BU Research Blog

The conference season has arrived. The summer vacation has always been the most popular time to attend international conferences and academics get the opportunity to travel either in Britain or often beyond to read papers at conferences, answer questions from expert audiences and enjoy the experience of being surrounded by subject specialists. But conference attendance, especially in far-flung corners of the world may be viewed sceptically by those looking to tighten institutional belts. In this article I want to argue that attendance at international conferences is a vital part of the development of an academic.

My recent attendance at a conference in Italy reinforced my view that, especially for postgraduate researchers and early career researchers, conferences are essential to their development. I think there are different aspects of this. Firstly, presenting a paper to an audience which will include subject experts not readily available in our own institution is critically important. We may have colleagues who share our research interests in our own departments but at an international conference there are likely to be scholars from different countries who are or have been studying our specific subject.   The insights that these experts can provide raises the quality of our research. Often I have found that the question and answer exchange following the presentation is then followed by more intensive one-to-one discussion and these can be extremely important and might include ideas for further research and reading. Conferences are also an extremely important opportunity to network and especially to become part of a research network bidding for a research grant. They are also important recruiting grounds for anthologies or edited collections of book chapters. The conference is the most important place where a researcher advertises themselves for hire either for research grant applications or in further publications or to join a journal editorial board.

There is I think another important aspect of the value of the conferences. Increasingly today, university lecturers are obliged to focus relentlessly on the delivery of programmes to students. The Teaching Excellence Framework has added to the pressure that lecturers feel to improve the satisfaction of their students. This is of course a noble cause but sometimes research loses priority. What conferences and conference attendance can achieve is to motivate lecturers to pay attention to their research.

I express these views at a time when universities, not just BU, appear to be less generous in the funding of conference attendance. As they come under pressure to improve student satisfaction, money for conference attendance may be seen as a frivolous extra. Thinking of my own experience 20 years ago when I read my first conference paper as a PhD student I was delighted to find that in the small audience for my talk was a former BBC member of staff who had produced the programme I was discussing as well as one of Britain’s most celebrated radio historians. Those two supportive and eminent scholars have remained critical friends over the years and I believe that if I had not met them at that conference my whole academic career would have been different and far less successful. I have recently returned from four productive days at a conference in Italy; now that I am a senior academic I probably need less input from international colleagues but the reality is that in the handful of people who listened to my presentation was one of the leading international experts in my field and reading a paper alongside me was one of my PhD students, I learned a lot from both of them.

International conference attendance is a vital part of academic life and I sincerely hope that my colleagues will continue to be able to attend conferences both in the UK and abroad funded by the university.