When a conference has a meta-conference: reflections on the first day of live blogging at #undisciplining

Though Pat, Kate Thomas and I made initial contributions to the live blogging project yesterday, it really kicked off today when the main Undisciplining conference began. The day started with a short meeting for our co-researchers, before we all set off on our way through the conference. These are the results of day one:

1. Trying to Say Something Clever – Michael Toze
2. the person/al and the structural? – Pat Thomson
3. un-mining, (under-mining?) disciplinarity – Anna Davidson
4. I am NOT a sociologist, get me out of here! – Julia Molinari
5. sociology of art as a powerful way to reveal the social – Janna Klostermann
6. making a sociological board game – Pat Thomson
7. Being alone at conferences – Mark Carrigan
8. Structure and Undisciplining – Catherine Price
9. Questions from the geographical edges – Rosemary Hancock
10. The Missing Links – interdisciplinary in sociological inquiry – Donna Carmichael
11. A sociological walk of contrasts – Julia Molinari
12. The Future versus Bureaucracy – Michael Toze
13. Live blogging and the cinema experience – Catherine Price
14. Time to Write – Kate Carruthers Thomas
15. The dreaded conference dinner – Julia Molinari
16. When a conference has a meta-conference: reflections on the first day of live blogging at #undisciplining – Mark Carrigan (you didn’t think I was going to miss this off the list did you?)

What an incredible outpouring of creative energy. I hadn’t realised quite how much was written today because I retreated a bit, having my will to engage sapped by being tied up with a seemingly never ending series of tedious technical tasks. It goes without saying that I incorporated this into a blog, itself in part a response to someone who perfectly articulated what I was feeling (and a practical proposal relating to) on Twitter. Plus I found myself interpreting my later mood in relation to later responses. The whole thing is becoming chronically and almost overwhelmingly meta, compounding my own exhaustion but helping me interpret that and relate it to the conference as a whole.

There is a thread of reflectivity winding its way through the conference, increasingly showing signs of spiralling in upon itself as themes percolate outwards and onwards, across platforms and through the face-to-face. It has seemed increasingly obvious to me over the course of the day that the project needs more curation to feed back in on itself. It needs care and effort to frame the blogs and (re)present them undisciplining in a way that invites further responses. This might be through Twitter but it could also be face-to-face. I’ve struggled to do that during the day, with this project slipping to the back of my mind for long periods, though it should be a bit easier to focus tomorrow. But in a way that makes it more interesting because my fluctuating attention highlights the objectivity of what we’re doing, as something uncertainly begins to emerge from the aggregated iteration of the research team.

(I’m cross-posting this on my own blog first because I compulsively record everything that matters to me intellectually there and it’s dawning on me that I’m going to be thinking about this project a lot in the coming months, as much as my current focus is on the day-to-day of the conference. Plus I’m tired in a way that makes the familiarity of my own blog oddly comforting)