Art of Academic Gathering: Bodies of Researchers

My ikigai is ‘the art of academic gathering'. That is, bringing scholars together in innovative ways to develop supportive research communities. 

My ‘art of academic gathering’ projects consider how body position and conversational contexts, such as being outside, walking together, or sitting on the floor change the kinds of thoughts and comments that researchers have. We can use embodied cognition to improve academic research communities. 

• Here is an Art of Academic Gathering Statement (link)

• This section articulates some implementable ideas for event organisers. 

• Beneath this section, I sketch some recent projects within this aim.

Gathering Ideas

(I will add to this later. It will become a full webpage or website.)

• Conference Structure: Espirit de l'escalier session 

Build in a 'espirit de l'escalier' session each morning. In the first session of the day (starting on day two of the conference), participants discuss talks from the previous day. This gives people the opportunity to discuss ideas that arose in later conversations or percolated overnight. It allows the sharing of 'slower' ideas to the group, and speakers can respond to questions after further contemplation. A 'espirit de l'escalier' session helps de-centralise the importance of quick thinking in academia. (I owe this nomenclature to Cat Saint-Croix.)

• Conference Structure: Reformat the Session (Presentation-Talk About It-Then Q&A).
  In standard conferences, the talk immediately follows the Q&A, perhaps with a quick "bio break" for comfort. This means that Q&As are quite individualistic: Each person shares their own response to the talk, without having discussed it with anyone first.
  
  In this new 'presentation-chat-Q&A' structure, the talk is followed by a chat period. Participants are asked to discuss the paper organically, as if at a coffee break. They should not simply chatter about day-to-day topics! Participants should focus on the talk they just heard. This is because the chat is not free time. It is part of the presenter's session, and should be seen as such. Everyday chat thus robs the presenter of part of their session. 

The chat should focus on making the Q&A better: What potential questions are most useful? Timid question-askers can 'feel out' whether their question seems worthwhile to a small group. The garrulous can work on shortening their question, or quenching their 'need' to talk before the Q&A begins.

The Q&A can be seen as a collaborative "report back" session: What were the most valuable insights from the discussions that the speaker, and other participants should hear?  

What does the presenter do during the chat? The presenter should feel free to 'slip out' during this session, if they think participating would hamper their 'Q&A performance'. Other participants are expected to participate, and focus on the talk topic. Assuming the presenter stays, they will be engaging in one of the conversations about their session. 

Online talks can use 'Break Out Rooms' to create this pre-Q&A discussion time.

• Podcast-style Questions During Colloquia and Conference Talks

Suppose you invited someone to speak at a colloquium or conference. You probably appreciate or respect their way of thinking. So why limit their voice to just their talk topic? Consider setting aside a few minutes during their session (before their actual talk begins or after the Q&A) to ask them a few general questions. Here are some ideas: 

- What are your further research projects / what else are you working on / where might this research go next?

- How did you become interested in this specific topic?

- How does this project relates to your other research (if not already described)

- Why this project or topic matters to non-academics/to society/ to people outside of your field? (Frame this carefully, to avoid offence! Perhaps imply it is a standard question that you ask every speaker.)

- What topics do you think are under-explored in your sub-discipline?

- What is the most illuminating approach/question in the area that you don't use/focus on?

- What is your pet hate in your sub-discipline / what do you think is an unhelpful approach?

- Can you say anything interesting about your approach to writing / research that might help early career / less prolific people?

- Meta-philosophy (methodology): what are the hallmarks of success for philosophy / the aims of philosophy?

- If you were to make a graduate seminar by combining three topics or questions that aren't often combined, what would they be? 

These questions allow the audience to hear some 'hot takes'. It could be especially valuable for grad students, or for people who didn't follow or care about the talk. It can seed good conversations at the reception / dinner. 

  
I do this for Zoom speakers in graduate classes. Best practices: (i.) See whether the speaker is happy with this and email the questions to the speaker in advance. (ii.) clearly schedule question-time into the session. So, for example, a two-hour session, the Q&A ends at 1:52, and the final eight minutes is for these kinds of questions. (iii.) I would only ask four questions. (iv.) I would seek feedback about about whether this was more valuabke than the extra 8 minutes of Q&A.   

• A Guiding Question for Event Organisers

Event organisers, Consider asking yourself this: What things did I receive from my teachers and community at grad school that helped me flourish that I no longer receive, now that I have graduated? How my event innovate to help offer that same value to post-PhD researchers? 

Grad school is set up to help people learn. We can use some of those same norms and ways of gathering to help research communities flourish. Examples: Receiving and giving feedback on early drafts, giving presentations on influential or recent publications, work-in-progress circles, a chance to air out new ideas with people before deciding whether to pursue them, etc.

• The 'Embryonic Research Only!' Invitation

When you send the talk invitation, tell them polished talks are not welcome. Only embryonic ideas are allowed. As a guideline, if they have already presented the idea elsewhere, it is already too well developed for the research cocoon you are building. 

They will only have 15-25 minutes to present. This is because you don't want to hear every potential counter-argument and response, or rival view and its flaws. You just want them to cut to the chase of some new idea that might or might not work. It's a 'popcorn talk'. 

This creates an opportunity for the person to receive feedback on a newly emerging idea. If they try to impress the audience with a well-developed idea then they have wasted this opportunity, by giving a talk that they could have presented somewhere else.

If you are too shy to say this yourself, direct them to this website and they can read it here instead.

• Bold Move: Assign a Participant their Talk Topic
  Invitations and expectations are generative. They help researchers develop new ideas. I held a conference, and I assigned one of the participants a topic for her session. The topic related to her existing work, but I knew that she did not have existing research on that topic. She could run the session as an open discussion, a talk, or any other structure. But I chose her topic. It was thus a prompt for her to develop new research, much like an invitation to publish in an edited volume can be. 

Importantly, she was keen on this idea. And her invitation to the event was was not conditional on this innovation! Indeed, she was a co-organiser and one of my very dearest friends.

• Use the Nighttime, the Campfire, the Food Truck, the Walk, the Graveyard

People talk and think differently when walking together. They might be more collaborative sitting in a circle. Ideas are more expansive, and less analytical, when the room has a higher ceiling? What happens, then, when people sit on the floor. 

Can you hold a session in a graveyard? Or, at least, spend 30 minutes in a graveyard between the lunch hour and the afternoon sessions? It could shift the tone and content of the conversations for the remainder of the conference. Indeed, it might help those researchers develop more valuable and significant long-term research relationships.

We think, feel, and talk differently in different physical environments. Yet we convene for philosophy discussions in the same six physical places. (Large conference room, small conference room, room with tables in a circle, loud restaurant, bar, walking to the bar.) This choice of convening locations might be homogenising of research.

"I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. 

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought."— Jeanette Winterson

Some of the best conversations happen on the walk between the restaurant and the bar. When designing a gathering, perhaps ask yourself, can everyone leave their bags somewhere and take a slightly longer walk? Can this be done in an accessible way, and one that is not vulnerable to the vagaries of weather?

• Accessibility? Think Developmentally and Consult with Experts

Suppose one wants to run a wilderness conference, but worries that it is exclusionary: How would wheelchair users attend? I am not an expert in this, but here are four thoughts: 

1.) Consult with experts! Don't reinvent the wheel. Others have forged these paths before you. There are many accessible nature groups, who want to help. Google your region to find one.

I think that if is possible for tall ship sailing, it is possible for philosophy under the stars. (I have a background in tall ship sailing. I never sailed that ship, but I toured it during voyages with a sister charity.) These innovations need people to try it, whilst learning from disability groups. 

2.) Innovation in these directions can help make philosophy more inclusive and accessible to all, including when back in orthodox campus and hotel based gatherings. If we expand what is possible for academic gatherings, including in nature, it can change the norms when we convene in cities.

3.) Ask specific individuals. If you have specific individuals in mind, ask them for ideas. They are the true experts.

4.) Facilitation is a skill. And all skills can be developed. This means you can break the mould now, to change what is possible later. Perhaps consider facilitating a wilderness conference as a developmental stage: That is, running initial conferences in the wilderness can help you better understand how to do this with various disabled participants. (Note, though, that forging ahead cannot replace consulting with the experts!)

If you think convening in nature is a cognitive and social benefit, then (I think) it is worth transcending these apparent boundaries, towards more inclusive and radical modes of gathering.

Media on the Art of Academic Gathering

• An Ecology of Feedback, Daily Nous, I contrast circular structures and ecological structures of research community. 

• A Guide for Organizing Online Philosophical Conversations Daily Nous, I explain an easy way to create a lot of small group conversations. This method can be used to create small conversations at large online conferences, for example. 

 
Other Conference Innovation Ideas

Local Philosophy Question
Suppose you run a large annual conference, and you want to connect philosophically to the locale. Philosophers have gifts: Their ability to facilitate discussion, help people think through ideas, and provide perspectives. In turn, the academics can learn about the area and be inspired by site-specific philosophy questions and reasoning.

As the organiser, you can ask locals for local philosophy questions they would love a merry troupe of travelling philosophers to discuss. You can then host a  discussion  panel  on that topic. Indeed, you can even do it at the local tavern.

This way, you can create a novel outreach event, offer a service, and break up the monotony of the conference. 

For browny points, you could offer to create an educational resource about the topic for local schools. To do this, record 3-6 philosophers speaking for 2-5 min each on the topic -- offering their hot takes -- edit those videos together, post them on YouTube, and tell the relevant local teachers. 

___________

Examples from cities I lived in:

1.) New Orleans:

a.) What should we make of Nicolas Cage's pyramid tomb stone? Should he have a right to do that? Should we remove it?

b.) Love potions: Is it okay to sell and use products designed to steer other people's affections?

2.) Knoxville:

a.) How should we understand invasive species? What (if anything) should we do about them?

Invasive species removal at Ijams Urban Wilderness generates a case study about volunteer time and resources, and an opportunity to think through the emotions of the hydra-headed snake or Sisyphean tasks of climate change.

b.) What might reparations for environmental exploitation look like? Is it too late, wrt to logging operations?

The Ethics of Attention
CEU Institute 

1st-5th July 2024, Budapest

CEU Course Website

• Information is here

• Apply here. Application deadline 14th Feb 2024. 

Secondary information page (Link)

Directors:

• Georgi Gardiner (University of Tennessee, USA)

• Cathy Mason (CEU, Austria)

• Ella Whiteley (LSE, UK)

Guest Teachers:

• Tatyana Kostochka (Ashoka University, India)

• Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge, UK)

• Samantha Vice (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

• Wayne Wu (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Course Assistants and Admin

• Dario Vaccaro (University of Tennessee, USA), director's assistant

• Emese Havadtoi (CEU, Austria), local coordinator

• Kornelia Vargha (CEU, Hungary), course administrator

Topics include attentional virtues, norms, rights, activism, aims, flourishing, character, power, & inequality. Participants first survey major theories of attention, including in Asian philosophy, analytic philosophy, and psychology. We then apply these frameworks to real-life case studies about technology, media, AI, advertising, power, prejudice, bias, colonialism, art, love, friendship, religion, self-improvement, mental health, the body, science research, and skepticism about vaccines, pandemics, and climate change.

UTK News Coverage (Link)

This work received support from the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) under grant number IHS017504 and from the Open Society University Network (OSUN). We are grateful for this support.

Center for Applied Epistemology

Details Coming Soon. (Funding application available on request.)

The First Gen Philosophers Club

Here

Reflections Retreat:
Philosophical Reflections on Life Experiences

Mountain retreat workshop to generate new public-facing philosophy, supported by UTHC. This event has received $9,000 in competitive grants so far.

Proposed Event Description (link)

Note: This event has ben indefinitely postponed. I have left the University of Tennessee. I remain grateful to the Denbo Humanities Center for Humanities and the Arts for their generous support of my projects in the art of gathering. I am thrilled to continue similar projects at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Epistemology Working Group

My advanced students and I meet regularly to workshop each other's research. Description here. 

Play Times: Art Exhibition

Brief explanation. (Please see this Artist Statement (Link) for more.)

Early Career Spotlight

Highlighting some people who are doing great work on interesting topics.

Mike Deigan

Deigan has a great eye for interesting topics, and works in philosophy of language, ethics, and epistemology. His teaching range is strikingly broad, and his syllabi are creative. I think he doesn't yet have permanent employment. I don't really know Deigan, but I think we have had one conversation, maybe two, and found him an interesting, engaged, generous interlocutor when discussing philosophy ideas.

Arianna Falbo

I first heard about Falbo's work when they were still in graduate school.  I invited them to join one of my Zoom research circles, and I was always impressed with their creative ideas and insightful contributions. They were a guest in one of my graduate seminars, and multiple students wrote their final essays on her interesting ideas. She is great to talk philosophy with. And she is very active in research and philosophy community organising.