Better conferences follow-up: How to schedule conferences

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Unfortunatly there is not much to report form the world of STS right now: all email-lists are silent, 4S proposals are send out, EASST is missing this year. But time is a scarce resource these days, so I don´t mind. 

Since I run from workshop to workshop, from conference to conference these weeks, I wonder how conferences get scheduled. Nicholas comment to the Stengers workshop (“Why not in the summe?”) made me aware that also in here in old Europe most academic gatherings are all taking place exactly when our schedules are already full. Take these weeks: it is the beginning of the summer term here in Germany, and I travel to two different places to meet people each week.

I wonder why? How does the practice of scheduling academic gatherings work? Are there mechanisms, strategies and tactics I don´t get?

 

1 thought on “Better conferences follow-up: How to schedule conferences”

  1. I agree with you both, in fact that was something I was trying to put on our collective [blog] map when I talked about Selin as a scholar to watch as she is attending to some of these issues related to temporal elements used as resources for deployment in the "now." Jan and I have discussed this and soon I will present at a small IT conference at Clark University (MA, USA) about the issues of aligning temporally with international colleagues and collaborators with the use of technology such as e-mail, chat, skype, docs, wave, etc. The conference is about IT and academic activity, but mainly emphasizing teaching and the use of technology there within; however, my colleague, Eric Charles and I will claim that teaching and research are both valuable elements of the university worthy of serious consideration with regard to the use of IT. Especially the use of technology to facilitate or undermine research (international research, in particular) seems to be an issue rarely considered scientifically. I imagine that it is precisely for the reasons that Antonia was so critical of my thought that we could study conferences with the intention of figuring out how to make them better. Her words were something like making conferences is every bit an art as it might be a science. Well, I’m collaboration is something where attempts to study it scientifically might just run into the same concern; collaboration is every bit an artful waltz as it is just people interacting (which can be studied by sociologists). .To temporal infrastructures!

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