There have been a couple of interesting posts I’ve run across in my attempts to find out what happened at the 2009 AAA conference (see especially Lorenz’s run-down at antropologi.info). These discussions of conferences in general have encouraged me to write something about my own experiences organizing and attending conferences over the past year (see also, Lorenz’s What’s the point of anthropology conferences?, Kerim’s What’s Your Favorite Anthropology Conference? and Strong’s How to attend a conference in a couple hours). I thought I’d add a different perspective; that of the amateur, I’ll-never-do-it-again (dis-)organizer.

I will cross-post this at both Neuroanthropology.net and Culture Matters, something I do not usually do, because I think that it’s worth putting up at both places, and both sites are intimately tied to the content of the post. Apologies if you run across this twice; I won’t make it a habit.

Although I’ve probably been to a few score academic conferences since my first in 1992 (the Society for Ethnomusicology), I’ve never really organized anything substantial until this year, when Daniel and I organized our first Neuroanthropology conference, ‘The Encultured Brain,’ and I agreed to chair the annual meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society (the AAS). I also was on the ‘program committee’ for the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science annual meeting, but they realized I was up to my neck in other planning so didn’t ask too much of me. It was probably a monumental act of stupidity to agree to do this, but at least I get this blog post out of it! (Yes, that’s bitter irony you read…)

Before I get into the good bits though, I have to admit that I do enjoy conferences, although less and less, primarily because traveling always seems to leave me worn out, and my travel distances have gotten egregious now that I’ve moved to Australia. I had a hoot changing into my presentation suit in a cab on the way to the AAAs in DC about a decade ago, arriving half-way through my panel but in time to give my paper after United stranded me overnight in Pittsburgh or somewhere like that (it was snowing around the Great Lakes so, of course, United was taken completely off-guard by this freakish, never-before-seen weather). I once did a single panel at the Guadalajara meeting of LASA, spending the rest of the time sight-seeing, eating really well, and searching unsuccessfully for a second-hand accordion. And I met my wife at a Council on International Educational Exchange conference in Santa Fe, our ice breaker consisting of a slightly off-colour joke during the panel set-up that ONLY an Australian woman would find endearing.

So don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of the good conference, but I’ve also been traumatized at academic conferences, especially during the FOUR YEARS when I tried to nail down a permanent position. They can be very lonely, especially for the jobless, and I’ve wandered around the AAAs trying to find someone, anyone, to talk to when everyone else looked like they were having stimulating (or at least drunken) conversations. One of the low points was in the cattle pens for an interview with an institution in NY that had a 5-4 teaching load:

INTERVIEWER: Give me one good reason why you might take this job if we offered it to you?

ME: Don’t underestimate how bad the job market is.
[I'm not usually too quick on my feet, but extreme phobia of unemployment and imagining that I might be forced to move into my parents' basement and work at Kinkos apparently makes me a bit quicker on the uptake.]

But this post is about a different sort of indignity, or my thoughts on why to agree to organize one of these things and some advice from the other side, before the exhaustion and rose-coloured lenses of retrospection deprive me of some insights I might gain from having gone through this hell of a year.

Some general thinking in relation to other posts (list of advice is below):

Lorenz asks a lot of good questions about conferences, but one that sticks with me is the concept of a conference ‘theme.’ Lorenz wonders if the people at the conference should have talked more about the ‘theme’ (in his case, cosmopolitanism). In specialized conferences, themes might make sense; for our Neuroanthropology conference, the name kind of was the theme, and I can think of other examples of the same with organizational conferences.

But with the big society-wide conferences, themes seem to me to be a bad idea although I doubt they’re going away. They just confuse people, and you never really know how seriously the organizers are going to take them, so how much you need to twist your panel or paper abstract to fit the theme. Some folks complimented our theme for the AAS — ‘the ethics and politics of engagement’ – but it was a kind of committee-produced amalgamation, so broad and vague that just about anything anthropological would fit in the category. The theme worked really well for our keynote, and George Marcus admirably worked it into his talk, but the problem is more around the edges than with the central events. That is, I had a student come up to me and tell me that she hadn’t put a paper in because she didn’t think it fit with the theme, exactly the opposite effect from what we hoped.

I think academic conferences need to be inclusive, but that we also have to find ways of making sure that people have an audience. I’ve given papers at the AAAs where the panel was larger than the audience, and it’s terribly demoralizing, and hardly an experience that leaves one ‘professionalized’ in any meaningful way, unless you count increasing cynicism as a quality of the professional anthropologist. So there’s a constant battle between the desire to talk and the importance of having a space to listen seriously, without being overwhelmed. I doubt there’s an easy fix.

Academic societies exist primarily to provide publications and meetings for their fields, so there’s little chance that they will stop holding these mass events (although I really wonder how long-distance travel might change in the next decade). With that in mind, then, this post is for those of you who are considering whether you want to get involved in organizing one. My perspective is shaped heavily by working on the AAS, a medium-sized conference (400 or so people) with no professional organizing support, but I also have had a hand this year in two smaller conferences.

The list of suggestions

Organize two conferences? Sure, why not?

In both conferences that I played a major hand in organizing, we found a backer with some funding to help us with shortfalls, which took enormous pressure off the budget. In the case of the Neuroanthropology conference, a MAJOR factor in our success was the remarkable support of the Lemelson/SPA Conference fund, a wonderful initiative by Rob Lemelson that’s likely to nurture emergent work in psychological anthropology for years. In addition, Notre Dame moved in to support the conference well in a way that few other universities could match. In the AAS conference, financial support, especially from the Department of Anthropology, became incredibly important when our initial keynote lecturer had to pull out for personal reasons, and about $5000 in donations linked to his appearance dried up. In the end, in both conferences, money was still a stressor but significantly less than it might have been.

It was suggested to me for the AAS that I get a treasurer to take care of the accounts, but I kept this role in the Australian meeting for myself as I have a bit of a background in bookkeeping and running small business. I can’t reveal publicly all of the financial secrets I feel like I’ve learned, but let’s just say that university financial controls are often VERY poorly designed to help facilitate these sorts of one-off, unpredictable, I-need-cash-NOW, just-pay-for-the-damn-taxi kinds of events, so you’ve got to be creative. Contact me directly if you want advice (greg.downey (at) mq.edu.au). Everything was totally ethical and moral, if you’re wondering…

The registration fees for some conferences have become SO exorbitant, and attendees seem to get very little for their money. In both the AAS and the Neuroanthropology conferences, we really tried to provide value for money, covering our overhead (fixed costs like plane tickets for keynote lecturers) from donations and what you might call ‘premium’ registration (fully employed individuals, especially registering late). The cost of student registrations was kept to a minimum (just food and variable costs like an additional copy of the program) to encourage their participation. And we decided that we could afford to freeze the registration cost at the 2007 level, even though we were going to include food, something that wasn’t done in the earlier conference, in part because the Department wanted to throw itself a 40th anniversary party of sorts.

If you can, find some way to encourage early registration. You still want last-minute walk-up registrations, but you want them to be a smaller percentage of the people who attend. You might encourage them through discounts (we did a $50 discount at the AAS), special incentives (inclusion of contact info in the program), or just repeated, vigorous brow-beating through any mailing lists. We begged, harassed, made outragenous promises, but still had more than 20% of our traffic in walk up registrations. If many had been tighter than it was, this would have given me insomnia.

2. When you delegate, delegate completely or not at all.

That is, find tasks that you can entrust to people that are reasonably self-contained (the tasks, not the people), and then let the delegatees take care of these things without running back to you for every major decision. With Daniel at the Neuroanthropology conference, it was especially easy for me (not necessarily for him) because I trust him completely and he was the on-site person. In the AAS conference, I worked with some extraordinarily motivated and competent junior people — I’m talking about Malcolm, Lisa, Jennifer, Shane and Sophie, especially, but not exclusively. They were fantastic, and I could just trust them without having to consult on every question; they committed their time, so I felt confident backing up their decisions.

In contrast, in at least one case this year, someone tried to micromanage me over my shoulder, and it drove me nuts. That is, someone decided that they (note: I’m intentionally being vague) needed to be consulted on all sorts of decisions and ‘unmade’ many that I had made responsibly, doubling and tripling my work in some places and undermining my ability to negotiate agreements that would stick. In addition, this sometimes slowed down progress terribly. This micromanagement was incredibly frustrating and only increased the work and stress involved with no increase in the quality of the event. In addition, when I put small decisions to the organizing committee for input, the decisions invariably became more complicated. My advice: streamline organization and let people (including yourself) make final decisions without a lot of consultation. Too much time gets wasted in committees on simple decisions that don’t matter; save committees for the big decisions that really DO matter and that you need input on (for us, this was conference theme and keynote speakers and special events).

3. Keynote speakers matter. A lot.

After having done a couple of these conferences, I’ve been startled how important the keynote speaker(s) is (are) for people to attend (here’s the info on the AAS and on Neuroanthropology keynotes). Maybe this is because both conferences were in non-central places (well, Sydney’s central in some ways), and people had to be encouraged to make the trip. But I was surprised at how much it mattered who was headlining the show, and I’m very glad that in both cases we invested some money in bringing in people who were widely known. In contrast, in the places where I was a keynote speaker, I think I gave good talks, but I don’t think I helped attendance at all (and thus the budget).

Also, if you’re organizing the conference, don’t let them (by ‘them’ I mean anyone) talk you into keynote speakers that you’re not interested in. People will tell you that they’ll help you with hosting duties, but you’re going to do most of the work and organizing, so it’s worth your while if you get a chance to meet someone you really want to meet or reconnect with someone you want to see (in the case of both the Neuroanthropology conference and the AAS, I managed to get this right, but not without a few stumbles along the way, so I got to meet Patricia Greenfield, Harvey Whitehouse, Marcia Langton, and Michael Jackson, and to re-connect with Elizabeth Povinelli and George Marcus — a really remarkable set of opportunities). George Marcus wound up coming home with me for a couple of days to the farm, which was great until a friend of ours started showing home movies of horse riding events (and I fell asleep). All I can say is, if you’re lucky, your keynote speaker will be as forgiving as George Marcus!

4. Sweat the details, especially conference programs and handouts.

God, am I glad that I worked my butt off on programs and notebooks for both conferences! I’ll come back to the subject of ‘speed presentations’ in another post, but I think that a bit of planning and polish really made a big difference, and the conference program was a crucial component of the overall presentation of the event. The irony is that the cost of something a bit slicker and more professional-looking, if you do it yourself, is virtually the same as something kind of slipshod and uninteresting. A colour cover on the program, and a few inner colour pages or photos of speakers, for example, add minimally to the overall cost.

In the case of the Neuroanthropology conference, Daniel and the people on-site at Notre Dame came up with some brilliant design work (check out this example, if you like), giving the whole thing a distinctive and instantly memorable look. Especially as we were looking for a kind of visual identity, the work done by the design people was especially valuable. In the AAS conference, we had Chris Barry’s powerful photographs from the art exhibition to work with (see this page, the same photo we used for the program cover).

In the AAS program, we really thought long and hard about how to lay it out to make it easy to access and read (if anyone wants to check out the format, I’d be interested to see what you think; I stole it). Malcolm Haddon, especially, did a lot of work on a quick reference grid, and I came up with a page layout that put key information on the outside page margins and in the lower corners of the pages so that the whole guide was easy to flip through. It may sound trivial, but I always find the AAA program overwhelming and very visually difficult to scan and parse; with 240 papers or so in the AAS conference, we had an easier task laying things out, but we also did have the risk of it being too hard to work through. Design matters.

5. Food, food, food.

Again, in both conferences, we really sweat the details around food, and it paid off big. I’ve been to conferences where eating was an afterthought, a distraction or a logistical challenge that disrupts the whole flow of the conference. At the AAAs, I always wind up in some horrible line trying to get a fix for my Mexican fast food craving (no relief in rural New South Wales). In both the Neuroanthropology conference and the AAS conference (and the Cognitive Science conference, though I take no credit for this), food pulled the conference together, creating opportunities to talk, meet people, lightening the mood, reinvigorating the audience, and generally serving as a social lubricant and psycostimulant. If you have any questions about whether to spend money on food, my advice is DO IT.

In both settings, if conference-goers had to forage for themselves, they would have had to walk far, to make decisions about where to go eat, and the group would have fractured apart. In the Neuroanthropology conference, we adjourned from the main room to the open atrium of the building where the university’s caterers put on a great spread (ice cream bars in the afternoon were a stroke of genius, but I just remember being overwhelmed by these lovely buffet tables). At the AAS, we had great weather and a lovely central courtyard where caterers laid out some great choices (fruit smoothies one afternoon and noodle boxes full of salads on the day of the Lévi-Strauss tribute over lunch were two revelations, especially considering we were on a tight budget).

Ironically, the sit-down conference banquet at the AAS, a traditional part of the meeting, was a bigger let-down in terms of chances to talk and share. In retrospect, I’d cut the price of the banquet to a minimum (more people can attend) and throw a massive outdoor barbecue; or better yet, include the conference barbecue in the basic price to encourage participation.

To make the budgets come together, we had support from our sponsors, but we also went through menus and budgets with a fine-tooth comb, cutting any overcharges, skimping on non-essentials, searching for bargains – Malcolm, for example, scored us excellent wine for our opening reception at the AAS from a wholesaler for less than $4/bottle (and we got compliments on the drop, although our secret’s now out). The per diem food budget for conference packages was about double what we ended up spending on campus; organizing it ourselves rather than handing it over made for big savings. For the Neuroanthropology conference, we didn’t have to be so tight, but it was a much smaller event

6. Get help. Especially the over-committed and over-eager.

This goes with point #2 about delegating. In both conferences, we got great help. I can’t take any credit for this at the University of Notre Dame, as Daniel managed to get all sorts of good logistical support for the conference there, including nifty graphics, travel planning support, and a ton of on-site help from Marina (who was brilliant). UND has this down to an art from what I saw, probably because they do events all the time with alumni and a host of other functions. To be honest, I was blown away by the quality of the work they did.

At Macquarie, we didn’t have this help at all, but I was lucky to find people who could do it (sorry, MU, but your conference support is really weak — especially the utter lack of communication between events and facilities management that led to all the concrete being torn up outside one venue with no warning). My new rule of thumb for conference helpers: get junior colleagues who will over commit and over-identify with the outcome. Senior colleagues are too busy, have too many travel commitments, win grants, have complicated professional lives, and just generally have a well-developed extraneous work-avoidance system. So you have to prey on younger, idealistic colleagues who haven’t yet developed the slippery outer coating that successful academics must eventually grow or become too bogged down with bureaucratic crap.

From the program coordinator (Malcolm), to the exhibition curator (Jennifer), to the registration/IT maestro (Shane), to the film program curator (Lisa), to the ‘head volunteer’ (Sophie), to every single grad student and undergraduate who put on an MU t-shirt, I was blown away with how much they helped and the great impression they made. The volunteers were actually the personal face of the conference, as I was running around backstage most of the time.

In the case of Malcolm, Shane, Lisa, Jennifer, and Sophie, we had waaaaay more volunteered organizational skill than we could have ever bought with professional conference organizers (I’ve been told an estimate for the cost of conference planners, and there’s simply NO way we could have done it). And we could not have hired anyone with their passion. Lisa gave us a full conference-long film program on a shoe-string, and Jennifer surmounted absurd challenges mounting an innovative art exhibition and bringing together scholars from inside and outside of the academy with artists in the opening and a series of conference events (the exhibition was mounted also with Rhonda Davis, Senior Curator at our Art Gallery)

7. Get ready for the squeaky wheels. You will now be a magnet for the irritable.

In every large group, there will be the difficult cases, the terminally stupid, the inconsolably belligerent, the irreconcilable rivalries, the demanding prima donnas… When you put your email address down as being in charge of a conference, you will invariably attract a few bizarre, angry responses: people outraged about a policy decision you made, someone who’s taking issue with the topic, a distant colleague who is incredulous that you would schedule the conference on the same weekend as their anniversary. Remind yourself that 98-99% of the people involved are grateful and enjoying themselves and don’t get too hung up on those who are not. I’ve certainly learned a lot about some of my colleagues, not all of it laudatory, by doing this organizing.

Also realize that academics often hang on in their careers when they might have already been forced to leave other careers due to advancing age. This may sound odd or overly specific, but several of the most belligerent encounters I have had turned out to be with people who might be in the early stages of more serious degenerative conditions, and it was a helpful reminder to be as generous as possible when you get someone belligerent. Sometimes the person on the other end of the angry phone message or email is struggling with demons you don’t know.

8. Shake up the format, even if you fail.

The straight-jacketing format of many conferences has been discussed online at places like Savage Minds (see, for example, Learning from TED, SFAA and BarCamp by Kerim). I think it’s important to share ideas for how to do the format differently, and to talk about the results of our experimentation. (I may even try to put together a post on experimental formats at some point.)

In both conferences I had a hand in this year, we’ve tried to shake up the usual format of a panel of read papers, at least in some sessions. In anthropology (for our non-anthropologist readers), the AAA model is blisteringly-fast verbatim-read 15-minute paper and on to the next, with discussant (sometimes) and 15 minutes of discussion at the end of the session except, oops!, speakers #2 and #3 talked over time so our session is over and the next one is already standing in the doorways looking impatient… The format has been criticized on all sorts of grounds (see, for example, How To Present A Paper – or Can Anthropologists Talk?), and I know it usually leads me to a dull headache and lots of under-breath muttering.

In the Neuroanthropology conference, we attempted ‘speed presentations,’ lightening fast, here’s-my-point-and-contact-details 7-minute talks followed by a few minutes for the whole audience to write comments, suggestions, or just ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ on pre-printed message cards (the notebook discussed in #4 that led to serious sleep deprivation). Then we had extended ‘tea breaks’ for people to catch up and talk, but also so that every speaker got their message slips right away as they were sorted and distributed as we went. In the AAS conference, we tried to set up a ‘conversation’ plenary session where five junior scholars put 5-10 minute questions to a senior colleague whose work we all found intriguing (Michael Jackson, currently at Harvard). At the AAS, Jennifer Deger also tried to create an alternative format by holding sessions in the MU Art Gallery, surrounded by the works people were discussing. (If you’re interested, we’re going to try to get videos and an online catalog up of many of these – see the next point.)

Not every experiment worked, but at least they interrupted the tendency toward somnambulance that can set in when the format is overly formulaic. Many academics must give a paper if they are going to get university support to come to a conference, so organizers needs to be generous with opportunities, and we tried in both conferences to be open and inclusive, but also punctuate the homogeneity with a few interesting twists.

9. Get PR involved; they do this sort of thing for a living.

The public relations and conference support people at Notre Dame were pretty professional, but I’m not sure we got all that we could have out of them. Although they frustrated me at certain points with the AAS, the Macquarie public relations offices (which I guess are now called ‘marketing’) helped with some key issues, but I can also see how they’d be even more useful if I had used them more astutely. They’re great for simple things like getting signs put up to direct people to the registration desk, providing an AV technician for the opening presentation (just in case), coming up with left-over bags to give delegates and t-shirts for the volunteers. After I through a little conniption fit, we even managed to get reject coffee mugs and mouse pads for all our delegates; the initial run had the wrong star in the MU logo, the six-pointed Star of David rather than the seven-pointed Sirius, so they wound up as ‘collectors edition’ swag. Whoever on your campus organizes events for the head honcho is the person (or people) you want. Getting the head of your school or university to agree to show up means that her or his reputation is on the line (at least to some degree) in the event, just as yours is. This really helped when the concrete ripping started, and it was undermining someone’s event who had a lot more authority than me.

The two conferences were great opportunities to do both internal and external PR. In Australia, we used the AAS to promote ourselves as a department, throughout the university but also to other anthropologists in Australia. Promoting the discipline of anthropology seems to me to be especially important in Australia, where it seems to have a lower profile (somehow) than in the United States; don’t ask me how this is even possible, but it does seem to be the case. If I had more time and energy, I would have worked even harder at this, but I did find that the press contacts of the university were interested, as long as I had a story to sell them. It would be worth it to sit down and have a brainstorming session on how you can use a conference to promote your department.

In addition, we worked hard to use the AAS conference to promote our department to our own university’s administration, especially crucial because there’s been a lot of turnover with new administration coming in over the past couple of years. We were able to get the Executive Dean of our Faculty and the Vice-Chancelor of the whole university (kind of like the President in the US system) to come and speak to our delegates, and we have them on video recording saying nice things about our department. It was important to think hard about what these folks, especially the VC, wanted from us to make it work; we provided extensive notes and talking points, ironically tying in nicely to a couple of his own most recent weblog columns and speeches. Although it’s impossible to tell from my perspective, I think that the internal PR gains were likely as important as the external ones, in terms of presenting ourselves as a corporate entity (in the anthropological sense) to the anthropological community in Australia.

10. Try to leave a lasting footprint and reach outside your normal public.

This is something I’m still working on, so I’ll keep you posted, but I often feel like conferences are a bit like a circus (the old-fashioned kind, not the merchanidized and semi-permanent troupes of the Cirque du Soleil). The conference, err… circus, rolls into town, there’s a few days of pandemonium, the acrobats, freaks and animals all come out, performers risk death (or at least career suicide), and then everyone packs up and moves on to leave a ringing silence in their wake. It just seems like so much work not to leave a lasting legacy of some sort, especially when online channels for publication and other presentations are so readily available to leverage the one-time event into something more indelible.

In the Cognitive Science conference, there’s going to be a refereed, online conference proceedings, which is pretty standard for the discipline (albeit a lot of work). With the Neuroanthropology conference, we’re working on a volume based on the more substantial presentations, and we’ve got videotape of the keynotes and opening and closing talks that I need to pull together and post. I’ve also got videotape of the plenary sessions and keynote from the AAS meeting, but, in addition, we used the digital recording capacity of Macquarie University’s lecture halls and classrooms to audio-record every session and will be organizing to make them available as podcasts or ‘audio proceedings’ (the SfAA tried this as well). Keep watching at Culture Matters, where I’ll be posting the audio proceedings as podcasts.

We’ll also put up a lot of photographs with the ‘online AAS proceedings,’ and any other links I can find, just to make the whole thing a longer-term point of reference. Because Malcolm and I worked hard on the program, we’ve got plenty of text that’s all clean and ready to go, so we’re hoping that it becomes a kind of time capsule of Australian anthropology. In addition, our curators, Jennifer and Lisa, have got some rather remarkable resources that we will try to put up. Overall, the conference-related materials should significantly increase our Departmental footprint online, a crucial issue with many of our students (especially doctoral candidates) coming from overseas. Jovan Maud, Australian anthropological online pioneer, tried to talk the AAS as a whole into creating a weblog, but the nay-sayers carried the day, so we’ll just host the whole thing on our own website, and increase traffic to our site (once I can get the memory-heavy video and audio files hosted elsewhere and just link through to them).

11. Remember that, ultimately, organizing is not the focus of the conference.

The more people are happy, the more they will be focused on their papers and discussions, not your planning (well, except for the food): Malcolm pointed this out to me during the AAS conference, and he was spot on. He reminded me that, at the end of the day, conference goers are not there to enjoy the organization of the event, but to listen to and talk with each other.

If you do your job as organizer, about 80% of the conference, even a complex one with lots of extraneous events and planning, is still going to show up with the registrants. That is, the success of the event will be decided by the talks that they carry, by the slides they show, by the comments that they give to each other, and by the conversations they have. Although it’s important to worry about the details, it’s also important to keep the organizing in perspective and reconcile with the fact that most of your work will be largely invisible to the majority of participants. They will have no idea that you’ve been through a kind of super-store death march to get nametags and bottled water (against your better judgment) and last-minute supplies of all sorts; they’ll have no idea that you were swearing over your mobile phone at the guy in charge of ripping up all the concrete outside the lecture hall where the plenaries are to be held; no one else needs to know that you’ve left burnt offerings to the orixás to try to head off a problem with a cranky senior colleague, a run-away photographer, or an over-booked hotel.

In the end, smile, take the compliments, but understand that most folks will have no idea all the work you’ve done. However, the other people who have organized conferences will get it, and they’re very important colleagues to leave with a good impression. The good news is, that’s not hard, as most of them realize what’s gone into the planning, even if it all doesn’t come off quite as you hoped. In other words, some of your most important potential critics will mostly be incredibly generous (as one double AAA conference veteran was to me on the first morning when it really helped).

12. Get your own motivation straight before you start.

This may sound obvious to some, but you’re in for a rough ride, even if you have a lot of help (such as in the case of Notre Dame for me – Thanks Daniel and Marina!). So as a conference organizer, you need to be able to go back to your motivation, to remind yourself why it’s all worthwhile. For Daniel and I, the motivation for holding the Neuroanthropology conference was pretty clear (although Daniel might disagree): we wanted to get together a group of people already working together on a volume, and to see if there were people out there interested in this area of work. It was a chance to take our virtual efforts and see if they transferred over into a real, face-to-face collaboration. And the result was extremely gratifying. I can say that the conference was one of the best I have ever been to, in part because Daniel, Marina and the others at Notre Dame did so much to make it a pleasure. I was exhausted and spent, but buzzing with excitement to keep pushing forward with neuroanthropology.

For the AAS conference, the motivation was a little less obvious, but I had to keep reminding me of them as different problems arose, the stress level increased, and various things started to partially melt down. For me, the health of our professional organization, our profile as a discipline, and our ability to attract new talent is incredibly important — that’s what the conference was about to me. I also have very little professional profile in Australia, so it was like throwing a belated ‘house warming’ party. Both Malcolm and I had a laugh about this, as between us, we’d been to a total of three AAS conferences before the one we organized (it might be four, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating terribly). So this AAS was a bit of a debutante ball for me, and I’m really happy with how it all turned out.

Summary and final thoughts

If you haven’t already decided to get out of the commitment to organize a conference, you might still have a chance if you stop reading. Right. Now.

Still reading? Well, it was actually a great experience this year doing a couple of big events. No, I’m not going to do it again very soon, but I am really happy with how both conferences turned out. If I can in fact turn them both into something lasting (or, be part of the team that turns them into something lasting), I’ll have accomplished what I set out to do. Computers, desktop publishing, digital audio recordings, online proceedings, home video editing… all of these tools have made it possible to ‘punch above our weight’ in organizational terms, to have a kind of electronic reach that was much more expensive before. Keep watching these spaces to see if we’re able to turn our one-time circus events into something more lasting.

Credits:

Cartoon Greg created with SPStudio (generator of South Park-style characters).

The AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) has published its final report on the Human Terrain System (HTS).  Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.

In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of “anthropology” within DoD.

The entire report can be read online at http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/CEAUSSIC_HTS_Final_Report.pdf.

–L.L. Wynn

Recently we were informed that Macquarie was to change its ethics policy to make it so that students could no longer be listed as chief investigators on ethics applications.  This would mean that supervisors would have to be listed as CIs for all student research projects, including those of PhD students.  Should these changes be put in place students will have the choice of being minor researchers or, at best, ‘Co-investigators’. The proposed changes immediately raised concerns in the anthropology department about the implications our students’ research.  I’d like to raise some of these issues here in the hope that it will generate a productive discussion of the subject.  The central question essentially is this: why might a change that is perfectly innocuous for other disciplines be problematic for anthropological research?

First, what are the stated reasons for making these changes?  The primary justification for the new approach is to better recognise the role of students as research trainees rather than researchers in their own right, and to better reflect the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, which states that

“the research supervisor… (must provide) guidance in all matters relating to research conduct and overseeing all stages or the research process, including identifying the research objectives and approach, obtaining ethics and other approvals, obtaining funding, conducting the research, and reporting the research outcomes in appropriate forums and media”

I don’t think anyone would disagree that it is always the supervisor’s role to provide guidance in all the areas stated here.   But making supervisors CIs is something rather different than acknowledging their role as mentors; it implies that this is their own research in some sense, and more importantly it assumes that they can take ethical responsibility not only for the design of the research project but also for its conduct.

It seems to me that these changes are an attempt to apply a laboratory-based model of research across the board in which students either work on a project in collaboration with their supervisor, or work in a controlled environment in which they can, at least in theory, be constantly under the supervision of an academic.  I was reminded of the different disciplinary expectations of lab-based research when I discussed this issue with my wife, a molecular biologist.  She couldn’t initially see why the anthropologists were so concerned about the implications of the changes; for her it was perfectly normal for the lab head or other senior researcher to be the CI for student projects.  This gave me cause to reflect on why the changes seemed so problematic for anthropological research.

So why is anthropology different?  Here are four reasons I can think of why the proposed ethics model is problematic for ethnographic research:

• First, students doing fieldwork in often far flung locations cannot reasonably be expected to be under the direct supervision of an academic.  Guidance may come from afar but in the end the student must be able to take responsibility for their own ethical conduct.  Related to this, the research ’situation’ is never determined once and for all as it is in a laboratory environment; it is an ongoing, evolving process in which the ‘terms’ of the research, and the frame which differentiates the research from not-research, are never fixed.  This therefore requires researchers to make ethical decisions in real time, in novel situations as they arise.  Thus it would not be possible for a supervisor to visit a field site, determine that everything is okay ethically, and then leave again.  For a supervisor reasonably to take responsibility for the ethics of an ethnographic field project s/he would have to be there the whole time.
• Second, the ethical qualities of anthropological research cannot be separated from the relationships of trust established during fieldwork.  As the sole fieldworker the student, and no-one else, enters into relationships (hopefully) of trust and obligation with the people s/he is working with.  This kind of rapport is not something that can simply be transferred to others, people whom the research communities have never met.  How can informants be sure that sensitive, personal or secret information won’t be shared with the other researchers on the project?  How could the student researcher guarantee the confidentiality of information s/he acquires?  And would, indeed, supervisors have the right to demand to see their students’ fieldnotes on the grounds that they are CIs in the research project?
• Third, in interactions with bureaucracies and others in gate-keeper roles, it is the student who must act on his/her own behalf.  The perception that the student was merely an assistant (because even as ‘co-investigators’ they would clearly appear to be the junior party) would certain diminish his/her ability to negotiate terms of the research.
• Fourth, unlike fields such as biology in which the lab head always appears as last author on papers regardless of whether s/he contributed to the research in any practical sense, in anthropology the student is usually the sole author of work based on her/his research.  There are some exceptions of course, but in the case of co-authored work there would be expectation that the supervisor has also did a substantial amount of the research or writing.  If supervisors were required to be CIs with regard to ethics, would they also appear as authors of the research outputs?  Shouldn’t there be a logical consistency between ethical requirements and authorship, both of which are expressions of the subject-position of the researcher?

So those are four reasons, although I am sure there are more.  The broader consequence of my argument is that there can’t be an a priori universal ethical researcher-subject, independent of discipline or research situation.  In order to work with this recognition ethics committees need to be able to indulge in a sort of ethical relativism, which is to say that they see ethics as contextualised by discipline and research situation rather than being based on universal models that can be applied uniformly in every situation.  This is of course a very ‘anthropological’ way of viewing things.  But I think anthropology and its methods demand the ongoing contextualisation of ethical engagement, which is to say that it demands to practise what it preaches.

I’m interested to hear what others think on this matter though.  Are there other universities adopting a similar approach to student researcher ethics?  Are there any precedents for this sort of change?  Are there good arguments for making supervisors CIs for all their students’ research?  Or does this put supervisors themselves in an unethical position, i.e. being asked to take responsibility for things that are largely out of their control?  And if supervisors feel that they are morally and even legally accountable for their students’ ethical conduct during research, what effects would this have on the sorts of projects they would be willing to take on?

While we’re talking about national parks and other common spaces in relationship to migration, I’d like to draw attention to this nice short film on the concept of “The Commons”.  Using some groovy retro animation and sporting a catchy soundtrack, the film makes an argument for recognising those things that we (should) share as members of societies, including water and government.  The film encourages us to see the value of these shared things and to see the injustice of their exploitation by the few.

As a concise way of making a bringing a simple idea to life, I think the film is very effective.  It is also inspiring, which is not all that common in environmentalist discourse.  As was noted in a recent NYT article, environmentalism is generally failing to inspire large numbers of people to change their ways.  Witness the ever greater numbers of people who, despite the hardening of scientific evidence, do not believe climate change has anthropogenic causes.  Thankfully, there seems to be an increasing recognition that bringing about social change around climate change is not just a technical issue but one that involves understanding human psychology and “culture”.  One important factor is that of motivation, of inspiration.  Consider these statement from the NYT article:

“I think we have become very, very good at describing that we’re against. … We’re terrible at describing what we’re for. We’re against climate change, we’re against biodiversity extinction, we’re against land-use change, etc., we’re against pesticides … but what are we for?” [Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change] said.

Martin Bunzl, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, compared the climate change movement to the civil rights movement. Climate change is often described as a “technical” problem with technical solutions, he said, a portrayal that research has shown is ineffective.

Instead, he said, the key is culture change — it’s about changing what’s in people’s heads.

I agree that people are going to have an easier time coming on board some social project which inspires them, which feels like moving in the right direction.  The problem with a lot of environmental discourse is that it plays upon feelings of guilt and pushes in the direction of greater asceticism.  No wonder so many people have difficulty signing up to that.  So perhaps we need to reframe the debate and ask ourselves not what we should abstain from but we are for.   And one possible answer to this question could be, “We are for the commons!”

Okay, enough of a rave.  Here’s the film:

Portrait of Chandra Jayawardena, founding professor of anthropology at Macquarie. Van Sommers 1979. Photographed by Sumant Badami.

We were very excited when the library here at Macquarie agreed to hand over a portrait of our department’s founding professor, Chandra Jayawardena.  Up until recently it had been gracing a wall near the library’s anthropology collection.  It is now hanging just outside our meeting room (and directly outside my office) and adds a welcome touch of seriousness and history to the otherwise featureless walls here.  This portrait by van Sommers was one of several made of academic staff in the department back in the 1970s. This particularly striking image of Chandra references his work in the Carribean, or perhaps Mauritius.

Although Chandra died long before I came to Macquarie I have over the years developed a keen sense of his legacy.  In conversations with staff members who knew him, all of whom have retired over the last few years, I have noticed a level of esteem for Chandra bordering on reverence.  The values with which he founded the department — social engagement, a concern with power and inequality, and a willingness to innovate — are, I think, still alive and well.  Personally, seeing this portrait as I leave to go to class, and looking into Chandra’s eyes, reminds me that anthropology is a serious and important business with a lot to offer the world.

I’ve copied below text from our department website which gives some more details about Chandra, his life, and his influence in anthropology.

Chandra Jayawardena was the Foundation Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie. He was appointed in 1968, and sadly died as a result of an operation in 1981 at the age of only 52. He had previously taught at Sydney University, where he was an intellectual catalyst of extraordinary impact. He taught many of the current staff at Macquarie’s department. Professor Hamilton particularly remembers him for his dynamic and exciting lectures on the topic of the bureaucracy in Zazzau, a kingdom in northern Nigeria, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – something which only the most talented of lecturers could make into a gripping topic.

A scholar of international repute, Chandra exerted a great influence on the development of anthropology in Australia. Born in Sri Lanka, he graduated from Colombo he enrolled at the London School of Economics and studied across a number of fields: cinema, law, social theory, anthropology, literature and politics. We can see in this framing of his intellectual life many of the important strands which still inform teaching and research in the anthropology department at Macquarie. His research interests included, in the 1950’s, work in the Caribbean, especially on work, solidarity, conflict and egalitarianism among Guyanese plantation workers; in the 1960’s, studies of Indian society in Fiji, especially with regard to religion and social change; and from the mid 1960’s, an investigation of politics, religion and law in Aceh, North Sumatra.

After his appointment to the Macquarie Anthropology department he gathered together a number of scholars with interests similar to his own, with a commitment to an international and cosmopolitan type of anthropology, and a deep interest in social theory. All were Australians, which was most unusual since the majority of appointments in Australian universities up to the 1970’s were from England or the United States. Chandra himself taught tirelessly and published as frequently as he could. He had just received his first ever Australian Research Grants Committee grant when he passed on. He was planning an ambitious study of the Indian diaspora, looking at plantation communities in Fiji, Natal, Mauritius, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. His failing health in later years made work and travel more difficult, and there are many papers and drafts for publications which were never completed. His unpublished notes and papers are archived at Macquarie University library.

It’s been a bit of a quiet time on CM and I thought the perfect way to get things going again would be another makeover.  To tell the truth I didn’t like the last look at all and ended up agreeing with one commentator who thought it was too cluttered.   This time I though we should move to a less cluttered look and also to update the header image.  I have once again employed my very modest Gimp skills to produce a new banner which I quite like.   Doing the header I took inspiration from Anthropology Works, by using a Creative Commons licensed photo from Flickr as the basis for the design.

Feedback is always welcome.  If you like it or hate it, please let me know!

I woke up this morning to read that Claude Levi-Strauss has passed away, aged 100.  As a testament to his stature as a world-shaping thinker, he has received prominent obituaries in newspapers around the world.  This New York Times piece by Edward Rothstein is especially worth a read.

As one wit wrote in the comments to that article, “He will be mythed!”

My little brother just started medical school (golly!  I still remember changing his diaper!) and he has been telling me about some of his most exciting lectures.  I asked him to tell me more about what he thought made for a great lecture, because I’m always trying to figure out how to improve my own lecturing skills, and here’s a little anecdote he told me:

[One teacher] gave us a great series of lectures on the pelvis.  He got a round of applause for his demonstration of the female perineum.  He had one student squat down on the ground, representing the bladder.  Another student stood just behind him in a ski-jumper position, representing the uterus with his bent over body body and the ovaries with his backwards-protruding and slightly drooping hands.  The teacher then stood behind both of them and thrust his hands up into the air exclaiming: “I am the rectum!”  I will never forget the relative position of the female pelvic organs.

A couple of things strike me about this.  First of all, it demonstrates the wisdom of some advice I once got from a great teaching mentor, Larry Rosen, which is that you direct your humor against yourself, not students.  This teacher didn’t make a student be the rectum; he took that role on himself.

Second, it’s amazing how memorable you can make something by teaching through embodied experiences.  I try to do this in my own classes by getting the students physically involved in lecture concepts — for a lecture on the placebo effect, for example, I do a blind wine tasting of red and white wines at room temperature to make the point that our sensory experiences are heavily influenced by our expectations.

However, I’m not sure whether the reason this bodily demonstration of the female pelvic organs was so memorable just because it entailed bodily movement or if it’s because it was so unexpected, unusual, and humorous.  I mean, if medical lecturers regularly demonstrated the positions of organs in the body by having students contort themselves, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so memorable.  Maybe it’s the novelty and the humorous unexpectedness of your lecturer shouting “I am the rectum!” that is the real trick to this effective demonstration.

It never occurred to me to use physical demonstrations like this to illustrate physiological processes, but I’m going to have to try this next year in Drugs Across Cultures after the lecture on brain neurology and addiction.  So many students get confused about how neurotransmitters work, and I don’t think it helps much that I find it confusing, too, despite the heroic efforts of our psychologist guest lecturer to explain this with pretty colored diagrams.  Next year I think I’ll get her to direct a bunch of students to play the roles of drug molecules and neurons and neurotransmitters and act it out.  “I am cocaine!”

–L.L. Wynn

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just announced the winners of the first round of research funded under the Minerva Initiative.  This was a joint process whereby the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DoD determined funding for research on “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” — i.e. social science research deemed of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.  You can go to the DoD media release for more details, but in case you’re wondering if David Vine’s proposed Minerva research got funded, the answer is no.

There were four topic areas  for the NSF solicitation: authoritarian regimes, the strategic impact of religious and cultural change, terrorist organizations and ideologies, and new dimensions in national security.  17 men were funded, compared to 6 women (1 man and 1 woman were both funded for more than one project).  I did a quick search on the departmental affiliations of each grantee to try to determine disciplinary background, and as far as I can tell, no anthropologists were funded.  The disciplinary breakdown is: 14 political scientists, 6 economists, 3 sociologists, 2 psychologists, 1 linguist, 1 communications studies researcher, and 1 computer scientist were funded.

Of course, what we don’t know is what proposed research projects and disciplines were not funded.

Since I started  betterplace.org, I have been looking for inspiring ideas in the field of social innovation. Naturally my thinking has been very much shaped by anthropology and thus I have followed with interest anything at the intersection between development and ethnography. Recently one of the useful (and fashionable) concepts has been design thinking.

Design thinking has many overlaps with the anthropological approach, such as starting out with as little preconceived ideas about the research topic  as possible and gaining an empathetic understanding through immersion during fieldwork. It has been pionieered by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and institutionalised at the Hasso Plattner d.school in Stanford (which has a sister institue at the University of Potsdam in Germany, around the corner from where I live in Berlin)

A few months ago IDEO published The Human Centered Design Handbook for NGOs, which

will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

It is now available in a new, second edition and I highly recommend it to anybody interested in applied social innovation.

Among the many useful tools they advocate in detail is context immersion:

Meeting people where they live, work, and socialize and immersing yourself in their context reveals new insights and unexpected opportunities. Human-Centered Design works best when the designers understand the people they are designing for not just on an intellectual level, but also on an experiential level. Try to do what your constituents do and talk to them about their experience of life in the moment.

On a project in rural India, people said that cultural tradition prevented women from touching men who are not immediate family members. However, by spending several days in a village, the team observed that there were many instances in which trained or uniformed women doing specifi c jobs were able to touch men without any serious problems. These gaps between what people say and what they do are not bad. In fact, seeing these differences may highlight new opportunities; for example, designing a new medical service that could be provided by uniformed women customs.