An Invitation to Slow Talk

 

Ah, academic conferences.  They are supposed to be occasions where we exchange our work with others, getting and giving feedback to mutually propel the scholarly project forward.  But at the typical conference, you come halfway across the country, or even the world, to deliver a 15-minute (or less) Power Point presentation to 15 people (or less) who get 15 percent (or less) of what you were trying to say.  As for feedback, well, you might get a few questions in the 5 minutes (or less) of discussion time allocated to your paper.  But these questions will often be of little constructive help, as they are based on reactions to the small amount of your work that you were able to convey in the standard conference format.  And the questions you offer to others about their own work will typically, if truth be faced, be of the same small constructive value.

OK, maybe not always.  But if you’ve ever been to a typical academic conference, you will likely recognize this sorry situation, and will have experienced the post-conference let-down that greets your return home: the why-did-I-bother-to-go effect.

Surely there must be a better way.

At several conferences in the past few years, a new format (that is really an old format) has met with great enthusiasm: what is coming to be called slow talk, in rough parallel with the notion of “slow food.”  We first tried it out at a small conference on sustainable consumption (25 people) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in June of 2006.  In August, 2007 tried it as the format for a separate stream of papers (a “working group”) at a mid-sized rural sociology conference (400 people) at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.  And in June of 2008, it was the format for another small conference on sustainable consumption, this time at the Arlons campus of Liège University in Belgium. All three conferences met with great success, with many people commenting along the lines of “this is the best conference I have ever attended.”

So, what is slow talk?  The gist of it is to replace presentations with written papers that participants read ahead of time, and to devote all the time allocated for each paper to discussion.  The motto is no Power Point.  Slow talk stresses an informal, intimate environment with much opportunity for casual and non-academic interactions outside of the paper sessions, so as to defuse the ego-charged and oppositional character all-too-typical of formal academic situations.  The aim is for author-centered sessions that focus on enhancing and developing the author’s argument, rather than occasions for posturing and staking academic turf.  We also extended the time allocated to each paper from the usual 20 minutes to 30 minutes at Wageningen and 45 minutes at Madison and Arlons.  Although this limited the number of participants at Madison and Arlons, and extended the length of the program at Wageningen, this allowed the intimate, detailed, and constructive environment of slow talk to flourish.

As a result, a slow talk session feels more like a feast than the typical academic fact fight.  People mix seriousness with laughter.  They savor each other’s presence and conviviality.  They create the conditions of unexpected discovery as they delight in the creativity of dialogue, positive critique, and mutual learning.  And they leave the occasion with a feeling of enrichment and fulfillment.

Slow talk is also very helpful at conferences with international participants.  Typically, non-native speakers of the conference’s language can read better than they can follow a presentation outside of their native tongue.  Having the papers available ahead of time gives them time to work through the needed vocabulary.  And the conversational quality of the discussion also is typically easier for non-native speakers to follow than the jargon-heavy mannerisms of formal oral presentations.

It is also very helpful to have discussants for each paper, to set the table for the discussion.  But the discussants have to be strictly limited in time.

Of course, if people don’t do their reading ahead of time, and if authors don’t get their papers in, the format would fall apart.  We worried greatly about this at each conference.  Yet people actually came through, with few exceptions.  There was a lot of last minute reading, to be sure, much of it on the plane and in the hotel room the night before.  But even these hurried readings seemed to give people a lot better sense of the content and purpose of an author’s work than the typical Power Point presentation, as the quality of the discussions showed. 

The basic principles of a slow talk format are:

• no Power Point, or any other form of formal presentation by the author: all the time is devoted to discussion instead.  At least 30 minutes seems right, and 45 minutes is better.

• small size, allowing an intimate atmosphere: 25 to 30 seems to be about the right number, although it could probably go as high as 50 or so.

• lots of informal interactions among the participants: At Madison and Arlons, we held bike tours the day before the conference, which allowed people to get to know each other one-on-one.  It is crucial to hold these events before the sessions, to help create the positive and collaborative energy of slow talk.

• all papers available in written form at least a week before the conference: The expectation is that participants will have read before the conference begins all the papers whose discussions they plan to attend.

• every paper receives a 5-minute review by a conference participant: This ensures detailed and committed feedback and sets the stage for the discussion.  With the 45 minute format, there is time for two reviews, which seems to be better.

• the reviewers distribute written copies of their reviews to the attendees at the paper session: This provides some formal pressure to ensure that the reviewers do a careful job, and also makes it easier for the reviewer to stick to 5 minutes. 

• the reviewers distribute a copy of their review ahead of time to the author: This gives the author some more time to think over the comments, and is especially helpful to an international author.

• the author gets 5 minutes to respond to the review: This also helps the author frame where he or she is most looking for feedback and advice.

• each 45 minute discussion follows a 5-5-5-30 model, or a 5-5-20 model for a 30 minute discussion: The reviewers each orally present their comments for 5 minutes, the author responds for 5 minutes, and the whole group discusses the paper and the reviews for remaining time. 

• discourage attendance at the paper sessions by walk-in attendees: This keeps the atmosphere personal and informal, promoting social conditions in which critical commentary is delivered in a non-hostile way and is received without loss of public face.

• parallel streams of papers: This keeps the numbers of attendees at each session to a friendly 10 to 15, and also means that any one participant only has to read roughly a dozen papers ahead of time, given that he or she can only attend that many paper sessions.

• have a presider of each paper session: Although the atmosphere is informal in slow talk, there is still “air traffic control” that needs to be done to ensure a balance of voices in the discussion and to keep everyone on time.

• use the “threads” model of discussion: Have the presider organize the discussion not merely by the order in which hands went up but in conversational “threads” in which comments are taken on a particular theme until it is exhausted, lending coherence and group creativity to the discussion.

Consequently, with the slow talk approach, an author gets 30 to 45 minutes of feedback by people who have actually read his or her paper, plus loads of other feedback during the informal activities of the conference.  Plus it must be frankly admitted that most academics—indeed most people—are not gifted stage performers.  Academics are, however, very good at talking and very good at writing papers.  Slow talk procedures focus on these skills that attendees are most likely to be good at, bringing a high level of delight to the social interactions of the conference.

The only significant complaint that attendees had about the slow talk approach was that one could only attend one stream of papers, leading one to miss some papers of interest. But with only one stream of papers, each attendee would have had to read that many more papers, or else compromise the time devoted for each paper and the time set aside for informal interactions. This seems an inevitable conflict of the slow talk approach: that opening up detailed dialogue means some closing down of other potential engagements.

If one accepts this inevitable conflict, it may be possible to scale the slow talk approach up a bit.  Some of the intimacy of the conference, in which everyone really did get to know each other at least a little bit, would be lost.  But much of the delight of slow talk would still be retained in such a slower talk conference.

 

Page last updated August 20, 2008.