“…Academic conferences: sites for higher education research Situating conferences in higher education research Academic conferences have been researched and theorised in a multitude of different disciplinary contexts and for numerous different purposes, but the resultant writing has not necessarily been published as 'higher education research'. The existing research and writing on conferences, with some exceptions (e.g., Childress, 2010;Smeby & Trondal, 2005), tends to lie in the category of publication that does not count, according to Tight's (2012) classification system, as research in higher education, namely journals and books that are positioned within, and so marketed as relevant to, the disciplines from which they emerge. Though some of the literature on conferences takes a more general stance with regard to the nature and purpose of conferences (Elton, 1983;Hart, 1984;Hickson, 2006;Pereira, 2011Pereira, , 2012Skelton, 1997), most of the disciplinary work on conferences either focuses on the historical importance of a conference for the discipline (e.g., Carpay, 2001 for psychology;Gibbons, 2012 for English;McCulloch, 2012;Walford, 2011 for education), or on the necessity of working at conference practice for the improvement of the field or discipline (e.g., Jeffrey, 2003 for geography).…”