Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Växjö along with some 400 other academics to participate in a national conference for Swedish historians. This national conference is organized every three years and serves as an important venue for various kinds of historians. If you’ve been in the field for a while, as I have by now, it serves as an opportunity to socialize with friends from all over the place and see what’s going on in the field. This has not always been the case.
My first conference was in Lund in 2008. I had just been admitted as a PhD student, but had not yet started working. The only person I knew was Isak Hammar, who was in the same position. We mostly kept to ourselves, exchanged a few words with people we knew as teachers and supervisors and attended a few sessions to watch and learn. I didn’t take the initiative to talk to anyone by myself.
Yet I felt special and chosen. I had become a PhD student! During my undergraduate years, I had been told that this was virtually impossible. A dream had come true. I would get paid for four years to work with history. I would have the opportunity to write a thesis. A book! For me, all of this was incredible. Socially, I had also received a new identity. When someone asked me what I was doing, I could now answer “PhD student in history.” The reactions I got from the people around me were quite different from “I study history.”
My second conference was in Gothenburg in 2011. At this time, I was more at ease in my role as a PhD student. I was comfortable in my home department. It was large and there were many PhD students. Once at the conference, I spent time with the people I knew. Isak and I had scheduled a session in which we would present our thesis projects. It was slotted for 8 a.m. the day after the large conference dinner. The audience consisted of four PhD student friends from Lund, a retired journalist and someone who had entered the wrong room (who left as soon as we started talking). I really didn’t feel like one of the gang.
The next conference was held in Stockholm in 2014. At this time, I had received my PhD, I had temporarily been assigned lecturer, received some attention and – as faithful blog readers may remember – become more humble. That spring, I was also on parental leave and socially cut off from the academy. Intellectually speaking, I felt like a vegetable. I was scheduled to participate in three sessions and was quite nervous about this. The result, however, was pretty good and I felt – perhaps for the first time in a conference setting– that I fit in. During my stroller walks, I had thought a lot about my career options. Perhaps I should become a teacher? But in Stockholm, it became clear that what I truly wanted to do was to try to become a historian. In any case, I had to give it a chance.
A few months after the conference, Johan Östling called me. He told me that he was going to try to start up something called “history of knowledge” and asked if I wanted to be involved in preparing a major application. I had never encountered the term history of knowledge and found it a little vague. But I said yes without hesitation. This is something I have not regretted.
My fourth conference was in Sundsvall in 2017. It was a busy conference. I organized two sessions, spoke at a third and was also involved in an infamous roundtable conversation. At this time, I had also started to look at conferences in a new way. In the past, I had mainly participated to gain intellectual impressions and learn new things. Now, I saw it more as an opportunity to get to know people. I had a list of people with whom I hoped I would have the opportunity to talk. Academics whose texts I had read and wanted to get to know better. I succeeded in doing this and I am glad that I had worked up the courage.
The other thing I wanted to try in Sundsvall was to bring people together who I knew but who didn’t know each other. The two sessions I organized – one on the history of the perception of the future during the post-war period and one on the ecological turn around 1970 – were thus already successful by bringing the panel together. The audience that attended and the interaction that took place were nothing but a bonus feature. This is an area I truly don’t yet master, but I have at least gotten better at introducing people to each other.
Perhaps one may sum up my experiences from Sundsvall as being the first time I “used” the conference media. I have greatly benefitted from what I learned from this conference in recent years and in a number of other contexts, not least international ones. Conferences are what you as a participant make of them. The ten to fifteen minutes when you present something represent a minor element. Their purpose is to facilitate interactions and conversations. It took me a long time to finally come to realize this. Almost a decade.
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