The #Undisciplining Meta-Conference

Now that I’ve recovered from last week, it seemed the right moment to do a round up of the live blogging project Pat Thomson and myself initiated at The Sociological Review’s Undisciplining conference. There were 43 posts from 13 live bloggers over four days. This is a pretty substantial outpouring of thought and reflection over a relatively short period of time:

1. #Undisciplining Day Zero: Preparing From The Cat Cafe – Mark Carrigan
2. Live From Breakfast – Pat Thomson
3. The Hive Begins To Form at #Undisciplining – Mark Carrigan
4. Landing – Kate Carruthers Thomas
5. What does it mean to reflect in real time? – Mark Carrigan
6. Trying to Say Something Clever – Michael Toze
7. the person/al and the structural? – Pat Thomson
8. un-mining, (under-mining?) disciplinarity – Anna Davidson
9. I am NOT a sociologist, get me out of here! – Julia Molinari
10. sociology of art as a powerful way to reveal the social – Janna Klostermann
11. making a sociological board game – Pat Thomson
12. Being alone at conferences – Mark Carrigan
13. Structure and Undisciplining – Catherine Price
14. Questions from the geographical edges – Rosemary Hancock
15. The Missing Links – interdisciplinary in sociological inquiry – Donna Carmichael
16. A sociological walk of contrasts – Julia Molinari
17. The Future versus Bureaucracy – Michael Toze
18. Live blogging and the cinema experience – Catherine Price
19. Time to Write – Kate Carruthers Thomas
20. The dreaded conference dinner – Julia Molinari
21. When a conference has a meta-conference – Mark Carrigan
22. Care and the conference – Michaela Benson
23. Echoes from Beyond the Edges of #Undisciplining – Jill Jameson
24. Conference as home – Pat Thomson
25. Beyoncé Vs Bev Skeggs – Donna Carmichael
26. Knowledge production outside the university at #undisciplining – Mark Carrigan
27. Why should anyone get paid to do sociology? – Mark Carrigan
28. The feminist walk of the city – Catherine Price
29. Making friends and changing the world – Rosemary Hancock
30. The Rising Emotions of Asking the Panel A Question – Julia Molinari
31. Too Too – Pat Thomson
32. Not Knowing Why We Do What We Do – Michael Toze
33. Time Out – Pat Thomson
34. Outside/In Place – Kate Carruthers Thomas
35. Undisciplining like a moth to a flame – Janna Klostermann
36. Re-Sounding Edges: #Undisciplining – Jill Jameson
37. A Fireside Chat: Defending the Social – Julia Molinari
38. How does the sociological speak to/with/from the earth? – Anna Davidson
39. Going Live? – Katy Vigurs
40. Art! – Janna Klostermann
41. Beyond the conference – Michael Toze
42. Reflections on Live Blogging – Catherine Price
43. Ending Where I Began #Undisciplining – Mark Carrigan

To what extent does this constitute a meta-conference? It was an organised process of asynchronous dialogue with a remit as wide as the conference itself, with the choice of topics being left to live bloggers as they made their way through the conference. To the extent live bloggers were reading each other and in some cases responding to each other, either directly in a substantive way or indirectly through riffing off themes such as awkwardness or isolation, it is clear the above is more than the sum of its parts.

It wasn’t simply individuals responding individually, with the live blog being an aggregate of these individual responses. It wasn’t a collective either but rather something in between the two. What is this in between and what can it tell us about conference sociality and how it can be extended and deepened using social media?