Building Blocks: Conference Papers

Since I have been yammering on about writing as a process, I want to pull on that thread for the next few newsletters/blog posts. What are the building blocks of my process? How do each of them work? Are they Fordist in orientation? Or, do they magically arrange themselves like Blue’s Clues (or Ghostwriter)? I came to, at least, this conclusion: I have several steps I tend to go through. While each of them are helpful, I also find that not all of them are necessary for each project. For the next four weeks, I’d like to talk about each building block.

Finally: conference papers.

When putting together my documents for promotion to full professor, I noticed that my number of presentations had decreased by about half. I was not concerned the lower number would create a poor result for me. Rather I got curious about how the lower number came to be given the way I tend to use conference papers and presentations. I scanned the presentations – both conferences and invited talks – and I found a fascinating pattern.

Prior to tenure, I used conference papers as ways to test out my ideas. I approached the conference paper as a way to provide the overarching idea of a chapter and one analysis. I did that for several chapters and one article. For invited talks, I focused on the overarching idea of the first book and one example from a chapter. I needed a lot more intellectual community of this sort for the first book. The second did not benefit from intellectual community in the same way. Instead, I relied on conversations – both the conversations I had with writers in the edited volumes and conversations that were specifically about my own work.

This leads me to the how the building block of conference papers and keynotes works. They can be a way to test drive your ideas in front of a specialized audience. When this occurs, I find it useful to provide people with a question I need answered beforehand. That way, they can be enlisted to assist. I also am sure to pepper the paper itself with questions so that people can provide their own ideas.

Even when the comments and questions aren’t useful (or in some cases rude), they offer me information about how an idea is received. Everyone has their own peculiarities with regard to what they find fascinating in our shared fields/disciplines. Those idiosyncrasies help me understand how my audience approaches the work. Or, what I might be able to take for granted vs. what belongs in a footnote. I know that some folks would be concerned that the questions could imply you don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t put much stock in that because the questions indicate you are actively engaged in the doing of the project.

As is the case with my conferences after tenure, I switched into presenting work I felt was done. Some presentations were upcycled from completed work. Some presentations and keynotes were a way to present my methodology (of reading Black madness and mad Blackness) so that people had some buy-in before they read the book.

These kinds of presentations also benefit from questions, but they tend to be less in-process than the other kind. As a result, the data they offer about ideas or audience tend to be expected or de riguer. I still find that the questions people have tend to help me understand how or whether my work has landed and, what, if any, questions do people have about how to apply my work to what they’re doing.

I hope this series on building blocks helped!