The Geographies of the Conference: Knowledge, Performance and Protest

Abstract

Conferences are an ubiquitous and important part of political and academic life, acting as key sites of knowledge creation, public performance, legitimation and protest. Reviewing the current literature and drawing on our own work, this paper suggests that geographers are well-placed to provide insight into conferences through the concepts of visibility, performance and space. We explore the politics of academic, climate and geopolitical conferences, focusing on their production of epistemic communities and their role as sites for the performance of ideological positions and identities. We then explore international summits as protest spaces. We draw attention to a number of scales in our analysis, suggesting the need to attend to the global, national, local and micro-scale of conferences to ask what space and location contribute to conference outcomes and how conferences in turn act back on the landscapes in which they are embedded. We conclude with four reasons why we believe that conferences provide a fruitful – and important – focus for research in geography

Why Conferences Matter—An Illustration from the International Marine Conservation Congress

“…However, history has shown that regional conferences provide a different face-to-face knowledge sharing experience to global meetings, capture few non-regional issues, and lack the scope to address global problems like those typical of marine conservation (Craggs and Mahony, 2014). For large-scale environmental efforts to be successful, multidisciplinary endeavors and collaborations across regions are crucial.…”

Mobilizing drug policy activism: conferences, convergence spaces and ephemeral fixtures in social movement mobilization

“…Not only do they bring people together, engendering an embodied mobility -discussed above -but conferences also facilitate the transfer of knowledge and the construction and maintenance of weak and strong ties. This translation is almost always the main purpose of any conference, be it activist or academic in nature (Craggs & Mahony, 2014). And it is the intent that the assembling of people and ideas, the creation of such a convergence space will contribute to the production of policy change through advocacy.…”

“…Conferences as sites of learning and exchange have long held value for diverse communities such as; political conferences, academic conferences, business conventions, and I would add to this, activist conferences (Adey, 2006;Craggs & Mahony, 2014;Diani, 2000;DiPetro, Bretter, Rompf, & Godlewska, 2008;England & Ward, 2007;McLaren & Mills, 2008;Tanford, Space and Polity 3 Montgomery, & Nelson, 2012). Early work on policy mobilities has noted the importance of faceto-face communication in the form of conferences and policy tourism (González, 2011;McCann, 2008;Ward, 2006).…”

“…There is an ongoing massaging of ideas and meetings that occur in the orchestrated spaces that constitute convergence spaces such as conferences. Unstructured events, such as coffee breaks, and evening receptions are as important as the scheduled plenary sessions (Cook & Ward, 2012;Craggs & Mahony, 2014). In the evenings, there were several different events that were scheduled, such as the Canadian debut of a documentary, Raw Opium.…”

Conferencing the international at the World Pacifist Meeting, 1949

“…In particular, academics have shown how international conferences operate as stage-managed events by drawing on a growing literature of how both conferences (Craggs, 2014a;Craggs and Mahony, 2014) and international systems more widely (Ringmar, 2012) are presented, scripted and performed, and the role that techniques of theatricality play in the conduct of global affairs. Carl Death has shown, for example, how analysing conferences as moments of political theatre is critical to understanding how international legitimacy is enacted (2011a), and how modern forms of governmentality are exercised (2011b).…”