readers with experience as asked to weight in.
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I’ve presented conference papers at a couple of conferences (one on comparative contract law, and another on the impact of tax law on the financial crisis), and attended a couple more in the legal academy and also when my wife was in graduate school (American studies). I also attended an academic conference once while growing up in a college town in a professor’s home. Thus, I’m hardly a veteran, but have some experience.
Reading line by line is rare, but does happen and is just as awful as it sounds. A significant minority of humanities grad students and junior professors are extreme introverts with absolutely no training or experience in public speaking and who may not have been big on classroom participation when they were undergraduates, who also have negligent academic advisers.
Boring and ill-prepared or formulated talks are frequent. But, in fairness, some of the boring-ness is due to acute specialization and the talks can be more interesting if you are familiar with the field.
The rest of the complaints are not as serious as them seem. Gunners who ask questions that are really statements just to make themselves look smart and look like they are participating intelligently are par for the course in pretty much every public presentation forum, for example.
There are also almost always good presentations and panels at national conferences (especially the “big ones” in the field), and especially by “superstar” in their field presenters, often (but not always) more senior professors and top of their class at top ten grad schools students just about to get their PhDs. Those talks, however, do tend to be mostly repetitive of talks already given elsewhere by the same presenter.
Humanities and social sciences conferences tend to be as much focused on networking and at the more important conferences, on interviewing for faculty vacancies, as they are on paper presentation, which isn’t terribly inappropriate in this day and age when preprints are often posted on line at SSRN or in similar forums.
I’ve been to a few conferences related to Slavic languages/culture, and it rings mostly true, with a few qualifications. The reading line by line is unfortunately true in a significant minority of cases, especially for foreign professors with limited English knowledge. Everyone except the linguists are guilty of being deliberately obscurantist to varying degrees, poets in particular. However, there is a fair minority, perhaps 1 in 5, that are very informative (usually about some recent social phenomenon or current events).
I have only been to a few philosophy talks and I cannot address most of the claims in the article, but for the one you singled out, that is what I saw and everyone assured me that taking papers intended for print and reading them verbatim (without even memorization) is normal in most of the humanities. I am surprised that you ask; I would have thought that simply by osmosis through the rest of academia that you would have heard that assertion many times.
i’m very sealed away from inter-disciplinary interactions. barely interact with people outside of genetics, let alone outside of science.
When I was in grad school, I assumed that all seminars were like economics seminars: no prepared texts, frequent interruptions by the audience, occasional prolonged arguments between the speaker and the audience, occasional prolonged arguments among members of the audience, frequent brief arguments among various parties. I learned pretty quickly that, in the humanities and social sciences, it is pretty much only economists who operate this way. So much so that any sort of interdisciplinary talk requires negotiation and a little speech at the beginning setting the ground rules. Over time, economics is slowly converging on the seminar-as-waste-of-time approach of the other disciplines.
I have no idea why other disciplines have conferences and seminars. As far as I can tell, you get just as much out of reading the paper as you do by going to the talk. And faster.
The uselessness extends well outside the humanities and the social sciences. Medical and public health conferences may have some value, but whatever value they have does not come from the talks. Just read the abstracts and wait for the papers to come out if you find some of them interesting. You are going to get nothing more out of the talk. It’s just one goof after another speed talking through 10 powerpoint slides in 10 minutes. Total waste of time. The poster sessions are usually much more useful since you can actually talk to the guy standing forlornly next to his poster—they are often pretty interested in talking about their work since it staves off the boredom.
Then you can read the paper to fill in the details.
This is particularly true for seminars and invited talks, in which researchers can present the general story by including material from many individual papers. That gives you the "big picture" which is not immediately obvious from looking at each paper in isolation, and this in turn often makes it easier to understand the individual papers (because you understand better what they're after).
Blame it on the Least Publishable Unit meme.
(I miss Boston and the perpetual scientific conference atmosphere.)
I am wrapping up a PhD in a humanities discipline and I think that Wampole’s exaggerating a bit, but she’s basically got it right. Her especially bleak assessment may stem from her appointment in a French and Italian faculty, which is worse in my experience than English, Philosophy, and History faculties. The reason is that PhDs in foreign languages are people who were really great at X language, but don’t have any burning research questions to fuel truly interesting scholarship. But History, English and Philosophy have been major disciplines longer than French and Italian, and have established topics and texts that make conference panels and scholarship easier to follow. Based on what I’ve read from earlier period of humanities scholarship, my impression is that it has always been in a bad state.
Interdisciplinarity has been a big buzzword in the humanities for years, but they are very selective about which disciplines they are willing to interact with. Once in a graduate course with a lot of gender studies material in the syllabus, I asked why we there was no cross-disciplinary conversation between gender studies and, say, biology or even sociology, about the subject of sexuality. The professor’s response was basically that these disciplines lacked the historical perspective that is integral to humanities methodology. By this he was referring to the notion that you can’t study X without knowing the historical discourses that formed our assumptions about X. So you can’t understand sexuality without understanding how heterosexuality was invented by the West in the 19th century. And no biologist is going to be able to work with that.
The interaction of culture and biology is a potential area for such interdisciplinarity to take place, and there are research questions I can imagine pursuing–once tenured–with an evolutionary anthropologist.
As a total aside, it is possible to be engaging and good to listen to when reading an academic paper or something similar word for word, just as much as if you were giving an extemporaneous power point presentation.
I learned to do that as a child raised in church who has to read daily lessons from the Bible and my part on Christian liturgy to a room full of church goers, and I’ve continued to hone that in political meetings and as a lawyer. Indeed, most politicians and ministers and quite a few librarians who hone the skill during story time, can do it.
But, it is an acting skill that takes years of practice and good models to hone, and the people who actually do read word for word at humanities conferences uniformly lack that skill.
It pretty much hits the nail on the head, though the couple I attended always had about 10-20 folks for the presentations. It’s pretty much a given in the field that I was in, that if you wanted a position in a good Ph.D program and an in into a journal publication, that you had to present at a conference. The quality of your presentation really didn’t matter unless your faculty adviser cared about it. The more presentations the better.
I did not present. I had no money to fly across the country, and moreover, at the time I saw the whole thing as masturbatory BS in which charismatic profs and grad students present pomo shit that interesting to listen to but is garbage content-wise and everyone else goes through the hoops, which includes the above reading of papers by those who can’t or don’t care enough to do a proper speech. Hence my not being an academic now. Someone really had ought to have told me how integral those things were.
I’m in philosophy and have seen a very large number of philosophy talks. I cannot remember seeing a philosophy talk that lacked a thesis or an argument. Furthermore, philosophy Q & A sessions are usually moderated and the moderator is expected to step in if someone in the audience asks a question that is too long or irrelevant (though some moderators of course fail to do so). Other than that, philosophy talks vary a great deal depending on the subfield. In most subfields it’s very rare for the speaker to simply read a paper aloud, but it’s relatively common in history of philosophy. Ethicists, metaphysicians, and historians tend to use handouts, but epistemologists (especially formal epistemologists) and philosophers of science typically use powerpoint. Philosophers of science also often have more interactive talks, where the audience is expected to interrupt and ask questions during the talk.
Yes, it is for real. I would probably say it is bottom 20% of participants though.
I have been surprised to find that people who read their papers are sometimes better than those who don’t.
She forgets an important reason for conferences: Adding a line to the CV. That and networking.
It is especially important for grad students to add lines. Even though most young grad students’material sucks.
I have no idea why other disciplines have conferences and seminars. As far as I can tell, you get just as much out of reading the paper as you do by going to the talk. And faster.
The uselessness extends well outside the humanities and the social sciences. Medical and public health conferences may have some value, but whatever value they have does not come from the talks. Just read the abstracts and wait for the papers to come out if you find some of them interesting. You are going to get nothing more out of the talk. It's just one goof after another speed talking through 10 powerpoint slides in 10 minutes. Total waste of time. The poster sessions are usually much more useful since you can actually talk to the guy standing forlornly next to his poster---they are often pretty interested in talking about their work since it staves off the boredom.Replies: @toto
Not really, at least not in my field. The simple fact is that many papers are awfully written. I find that in general, presenters do a much better job at explaining the intuitive gist of their story in “live” presentations than in papers.
Then you can read the paper to fill in the details.
This is particularly true for seminars and invited talks, in which researchers can present the general story by including material from many individual papers. That gives you the “big picture” which is not immediately obvious from looking at each paper in isolation, and this in turn often makes it easier to understand the individual papers (because you understand better what they’re after).
Blame it on the Least Publishable Unit meme.
(I miss Boston and the perpetual scientific conference atmosphere.)
The linguists are less obscurantist? Speaking whose main amateur academic interest is linguistics, I feel unduly quite proud to hear this.
Generally accurate. The oddity is that in the sciences, which you’d think would select less for verbal wherewithal, audiences expect that a presenter can speak from slides for an hour. It’s just how you give a talk. Whenever this comes up with friends in the humanities, most find the thought paralyzing.