The Culture of the Conference

Academic conferences: representative and resistant sites for higher education research

“…The university has often been conceptualised as the site of higher education research, but it is recognised that universities, faced with these processes of change, are no longer places as such, but are increasingly 'borderless/edgeless' (Morley, 2012, p. 27, see also Barnett, 2012a;Derrida, 2001). Conferences, as sites of the globalisation of academia (Childress, 2010;Smeby & Trondal, 2005) and of technological innovation and change (Hart, 1984;Jacobs & McFarlane, 2005), are representative of the overall picture of higher education. However, conferences are also sites that resist the chronological account of change that is associated with the university's 'medieval inception' (Barnett, 2012b, p. 1).…”

“…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). A number of academics in applied linguistics are publishing on specific elements of conferences, from abstracts (Cutting, 2012), to the introductions of presentations (Hood & Forey, 2005), to question time (Querol-Julián & Fortanet-Gómez, 2012).…”