Back at my desk!
I’ll throw something simple into the muck here.
A regular sentiment within academic social media targets the audience member at an academic conference or talk who raises their hand during the discussion part of the event and says by way of preface, “This is more of a comment than a question…”
I’m one of the people who’ve done that. In fact, as I think on the academics I know and have gone to conferences with, I think many of us have done it. Sometimes we don’t say exactly that, but we make a comment rather than ask a question nevertheless.
I understand why it’s anybody who has been on a panel or has given a talk has their heart sink when an audience member starts off that way. If there’s a belligerent asshole in the audience, that’s how they’re going to start off. If there’s someone who is so self-centered that all they can do is promote their own work, that’s how they begin. If there’s someone who is a crank or has a weird obsessive take, then they’ll be commenting rather than questioning--I keep thinking about a story I heard from a colleague who was presenting about U.S. labor history and had to deal with a Famous Bigshot Historian in the audience who wanted her for some reason to talk about iron-smelting in Cuba instead. If there’s a person who just tuned out and wants to get up and restate something that one of the panelists said already, that’s how it gets announced.
That much I know we’ve all seen, and likely had it done to us. It gets done to women and to scholars of color more, and the person in the audience doing it is far more likely to be a white man, at least in my experience. So I completely get why that phrase is a trigger.
But at the same time, some of the best panels, roundtables and talks I’ve been at have been great precisely because an actual discussion happened after the main presentation, because people in the audience helped to create an active dialogue or convened something like a real, meaningful and completely respectful scholarly debate in a spontaneous and lively way. Some of the worst panels, on the other hand, were ones where the panelists ate the entire time and the audience just sat there passively--and thus the panelists had no idea what people made of their work, and the audience had no idea what anybody else thought of what they’d heard. Or they were ones where there were only questions, and the questions were performatively respectful but didn’t engage anything meaningful in the talks or presentations.
A lot of the problem is with format to begin with. The conventional “three papers read aloud with discussant” stuck in a teeny conference room with six people in the audience is a terrible way to take advantage of having other scholars present live and in-person (or on Zoom, these days). It’s passive and boring for the audience and relatively meaningless for the presenters. If there are papers, then they should be pre-circulated and read in advance. If it’s a small audience, then there should be both comments and questions, with a moderator keeping it moving and lively. Everything else should be in a roundtable format, as a conversation that focuses on the invited participants but includes the audience.
I’d be happy if the conventional talk or lecture by a famous or prestigious figure died out forever. I’ve heard at most five such talks in my life that were compelling performances that couldn’t have been experienced in any other way, and I’ve attended maybe three hundred such talks or more since I was an undergraduate. The problem with those isn’t the audience member who makes a comment or asks a question, it’s that most of them are just a speaker repeating something they’ve said in writing (or will say soon in writing) or that they’ve said to ten other audiences in exactly the same way but with no craft that suggests a live or spontaneous performance.
Whatever the event, if it involves an audience and if it is meant to be scholarly in any sense, I very much want to hear comments and questions. There’s a lot wrong with the way that scholarly intertextuality and conversation work--needless aggression, passive-aggressive insecurity, territoriality, etc.--but even if we were temperamentally and substantively closer to our ideals, we’d still want to be in dialogue and even debate rather than just constricted to unconditionally endorsing what was said through the asking of affirmational questions.
Image credit: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash