A recent thread on Facebook seemed to touch a nerve in the small community concerned. The issue raised is whether senior members of the community are too harsh on the more junior or less experienced members, particularly in the context of an annual conference. This led me to think about what a scholarly conference is. After all this is an invention, but like other apparatus it then takes on a life of its own. There are at least three templates that could be organizing participants’ experience of, and behaviour at this academic conference. Following Wilk, Stoeltje and colleagues, one model is the beauty pageant, a tournament of value in which exotic local beauty ideals mix with globalized standards. This model is one that some colleagues may have learned at the big academic conferences they attend, especially those at which employee recruitment plays a role. But it is also one where if one thinks the applicable beauty standards are those applying to Ms. Garifuna, when in fact, they are those applying to Ms. Universe, the opportunities for misunderstanding and disappointment, not to mention comic relief is apparent.  Reference the film, Little Miss Sunshine.

A second model that may be organizing behaviour and expectations is that of consciousness raising.  But this consciousness raising model is one that we can trace to the scholarly circles of critical theory and their incarnation in marketing as critical marketing and critical consumption studies. As Jeff Murray and Julie Ozanne, and Michael Saren and James Fitchett and others would e quick to note, the critical project contains a negative moment and a positive critical moment, but the aims of these moments is ultimately liberatory, to transcend a partial, oppressed or repressed state of knowledge or awareness. These two moments are not necessarily easy to distinguish or disentangle particularly for the more junior participants in the critical hermeneutic process.  Indeed, it is not so easy for senior colleagues either. In these circles textual products are objects for collective critical reflection. Confusions between the negative and positive critical moments leading to personal unhappiness may emerge if the hermeneutic critical model gets muddled with a third possible template.

The third template for action and interpretation that intervenes and interpellates participants in a scholarly conference is a powerful one. And this is the therapeutic model of group intervention that has become a generalized mode of action under late capitalism, under the Romantic Ethic that Colin Campbell discussed. This therapeutic model intervenes in activities as diverse as second wave feminist consciousness raising, alternative medical support groups described by Craig Thompson and colleagues, and obviously in groups like Weight Watchers so ably described by Maia Beruchashvili and Risto Moisio. The organization of such groups emphasizes individual testimonies coupled with relatively uncritical collective voicings of solidarity and support with soul soothing a key aim.  In this system, it seems like a text might be treated more like a health or weight loss target achieved rather than an object for criticial investigation. It seems patently obvious that when these latter two models collide the potential for misunderstanding is vast, and in particular, where the concern that the old may be “eating the young” might emerge.