Conferences and Professionalization

It seems that everyone is writing about conference experiences recently (see here, here, and here, for just a few examples). I missed the SCMS bandwagon, but I did help to organize a grad conference here at IU a couple of weekends ago... It's sort of a rest-stop in the road to professionalization: while it's not a "real" conference, it still performed many of the same functions as one, and then some. After all, this conference kept in mind its demographic at all times, and, as a result, it was something of an ideological apparatus which consciously attempted to interpellate us and legitimate our academic careers (sorry for the jargon--but it seemed especially appropriate for a conference about the political uses of knowledge). In other words,it offered me an interesting insider's perspective on what works/doesn't work in this process. From this perspective, I just want to offer a few (very scattered) notes about the kinds of work that conferences do to young scholars and some of the valuable advice I picked up:

• Especially from the perspective of someone on the committee, co-organizing it from a logistical standpoint, it really introduced me to the kinds of economies in which academics participate on a regular basis. This was an incredibly small conference (13 panels of 3 or 4 speakers each, with a keynote and a closing speaker, a closing creative reading, and a performance by a departmental improv comedy troupe), and yet the actual financial considerations to take into account were still considerable. There are many strange alleys through which we must travel in order to find these funds, departmental and other university channels. Another major conference was held exactly one week later than ours and it charged a considerable fee for admission to the conference as well. And I haven't even been incorporated into the system of outside grants and funds that could be used for these kinds of events. What is especially strange about the entire process was how self-cannabalizing these financial matters actually were: we ended up requesting a sizable amount of money from a student union board, only to repay it to the Indiana Memorial Union (which had originally given the board its funds in the first place) in order to pay massive fees for A/V equipment. It's an economy all its own, and it's small enough that it becomes increasingly clear how absurd this circulation of funds actually is.... It's 100% a capitalist microcosm, and any elder scholars who maintain the illusion that the work they do promotes a different kind of political-economy have clearly disavowed a great deal of what defines the profession as a whole (think of this as a kind of academic plausible deniability).
  
• While the committee argues every year about exactly how inter-disciplinary we want to make the conference become, I still maintain that it's a good thing. This year, more than any other, I saw panels with three different people from three different disciplines working on similar ideas through completely different frameworks. This gave a really exciting feeling to some panels that might have been dull in terms of content otherwise. The real contingency of inter-disciplinarity characterized the best panels that I saw, while others that were more traditional or "safe" were, well, traditional and safe. I know that my own paper (an elaboration of this post on guilty pleasures, although from the perspective that "guilty pleasures" are an experience that can only be characteristic of the kind of transitional consumer culture we exist in at the moment) didn't seem like something that controversial when I wrote it (from very much a cultural studies perspective): it took Victorianists in the English Department and a folklorist from another university to add more depth to my claims about different kinds of experiences of consumerism.
• Narrowing the scope to papers themselves, I can now definitively say that I don't mind hearing close readings during conferences. This used to drive me crazy, especially since it's pretty much the opposite of my own preferred methodology, which values context and broad strokes. The key is that the close reading has to be very smart and stay on point. There is nothing more boring than someone who does a close reading that relies entirely on clever puns about theoretical abstractions. It's a masturbatory pursuit second only to those scholars who rely on a single lens through which to analyze a single object: if I want a summary of an important book, I can look elsewhere, or, even better, read the original text itself. Close readings can be smart and relevant, especially when positioned next to other papers that offer interestingly different perspectives on the same issues.
• The most memorable papers (to me at least) are those that don't ignore that the primary purpose of our academic pursuits is to replicate an art of the provocateur. The papers I remember most, that have most inspired me in the past few weeks to investigate my own perspectives, were often those papers which at the time I found to be completely misguided. They were entertaining, but more importantly, while I found the arguments to be off track, they were still conceptually dense enough to evoke a disagreement that provoked more potential viewpoints. (By contrast, a boring lens reading of a single source inspired me to say to myself, "No, s/he's just wrong in that interpretation of the work" or "That reading doesn't really add anything to that object for me"...) The buzzword is that academic conferences are about networking with other scholars, but this simply isn't possible without a little showmanship: no one wants to talk to someone who delivered a boring/pretentious paper. Even someone who delivers a bad argument (but one that can be built upon) can be the life of the academic party.

This last bit is especially important to me. The goal of being provocative speaks in many ways to how I understand the purpose of our profession as cultural critics. Obviously, writing about Shakespeare and youth culture won't change the world in any real way (yes, the delusion that such academic pursuits are that valuable is still shared among a surprising number of my young colleagues), but it can hopefully generate a certain amount of discussion and critical reflection about the culture in which we live. At its best, this "whimsical f-bomb" brand of criticism can even hope to reach beyond the sanctioned academic borders of our professional conferences and journals. It's a goal I'd like to achieve on some level in my own writing at some point (hence the title and purpose of this blog--unsuccessful so far, obviously). But I can--and I think I succeed in this to some degree--encourage this kind of attitude in the venue of the classroom. The point is not to indoctrinate students toward the left (it should be clear from this post that I'm not the most liberal of academics ever, even if I'm really liberal by "normal people" standards). The point is to generate a real discussion, to get people to make real arguments, even those that I find misguided. It's a spirit I find in a lot of my colleagues as we discuss pedagogy, and it gives me hope that we're not totally useless in these changing times.