Over the last few weeks I’ve been attending academic conferences. While never the easiest thing to do and not entirely unproblematic, conferences are a core part of being an academic as they allow you to catch up with colleagues (who are really the only other people who understand what the hell it is that you do) and get a handle on what research is going on in the field – a sneak peak of what will end up being published in the next few years. It’s also a great way to “network” and get a reputation for doing a particular kind of work, which if your colleagues value, they’ll consistently come to you for.

Watching presentations at ICMS 2019 in Milton Keynes

I had a lot to think about at this year’s conferences and so I’m going to put my notes from them into a series of articles/essays here which I’m titling Notes from the Conference Circuit. I fully intend to populate these notes with my usual array of pictures of a Penumbra the travelling wolf because, as this research log has likely already established, I’m most likely an idiot (and I perhaps mean this only slightly in the Socratic sense).

The notion of “circuits” appeals to me as the word connotes going around, undertaking a circular journey, and finding your way home the long way ’round, all of which reflects something fundamental to the logic of conferences. Revolutionary. We go somewhere “exotic” and then spend most of our time in a hotel or university building that looks almost indistinguishable from the one that we just left, we spend time with the same group of friends that we regularly correspond with, and present our work to a hungover audience who can’t follow what we’re trying to say because we’re saying it too fast, and sketching in strokes that are too broad to stand up to scrutiny. However, conferences remain the best places to pick up the random off-shoot, the snippet or fragment of an idea that turns into something substantial a few years down the line. Most likely it will be something that you already knew or were thinking about, but you needed to hear it phrased differently, of come from a different source. You had to go around a long way to come back to where you were.