Projects

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. 

Espirit de l'escalier sessions are one of my favourite innovations. (I owe the nomenclature to Cat Saint-Croix.)

In standard conferences, the session format is familiar: Talk then, immediately, a Q&A. Perhaps there is a quick "bio break" for comfort. This orthodox structure means that Q&As are quite individualistic. Each person shares their own response to the talk, without having discussed it with anyone first. It also favours the quick thinkers and the confident audience members: They put their hands up first.

Here is an alternative: Presentation-chat-Q&A 

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. (Be strict about this.)

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 subsequent 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 can simply be told to the speaker later, without the entire audience hearing. (After all, some people -- the chat folks -- already heard it. You got the idea out to some audience.)  

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'. All 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 the pre-Q&A discussion time.

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 seminars. 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.

Afterwards, I would seek feedback about about whether the interview time was more valuable than the extra minutes of normal Q&A. 

Interstitial times at conferences - coffee breaks, walks to dinner, etc - can be the most valuable moments for developing research ideas and community. They have high potential value.

This raises the question, can conference organisers do anything to enhance these times, to help actualise their merely potential value?

One possibility is creating a space early in the event for participants to share embryonic research ideas or unusual research interests. This might be in a handout, pre-conference email, circle share, or by writing keywords on a name tag.

These initiatives might help spark valuable conversations, by seeding potential conversation topics. Two people might both be interested in an emerging topic, for example, and be unaware of the other person's interests.  

I suspect that sharing interests would especially helps graduate students and early career people, since their research topics are less known to the group.

Sharing can thus help create equity about whose research is discussed during interstitial times (coffee breaks, etc.), without relying on the well-known people remembering to ask "So, what are you interested in?" to less well-known people.  

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Some people might grimace at what they see as heavy-handed or patronising event facilitation. To those people, remember that all these ideas are merely suggestions. Feel free to take them or leave them. But please do not negative-nelly on other people's attempts to be helpful. And do  not overgeneralise from your own preferences. I can assure, you different people appreciate very different things.  

I have not developed idea, and so I do not have any details.

Someone suggested it to me, and so I am sharing it here.

Credit: Noah Saint-Croix Kunin.

Invitations and expectations are generative. They help researchers develop new ideas. This is common with publication invitations. Conference organisers can make happen with talk invitations too.

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. 

This is a bold move, so I should emphasise: I ran this idea by her first, and she was keen. I made clear that her invitation to the event was was not conditional on this innovation! 

If you want a more innovative conference, here is an easy way: Identify people who are innovative, good teachers, gregarious, or confident. And then ask them to run an interactive or innovative session. 

Many people want to innovate, but need an invitation: We can't turn up to a talk invite, and start asking the audience questions and having them throw balled up paper around the room. I mean, we can. But we won't.  

Your CFP can include a call for interactive activities and standalone 75-minute workshops. 
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Background: Academia would benefit from knowing the expression 'container facilitation'.

https://tendirections.com/the-art-of-the-container/
https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/facilitating-workshops-creating-a-container/

Container facilitation is a difficult and specialised skill (see, for example) that is taken seriously in activist, artistic, and social justice spaces (see, for example).

If you, as organiser, put on your own containers, you might need a thick skin, an idea, and a lot of time. It is a tonne of work and you could well receive pushback and criticism. Do not go into this lightly. There is a reason people charge.

Fortunately, as teachers, we do a version of it. Our classrooms are containers.

Your CFP can express interest in hosting containers of interactive philosophical activities. For an example, see The APA/AAPT Teaching Hub. Their CFPs request interactive sessions and specifies what this means. 

If your college has them, consider asking the pedagogy office, innovation centres, or DEI office whether they would like to host a session. They are often specialists in container facilitation and many are open to cross-disciplinary work like this.

(For examples of container facilitation in philosophical research, see some of my fringe events, and tarot activity sheets. See also my seventh-generation game, described on my teaching page as the Experience Machine Game. See also links to showcased conferences, below.)  

When you send the talk invitation, tell them polished talks are not welcome. Only embryonic ideas are allowed. 

Academic norms strongly pressure people to "look their best" during talks, and only present well-developed ideas. Presenting well thought out ideas has its place and its value. But diversifying is good. If you want create a space to nurture embryonic ideas, your invitation needs to be stern: Not letting them present developed ideas gives people the freedom to present their underdeveloped ideas. And this can be a valuable opportunity.

Tell them this:

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.

Registration fee exemptions for selected industry experts, journalists, and local artists can enrich the conference programme with cross-community insights.

But innovation and cross-community work also needs grace:

Here is an example. In 2025, an APA session was cancelled at the last minute. The session was supposed to be about trade book publishing. A media expert donated her time pro bono, and arrived at the conference. In the account that I heard (directly from the session organiser and panelist), the expert wasn't told she needed to pay to donate her time to the APA, and (reasonably) refused to do so. The APA showed no grace, and the session was cancelled and the room was locked, with all participants waiting at the door. 

This serves as a warning against other people who want to innovate through existing infrastructure: Know who you are working with.
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Grace is a gift, and it is how the world stays fresh. Without it, we are dust.

Without grace, we are eroded into the dry, unforgiving landscape of bureaucracy and fear.

If you want your conference to include artists, non-academic experts, people from other fields, and the general public, you must work with grace in your heart.

(Or, whatever is in your heart, bear in mind that academic norms are abnormal -- and registration fees are expensive -- to non-academics.)

This works especially well for someone working explicitly with ideas, such as a conceptual artist, curator, artist-professor, writer, or theatre facilitator.

Extend the invitation, and then decide the format together. You might interview her, for example, about how her work engages with philosophy or create a small panel about how interacting with art can aid philosophical reasoning at all stages: K-12, college, research, and the general public. Or you can create a roundtable or fishbowl about how to bring philosophy into dialogue with the arts.

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If you invite an artist, you might consider reading the 'How to Ask a Question at an Interdisciplinary Event' section.
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I've done this in class. If I did this for a conference, I'd consider doing it during a brown bag lunch, and then allow everyone 30 minutes in a nearby art gallery.

This might sound like I'm 'over-scheduling'. But you might be assuming that the rest of the day is spent in talks, or that I care whether they enter the gallery. Jettisoning assumptions like those creates a lot more room for innovating. 

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. 

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Examples from my cities:

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?

Event organisers, consider asking yourself this: 

1. What did I receive from my teachers and community at graduate school that helped me flourish that I no longer receive, now that I have graduated? 

2. How can my event innovate to help offer that same value to post-PhD researchers? 

Graduate school is set up to help people learn and think through ideas together. 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, asking questions to the "audience", a chance to air out new ideas with people before deciding whether to pursue them, etc.

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?

[This section is a work in progress.]

Innovating Radically? Start Fresh, and Start with the People
Here is my advice for very innovative events, such as unconferencing: Do not take an existing annual event, with existing regulars, and change it. You might encounter resistance and confusion from the regulars. Instead, start a whole new event, and begin with the invite list: Who do you want there? Who is "up for" innovation? Who would appreciate innovation, and go with the flow? 

Invite those people, and leave the old guard to enjoy normal events. This is easier and more valuable for everybody. 

Communication is Crucial
Communicate clearly in advance; don't throw innovation at people who were expecting a standard structure. The default expectations are so strong that it would be a bait-and-switch.

If it's a CFP-based event, signal hard that it is unconferencing or highly innovative in structure. You want to attract the people who will make it a success. You cannot make it a success alone. You need buy-in from the participants, and that means attracting the right people. 

Best Practices: Be Mindful of Needs
Be mindful that people have needs. Here are two examples. There are many more. 

A lot of people, if they are presenting, need to know well in advance what day their presentation will be on.
A lot of people rely on powerpoint. You don't need to provide it, but be mindful of their default expectations. 

Metabolise Feedback
Innovating requires trial and error: Performance-Feedback-Self Assessment-Revision.

I recommend that you proactively seek feedback, but take it with a thick skin and a grain of salt. Bear in mind that people tend to over-complain about community organisers and culture bearers. 

You are swimming upstream. That can feel hard. But if everyone simply goes with the flow, it leads to social  homogeneity. Research needs variety and creativity.

No event or gathering will suit everybody. People are extremely varied in what they prefer. You can't please everybody. 

Finally, current academic norms foster zero-sum thinking, competitiveness, and resentment; build the community you want to retire in.

Suppose one wants to run a wilderness conference, but worries that it is exclusionary: How would wheelchair users attend, for example? 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.
   
   

2. 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. 

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!)

Here is my view: 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.

Here are some other models for innovative conferences:

• Philosophy in the Wild

• The Coffee Break Conference of Aesthetics

• The New Ethics of Belief Retreat

• The APA/AAPT Teaching Hub. Their CFPs request interactive sessions and specifies what this means. 

This isn’t about organising innovative events, per se. But it is about the quality of interdisciplinary events. And inter-disciplinarity is related to innovation. (If nothing else, it helps you get funding.) 

Interdisciplinary events get a bad rap. 

And, at interdisciplinary events*, philosophers often get a bad rap.

As a group, we ask the wrong questions. Our colleagues don’t like it.

fwiw, here is my advice about how to ask a question at an interdisciplinary event.*

Ask yourself: What can I ask about,

1.) that the speaker wants to talk about, and
2.) that the audience wants to hear the speaker talk about,

such that,
 

3.) many people (including, ideally, the speaker herself) will learn something from the speaker because she speaks on that topic.

Ask that question. 

You’re a philosopher. You are probably especially well-positioned to do this. 

And, yes, you can probably also raise a cutting objection. Generally speaking, don’t do this.

And, yeah... you can probably make suggestions to drastically improve the direction of the project, from our perspective. Maybe try to refrain. 

Despite what you have been told, it is not what the event if for. And despite what your discipline trained-brain tells you, it won’t improve the event. 

If you want to improve the event, hold off on objections and (maybe even) major suggestions until the main event ends. You can try to catch the speaker later, without the audience.

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To be honest, I am ambivalent about the “refrain from major suggestions” part. I might cut it. Why? Because such suggestions can satisfy a different good-making conjunction:

1.) The speaker can think better about the topic in virtue of your suggestion / it would be good for the project if the speaker acts on your suggestion

and, importantly,
 

2.) The audience will learn something that is interesting to them because you spoke about it.

That is hard to pass up. It feels like that is what we, as academic event attendees, are meant to do. Hence, my ambivalence. But I do think meeting the first three conditions enhances the event more, qua the intended functions and success conditions of most interdisciplinary events. 

If you can make the speaker learn something from hearing herself speak… mwah. Chef's kiss.

And, in either case, if the second conjunct is missing, think of a different question.

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Note: By "interdisciplinary events", I mean things like humanities centres, artist’ talks, campus programming, book clubs, and the like. I do not mean specialist research events like the PPE, SSPP, or the Consciousness conference. 

They are full-on research events and, as such, you should feel free to be your normal know-it-all, lecture-disguised-as-question,  objection-first, nitpicking gadfly philosopher self. It's what we all signed up for.