I’m currently sitting at Manchester airport waiting for a flight to Dublin. I have about an hour of spare time whilst I wait for the plane to board (although there is already a short delay noted) and I thought I’ll right a few reflections about research conferences. In particular I thought it might be useful to reflect upon what they are, why people go to them and consider whether they are actually worth it. As my area of research is counselling and psychotherapy, I’ll most likely present examples from this area, but I imagine much of what I write will be transferable to other disciplines.
What are they?
My first contact with a conference of any sort was probably Roald Dahl’s Witches. If you’re not familiar with this, it was an opportunity for that particular group of people to get together and reflect upon a year gone by. Questions such as these might have been asked:
What had gone well?
What hadn’t gone well?
What new developments are there in the witching arena that we need to know about?
And… well… that’s sort of the ethos of the research conference too. In my arena people get together to talk about the most recent research in the counselling and psychotherapy world. In my case, I have been asked to provide a few keynotes this year to the Association for Counselling and Therapy Online (ACTO) and The International Conference on Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy, and applied to present at the annual research conferences of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and the Society for Psychotherapy Research. This year has been a bumper one, and a bit of a backlash on a hiatus around the covid period.
To present at most conferences you need to apply to talk at them. Often calls go out about six months before the actual conference (so be prepared if you are interested). A consequence of this is that you may need to project forward a bit when considering what you might present. Once you are accepted, you then have to pay. As with much of the academic world, individuals need to fork out quite a lot of money to engage with things (conference fees, travel, hotels, food, drink etc etc). Whilst I will contradict this a little below, the increase of online only conferences is brilliant for making conferences more accessible - both the keynotes I did were at online only conferences, with at least one having a pay what you can policy for attendees.
Types of presentation
When you get to a conference they vary greatly in size. Some have one strand that all attendees will head to, whilst others might involve quite a lot of choice. The conference that I am about to attend will have multiple strands running at the same time, which means I will have to make a choice and miss some things that I think will be interesting.
The keynotes - These are selected presentations that the conference organisers select as they have a particularly interesting story for attendees to hear. It is usually that these do not run whilst other presentations are ongoing.
Oral presentations - This is the main type of presentation in my field. Individuals are invited to offer summaries of their work. These are usually about 15-20 minutes in length with a space at the end for some questions.
Symposia - If people get organised beforehand people might submit a symposium of related papers (e.g. there are a number of symposia focusing upon therapeutic work with children and young people at the conference I’m going to).
A poster presentation - This can be a weird one, but is great for individuals who a newer to research conferences. Individuals create a large poster of their research findings and hang around in a coffee break - examples from the BACP research conference can be found here. People can then talk to the authors in a more informal environment.
A discussion - Some conferences encourage presentations that might have a discursive element. I quite like these and been involved in two this year. The first at the BACP conference was around the research agenda for web-based therapies (which I’ll create a summary of here at some point in time) and I’m about to do one about the role of AI in therapy.
A workshop - Some attendees want to share their ideas in a workshop format. For instance, people might demonstrate a new method or technique that they are interested in getting feedback on.
I am sure there are lots of others types of presentation - particularly in other areas - but these were the main ones I could think of whilst frantically typing at the airport.
Why go to them?
Ok, it’s now about an hour until I take off. The people next to me have accidentally spilt their drink all over the couple next to them and I’m being shuffled around whilst the staff mop up. The flurry of memories of travelling with my kids (and the need to dry them under the hand driers at times) floods back.
I am now resigned to fact that I’m not going to finish all of what I thought I’d get through in this sitting. So…. if you are interested in this and want to get some insights in why people might go to research conferences, tune in for another exciting episode of this counselling and psychotherapy stuff blog (I’ll try and finish it whilst I’m away).