In this post, Kate Carruthers Thomas presents a searing pastiche of ‘top tips’ guides on attending conferences, illustrated with her own cartoon sketches.
In this piece Liz Jackson explores the gendered nature of unwanted touching at conferences and reflects on the publication of her recent article “The Smiling Philosopher: Emotional labour, gender and harassment in conference spaces”
Wearing black, spicy food and not serving wine. In this week’s blog James Burford reflects on cultural questions at international academic gatherings in Thailand.
Academic conferences involve the coordinated movement (and coordinated stillness) of bodies across various kinds of spaces. Talking about the academic body and the research conference probably conjures images of a brightly lit room, and professionally dressed colleagues engaged in more or less erudite discussion. But, writes James Burford, what happens when the lights go out and the clothes come off?
Taking inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, Emily Henderson considers the role of tables at conferences
In her book Queer Phenomenology (QP), Sara Ahmed refers to the English-language idiom of ‘being treated like furniture’ to make the point that furniture is often positioned in the background of human interaction. To be ‘like furniture’ is to blend into the unnoticed, taken-for-granted objects that, according to a Ahmed’s phenomenological approach, in fact scaffold our lives. Continue reading “Conference tables: Reorienting Sara Ahmed’s ‘Queer Phenomenology’ towards embodied knowledge production (Emily F. Henderson)”
Conference Inference 