Monday 5 October 2015

Reflections on EISA 2015—Collated and concluded

I don't intend to do this for every conference I go to but writing up these summative posts has been very useful for the mental processing of my conference experience:

Day 1 (part 1)
Day 1 (part 2)
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

It should be added that reconstructing these snippets of very complex talks days after the event from my very sparse notes and even sparser memory may have resulted in mistakes and misrepresentations, although I hope not. Undoubtedly I missed whole chunks of what was said at the time and even more from the later stages of translation. Nevertheless, hopefully this has given whatever brave (or perhaps foolhardy!) readers have managed to trawl through my scribblings some idea of my week—and the inchoate thoughts that are scrambling to get out of my head as a result.

I don't think that I have much else to say about the event as a whole. As I wrote in my day 2 post:
[Before the conference, I had wondered] how well my own interests, which have meandered rather a long way from traditional IR in the past few years, would fit into the state of this discipline today. I needn’t have worried. By the end of day 2, I had realised that my epistemic idiosyncrasies were amply accommodated within what this discipline has become, at least in some quarters: an open-minded forum for ambitious intellectual work that is connected more by shared passions and concerns than by the strictures of method or domain.
That pretty much sums it up. Bravo, IR! Roll on Sussex in December.

I can only echo the widespread praise for the organisers (one of whom is, in the interests of full disclosure, my supervisor but from whom I swear I have complete editorial independence!) and look forward to Izmir in 2016.