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Sustainable Consumption and Society An International Working Conference for Social Scientists
Held June 2nd to 3rd, 2006
Sponsored by Research Committee 24 (RC24) on Environment and Society of the International Sociological Association
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Rural Sociology and the Agroecology Program |
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A "Slow Talk" Conference
The conference was organized using principles of scholarly exchange that the organizing committee came to call "slow talk," in rough parallel with the notion of "slow food." These principles worked out very well, with universal appreciation by the conference participants, several of whom called this the best conference they had ever attended. The basic principles of a slow talk conference, as we conceived it, are:
small size (about 25 participants), allowing an intimate atmosphere;
lots of time for informal interactions among the participants, plus group activities such as the bike tour we held the day before the conference;
45 minutes of group attention given to each paper;
no Power Point, or any other form of paper presentation, reserving all the time for discussion instead;
all papers available in written form a week before the conference, with the expectation that participants will have read before the conference begins all the papers whose discussions they plan to attend;
every paper receives a written review by two conference participants, to ensure detailed and committed feedback and to set the stage for the discussion;
each 45 minutes discussion follows a 5-5-5-30 model, in which 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 30 minutes, with an eye to enhancing and developing the author’s argument;
the reviewers distribute written copies of their reviews to the attendees at the paper session, and ideally ahead of time to the author, so as to keep their oral presentation of their review shorter, to provide some formal pressure to ensure that the reviewers do a careful job, and to give the author some more time to think over the comments;
strictly limit attendance at the paper sessions by walk-in attendees so as to keep 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;
two streams of papers, which 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 they can only attend that many paper sessions;
having a presider of each paper session (we had the same one for each stream over the two days) to keep some balance of voices in the discussion and to keep everyone on time;
having 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.
In short, if you travel a long distance to a conference you want more than the usual 5 minutes of feedback you get from people who may not have understood the crammed 15 minute presentation you just gave. With the slow talk approach, you get 45 minutes of feedback by people who have actually read your 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, and we would have had to extend the conference for two more days, 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. Although we limited participation to 25 or so, we can imagine roughly doubly the conference size and somewhat expanding the number of streams and days. 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. That might take away some from the easy-going environment of the paper sessions in which there was plenty of critical exchange but not one moment of anger or hostility in the entire two days, as near as the organizers could detect. But much of the delight of slow talk would still be retained in such a slower talk conference.
Conference organizing committee
Michael Bell, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Maurie Cohen, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Eva Heiskanen, National Consumer Research Center, Finland
Michele Micheletti, Karlstads Universitet, Sweden
Gert Spaargaren, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
For further information: michaelbell@wisc.edu
For a print-out of the conference Call for Abstracts: click HERE (pdf) or HERE (Word doc).
The conference program is available HERE.
A campus map showing the location of the conference activities is available HERE.
Page last modified June
6, 2006