a good conference?

Yes it was a good conference, an eventful conference especially the finally plenary where I saw a rather renowned academic act like a stupid, spoilt, paternalistic child. What bothered me most is that all of us in the audience put up with his egotistically-inspired tirade - a reflection of the hierarchical nature of academia?; the ideological power of compliance that made us all responsible for ensuring the careful maintenance of 'appropriate' literacy practice?; being polite or simply realising that there was no point in trying to fight fire with fire

Other than the last 30 minutes, the conference was a resounding success for me. I enjoyed Carey Jewitt's keynote although I was hoping she would say more about multimodality theory. I felt she had tempered her arguments to accommodate the linguistic focus of the conference. In many respect her presentation left me wanting more - more of the theoretical insights I found in her papers and especially her recent book. I guess this is always the case - we have such high expectations of the experts or gurus in the field and then feel really disappointed when they seemingly don't deliver against these (maybe unrealistic?) expectations. But I was glad I got to hear her and of course I will be able to recognise her when  she comes to the LiDU seminar series where my colleague and I will be presentation a paper in October.

The conference theme on ways of looking at data meant that I was challenged to think about my own approaches to the data for my research. I found the attention to detail or how Angela Creese puts it, the need to be 'systematic and rigorous' how we go about collecting and analysing data - almost a revelation. Sure I've heard it said before, but if I took anything away from this conference it was the value of being clear about how I want to deal with data.

I'm not a linguistic and I don't intend to do linguistically framed research but I can now appreciate the value of how their approaches simply because I have a better understanding of what they do. I always had this very one-sided view of linguistic-type research (applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography) and this conference has helped to shift some of my misunderstandings. I was preoccupied with staking out my claim to 'my own field' and distinguishing it from everyone else that I wasn't aware that this practice was also closing down any opportunities to see the possibilities for connections and synergies. Adrian Blackledge's short input on Bourdieu's notion of distinction and its relation to language provided a serious 'Ah ha!' moment, making it clear how language is a major way in which inequalities are constituted and reinforced.
So my conference experience could certainly be characterized giving me much needed positive exposure to the 'other'. A healthy requirement for any researcher, for anyone, really. Anyone wanting to understand the full complexities of life.

But it wasn't just about the experts - I went to a presentation on the implications of using photography as data by someone who had recently completed her PhD (Olga Solovona). I asked a question about her analysis process, wondering if she had considered multimodality as a way of unpacking the images, rather than foregrounding the interpretations of the image makers as her main analysis strategy. I was really just trying to see if she could offer me some advice about dealing with non-written text and documents - and secondly Carey Jewitt was sitting behind me and I wanted to impress her with my use of the term multimodality...ha ha ha (yeah right!). The presenter found me during the tea break and wanted to know from me if I could offer her any advice as I had sounded so knowledgeable about the possibly analysis processes. How do you like that...the blind being asked to lead the sighted.