Conference Review
9th Inter-University Graduate Conference: Constructions, Discourse and Representations
17 May 2008
May 17th 2008 marked the 9th year of the conference and in many ways a very memorable one. We had over 70 attendees travelling from 8 different countries, 43 of whom presented papers. Paper topics were diverse but tended to be from psychological and sociological perspectives. There were a number of sessions focused around issues of culture, Self/Identity, society and social representations, as well as sessions on narrative, cognition, health and methodology.
This year’s keynote Wolfgang Wagner, from Johannes Kepler Universität in Austria, turned out to be an excellent choice. The title of his lecture was “The Social Side of Essentialism: Identity, Racism and Monstrosity”. It was broad enough in subject matter to appeal to the diverse group of attendees and concrete enough for them all to follow his argument.
The quality of presentations was such that we have decided to dedicate the first issue of the new online Journal, Psychology and Society edited by Julian Oldmeadow and Brady Wagoner, to papers presented at the conference. The Journal’s aims are similar to that of the conference, i.e. to provide a forum for post-graduate to communicate their work and start a constructive dialogue with students at other Universities. It utilizes the online medium to enable readers to comment and rate published papers (like on amazon.co.uk). Thus, the first issue can be seen as a direct continuation of the work presented and discussed at the conference.
Lastly, I should mention that the week following the conference I have had numerous e-mails from participants thanking me, and all those involved, for their truly positive experiences at the conference. Here’s just a sampling of comments:
‘It was a very productive and friendly meeting.’ Kirill
‘Thanks so much for helping to make this a really enjoyable and worthwhile experience.’ Sheilagh
‘Just a quick note to thank you for the conference on Saturday, everything was so well organised and there were some really interesting papers presented.’ Fiona
‘Big thanks to everyone involved in the conference, I had a really good day, there was lots of really high quality interesting stuff and it was great to meet people’ Victoria
These spontaneous comments suggest to me that we not only fulfilled our aims (outlined above) but excelled at them!
Brady Wagoner
(University of Cambridge)
