Conference dispatches

Photo by brianwallace

L.A. has a reputation for being a cultural and intellectual wasteland, but at the 8^th Annual West Coast Law and Literature Conference, held January 13 by USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and Department of Comparative Literature, I found a welcome oasis. I came across it by accident; I happened to be in town, I knew one of the professors participating, and parking was provided (probably the deciding factor). Since the papers were accessible online, I already knew that the panelists – Bernadette Meyler of Cornell Law School, Julia Lupton of UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn – would be presenting work on topics ranging from England’s 1660 Act of Oblivion to joint-stools, Hannah Arendt, and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. I was anxious to find out just how all this (most pressingly, the joint-stools) could be connected under the proclaimed theme of “Early Modern/Post-Modern: Inventing the Political Subject.”

For some, the field of Law and Literature is symptomatic of the American university’s fetishization of interdisciplinarity, geared more towards marketing appeal than genuine intellectual inquiry. Depending on your perspective, it’s a way to make literature more relevant by relating it to the outside world, or a way to pretend to be engaging with the outside world while still remaining comfortably ensconced in academia. Debates over intellectual jurisdiction often ensue.

To my relief, the presenters at the one-day, single-panel conference didn’t waste time making the case for Law & Lit, opting instead to close-read and cross-examine each other’s arguments. All three panelists questioned the emphasis placed on “historicism” – briefly, the idea that texts should be understood in their historical contexts – and what the over-determined and often undermined term even meant. At one point, Kahn wondered whether “thinking with Shakespeare,” the project proposed in Lupton’s book of the same name, could really be called “historicist,” or if it could better be called simply “thinking.”

The relevance of this particular disciplinary intersection – between early modern law and literature and post-modern law and literature – was perhaps most aptly articulated by Kahn, who, in discussing her paper on “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza and Arendt,” posited that because early modern texts created the conditions for modernity, looking back on these texts can help us diagnose contemporary problems and give rise to alternative modes of thinking about the present. We might not be so flummoxed by current crises of political theology, from Islamic jihadism to Christian fundamentalism, if we paid better attention to how influential writings on the topic have been read and misread in the past.

The event’s format deviated from the norm of scholars reading their papers and fielding audience questions. Each of the three papers, copies of which were available at the conference, was introduced by another panelist’s commentary, to which the author could then respond; additional comments from other legal and literary scholars followed before the forum was opened up for questions. While feedback was delivered mostly as prepared remarks, the proceedings were enlivened by a spirit of collaborative openness. Kahn’s discussion of Lupton’s paper noted the early modern simultaneity of common law – in which the wife was considered her husband’s property – and canon law, under which a suitor must earn a woman’s consent through courtship. Using this legal lens, Kahn proposed, could lead to an alternative conception of Kate’s personhood in The Taming of the Shrew. Lupton said she found this idea useful, but pointed out that canon law didn’t necessarily endow women with any real agency: a “woman’s consent” to marriage often had little to do with the woman herself, but was instead used as a rhetorical strategy by men (like when Capulet waxed moralistic about his daughter’s consent in Romeo and Juliet).

I didn’t quite follow all this, and I’ve probably grossly misrendered whatever problematic was being (re-)problematized. But I did get the impression that the attendees were really, for the most part, engaging with each other. As someone new to the conference circuit and still at sea in my own field, I found the conversational, mutual-presentation format extremely conducive to, well, not zoning out during talks. No matter how eminently readable, the most riveting arguments can be difficult to follow when recited in monotone; by the time a paper is deemed worthy of sharing, I’ve sensed, the author is already weary of it. Having someone else explain, or question, what the papers were about kept things fresh for both the authors and the audience. For those who hadn’t read the material beforehand, the co-panelists’ commentary – which included both summary and critique – helped both focus the articles’ salient aspects and make them accessible to a diverse audience. I study French and English literature, and I attended the conference with my mother, a recent American History PhD and recovering lawyer, and we both came away invigorated by fresh ideas – this despite her wariness of Comp Lit jargon and my usual response of catatonia when confronted with legalese.

I hope to attend more conferences that work like this: interactive and well-organized, interdisciplinary but intellectually focused on the timely and the timeless, putting literature in conversation with politics without putting it on trial. Though I admit, I never quite figured out how the joint-stools fit in.

Photo by robbyb on Flickr

Most academic conferences we attend are actually the annual meetings of particular academic associations – the American Political Science Association, American Chemical Society (ACS), etc.—and most of these have been meeting for decades (the ACS was founded in 1876).  So it is a rare opportunity to be able to attend the founding meeting of an academic association, which I was able to do back in October.  The University of Wisconsin, Madison hosted the first annual conference of the Association of Environmental Studies and Science (AESS), which was started in 2008 to “serve the faculty, students and staff of the 1000+ interdisciplinary ‘environmental’ programs in North America and around the world.”  One of the goals of the new association is to build bridges between the different social science, natural science, and humanities disciplines that study the environment, and the conference was their first major attempt to do so.

As I learned during the main conference dinner, Wisconsin has a fascinating environmental history and rich legacy in environmental research (Aldo Leopold’s shack, for example, is near Madison), and so it was a fitting place for the first AESS meeting.  But the campus is not the easiest to get to – I ended up flying through Milwaukee and taking a two hour bus ride because there was no reasonably priced direct flight available.  But once I arrived, I found the town of Madison to be very nice – quiet and quaint, although also quite cold.  On the third day of the conference, we woke up to find it snowing, and this was the beginning of October!  It will be hard indeed to take a job back East…

The conference’s morning keynote speaker was none other than Jane Goodall, the legendary chimpanzee researcher, speaking to the group via a web-based videophone from a research camp in Costa Rica.  After a few technical glitches, she spoke eloquently about environmental issues and the need for continued strong environmental research.   It was a nice beginning of the conference, and reminded us of the urgency of ecological conservation.

The conference itself was organized into 9-10 concurrent panel sessions, which included topics such as environmental education, measuring environmental quality, religion and the environment, marketing and the environment, and environmental risk (click here to see the full schedule).  A good percentage of the panels dealt with the nature and development of interdisciplinary environmental studies and science programs, and the best ways to prepare students for a “green economy.”  But others were more focused on specific environmental topics, and there was a good mix of disciplines represented, from ecologists to economists to sociologists to business scholars to critical theorists.   This range demonstrated the diversity of ways of studying environmental issues, and the challenge of effectively bringing them together.

I presented a paper as part of a panel on “environmental law and policy,” which was a sort of microcosm of this dual challenge and opportunity.  The other panelists included a professor of law who spoke on the history of environmental law, a professor of international relations who talked about the intercontinental transport of air pollutants, and a graduate student in public policy who presented on the diffusion of automobile emissions standards internationally.  My own presentations was on eco-labels and environmental ratings of products and companies.  On the surface, it is difficult to see a common theme in these talks, but as the panel progressed, we identified several interesting connections that provided valuable perspectives on each of our areas of interest.  I had long and helpful conversations with two of the other panelists afterwards, and I look forward to staying in touch with them in the future.

In terms of my own presentation, the biggest challenge was cutting it down to a reasonable length for 15 minutes.  I had a lot of preliminary data and ideas I wanted to discuss, and it was like pulling teeth to take things out.  But ultimately I was able to find a couple key points to focus on, and I think that very much helped the presentation.  My advice to anyone having similar difficulty – try to identify the most interesting complexity to present, but don’t present all of the complexity.  And getting feedback from colleagues on campus before you go can also be a huge help.

In addition to meeting my fellow panelists, I also connected with several other interesting people at the conference.  They included professors from other UC schools and from around the country, including both large universities and small colleges that I had never heard of, but that have some very innovative environmental programs.  They also included other graduate students, including four from the University of Wisconsin, UC Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton who were working on topics closely related to my own interests.

All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet people in this diverse field, and hopefully make connections that will last far into the future.  I certainly felt like the conference was a success, and hope that the Association is able to build on the momentum.  The next meeting is in Portland; for anyone who is interested, you can check out the association’s website at http://aess.info.

Washington, D.C. autumn by ehpien

Last month I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, or “4S” for short.  This was the 34th annual meeting of the Society, and was held right outside Washington, DC, at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City.  There was no overarching theme of the meeting, and so it had a wide range of panel topics.  It lasted for three days, had almost 1000 participants, and included nearly 200 panels.

But, what you may be asking, were all these panels about?  What are “social studies of science” anyway?  Also known as “science and technology studies” (or STS), this field probably has as many definitions as scholars, but in essence, it is focused on critically investigating the ways in which politics, culture, and the institutions we call “science” intersect and influence each other.  Rather than assuming that scientists and the technologies they create are politically neutral, STS scholars study the ways in which ideologies and values motivate scientists and become embedded in the things they create.

I was first exposed to STS in a seminar I took in my master’s program that was led by one of the field’s leading scholars, Sheila Jasanoff, and it has had a big effect on my own thinking.  My undergraduate degree was in ecology and evolutionary biology, and I have always had a strong faith that science and reason can help us rise above our partisan politics and collectively solve society’s problems. But the STS literature, from Bruno Latour’s work on laboratories to Donna Haraway’s writing on museum exhibits, showed me how science and politics actively “co-produce” each other, to borrow a term from Professor Jasanoff.  While I still believe that science is a unique human institution that can and has greatly benefited humanity, I have come to appreciate its limitations and the need to look critically at its claims.

So panels at the conference discussed the politics of water knowledge and expertise, sustainability and climate science, medical information and ethics, internet cultures, computer code, food technology, chemical regulation, nano-technology, Asian bio-politics, genomics, and more.  More theoretical topics included the philosophy of science and technology studies, subjectivities, actor network theory, citizen participation, peer review and expertise, and the privatization of science.

My own panel was entitled “Agents of Sustainable Innovation and Design,” and included talks on actor networks behind geothermal heating and cooling, bioplastics, engineering consulting firms, and the electric car.  My own talk discussed actors driving the growth in environmental certifications and ratings of products and companies – the subject of my dissertation.  My goal for attending the conference was to articulate and get feedback on ways to apply to STS theories to my dissertation topic, and so it was nice that several people had some positive and insightful comments afterwards.

One of the truths about conferences is that it is the informal times between events that are the most rewarding, and this was no less true for me at this meeting. It is in these interstitial periods that you can make connections that can help you with your research or your career path, or just make new friends.  They can also help you deepen existing relationships as well.  For example, on the last night of the conference, I went out to dinner with a group of grad students from the Bay Area  — 1 UCSF student, and several Berkeley students from my department, sociology, and history (some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t) — and we had a great time sharing our research interests and swapping stories from the conference.

I also connected with some interesting people from other places that were doing research relevant to my own (on environmental standards, regulations, etc.), and I hope to stay in touch with them as well.  One of the great things about 4S is that it is very international – one of these people was from the Netherlands, and another was from Japan.

This experience underscores the underlying value of these types of conferences – of course they are great opportunities to present your work, get feedback, provide deadlines to push your research forward, etc., but I think they are primarily about building and maintaining a lifetime of relationships.  Whether or not you go into academia or not, you can be a member of these communities and share in their growth and development.

The value and dynamism of the 4S community of scholars was particularly apparent in the plenary session, where both young and old researchers discussed their hopes for the future of science and technology studies – how to become more institutionalized on college campuses, how to more effectively reach policymakers, etc.  I realized that you don’t feel this energy from just reading journal articles – you really do have to attend these gatherings to understand the intellectual life of these communities.  And so I am grateful for having the opportunity to experience the vibrancy of the STS community, and hope to stay connected to it in the future.

This past August I traveled to my first major week-long conference, the 94^th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Over 3000 ecologists brought the otherwise deserted downtown Albuquerque to life, overwhelming the understaffed restaurants and filling the streets with an unusually high number of Hawaiian shirt-clad and beard-sporting men. Ecologists study nature from the organism level up to the ecosystem level and work on land, in freshwater, and in the oceans. I hadn’t realized before attending this meeting that, for some traditional reason, marine ecologists (those who work in the oceans) are not members of ESA but are included in geoscience professional societies. The theme of this year’s meeting was “Ecological Knowledge and a Global Sustainable Society,” reflecting the concern among ecologists about the impact of human activity on organisms and the environment.

While the overall theme guided organized sessions, many sessions were filled with contributed talks and posters, meaning unsolicited presentations on any topic. The University of California, Berkeley participants gave over 100 presentations at the meeting. These included graduate student presentations on the biophysical constraints on the size of leaves, the need to take into account habitat complexity on different spatial scales when doing pest control, changes in the species composition of fungi due to increased nitrogen fertilizer inputs, and a new method for measuring nitrogen gas emissions from soil (my talk). Clearly ecology is a very broad scientific field!

This year ESA organizers made a greater effort to group talks and posters into sessions with cohesive mini-themes. However, it was unavoidable that there were still multiple rooms featuring simultaneous talks on the same areas of interest. This sometimes meant choosing between attending one talk to support a friend or another talk to learn about a new study. I tended to choose the latter, hoping that my friends would understand that I was supporting them in spirit. The overlapping sessions also meant getting quite a workout dashing up and down escalators and hallways to make it from one session to another during the short question and answer period between talks.

This was a great year to attend the ESA annual meeting for my field of biogeochemistry, the study of how biological, geological, chemical, and physical processes affect the environment. A special symposium sponsored by the National Science Foundation brought in high profile scientists to emphasize the importance of considering interactions in the cycling of elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and iron. There were also an unusually high number of contributed biogeochemistry presentations. This not only gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about topics related to my research, but it also allowed me to start networking.

I had looked forward to coffee and meal breaks as times to refuel and refresh, but it soon became apparent that those were prime times for introducing myself to new people and meeting up with old acquaintances to build collaborative relationships and sell myself for potential future jobs. As a graduate student, I was familiar with the work but not the faces of my colleagues. This proved to be an asset in calming my nerves before giving my talk—for all I knew my audience was filled with people who had wandered in from the street. However, this made networking much more difficult. Rather than using the awkward strategy of glancing not-so-slyly at the nametags of people passing by, I shadowed the well-connected members of my lab to angle for introductions.

I didn’t anticipate how tiring it would be to participate in a conference. Official meeting activities ran from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, including talks, posters, and mixers. By only the second day, I felt like a week had passed, and I wasn’t sure if my brain could absorb any new information. Though I didn’t plan to skip any of the sessions, I had to forgo one afternoon session filled with interesting talks to take a much-needed nap. I finally understood why conference attendees often ditch for a day to become tourists. The conference organizers also recognized the need for down time. My advisor dragged herself out of bed at five o’clock one morning to participate in an organized 5K run. Every evening one of my labmates joined an informal group of musicians and onlookers who gathered to unwind and release their creative energy.

One of my lasting impressions from attending the ESA annual meeting for the first time is the passion that ecologists have for science and for protecting nature for the sake of future generations. My flight to and from Albuquerque was filled with ecologists and the buzz of conversations rarely strayed from ecology. Even on the AirBART ride out of the Oakland airport, I eavesdropped on a USGS scientist introducing himself to two Berkeley faculty members who were discussing their research. Despite our overloaded minds, we couldn’t stop thinking about science. I feel lucky to be embarking on a career path in a field where my colleagues are so passionate about their work. I look forward to seeing them all again next August for the 95^th ESA annual meeting in Pittsburg!