Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Today I’m really excited because it’s the first day of the BASR Conference and this year it’s gonna be at my university, Leeds Trinity University. So the BSAR conference is the conference held by the British Association for the Study of Religions. So very excited about it. So hopefully, I hope I will be able to film bits of it so that you can have an understanding of, sort of, a day in the life of an academic, Conference Edition, I would say because of course the life of an academic is very different day-to-day and it can involve research or teaching or going to conferences. So in this case it’s gonna be a conference so stay tuned for this, a day in the life of an academic ‘conference edition.’

his is my office which is now full of my things, of my equipment. We’re filming this conference, so yeah, welcome to my space.

So this is the registration area, it is the first place to go to collect your badge and all the information regarding the conference and I’m supposed to be behind it, so I’m gonna get back to work.

[Video clip of opening address]

Usually, there are academic publishers at conferences and they display the latest research outputs and also, in some cases, give you the opportunity to talk to them and perhaps get a publishing contract with them for monographs or an edited book perhaps.

Hello, it’s me again. So it’s the second day of conference and I feel a bit more nervous today because I’m actually presenting a paper. So yeah, I’m a bit nervous and I’m also trying to film my paper so if unless it’s complete rubbish I’m going to upload my paper as well on this YouTube channel.

Oh, I am extremely tired it’s still the second day of the conference and now its the Assembly of the British Association for the Study of Religions and yeah, there have been quite a few panels since this morning but unfortunately I was not able to attend any, except the one I was presenting in because I recorded a few interviews that are going to be up on this channel in the next weeks.

So let’s now take a moment to address how academic conferences work. There’s basically alternations of social moments, where you can talk to people to researchers, do networking, as they say, and panels and also there are special events like, for example, the keynote. The keynote is usually a very esteemed researcher in a specific field who gives a longer talk. So it’s not the same as a paper. The keynote tends to be around an hour and it is in a big auditorium because everyone is attending the keynote. Whereas when you have the panels, usually there are multiple panels happening at the same time. So you may have two or three panels happening at the same time and normally what you do is to look for the one you are most interested in and you go to that one and you leave the other two out. Unfortunately, what often happens is that there are certain time slots where there are no panels that really interest you or are relevant to your research and other time slots where you have like two or three panels that are all extremely interesting and you’d like to just be in multiple places at the same time, so that happens.

So yeah, you do have this alternation of social moments and you are attending panels which are comprised of three papers, usually. Every panel, at least in my field, I won’t know in other fields, but I imagine that the structure of an academic conference would be quite similar. Every panel tends to last about an hour and a half. You have, as an average three speakers. So every speaker has 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. Because, if the paper was a good one, as they say, you will get questions afterwards and so it is good to leave a bit of time for discussing with researchers and other colleagues that want to ask you questions or sometimes just point out something, make a comment or suggest you a reading to move forward in your research. So the kind of comments you may get can be really helpful. There are some cases where you can get criticized or challenged after you have delivered the paper, that can happen too. Luckily the BSAR is quite a friendly conference, so that is unlikely to happen. But there are cases where a conference is… a paper can be heavily challenged by other scholars in the field who believe research has not been done properly or they have conflicting data and so they want to point that out.

Another important thing to explain is what are the panels, which are basically the core of an academic conference.

So normally a panel is a set of papers organized together by theme. So when there are three or four papers that have a similar theme they get organized together in a panel. Sometimes scholars can propose a panel, so they can decide themselves to be in a specific panel, with a specific theme and propose to the conference organizsation that specific panel with those people and with those topics. Otherwise, if you submit a paper, singular, an individual paper for a conference you will be added to a specific panel depending on the themes that emerge from the other papers.

And what is a paper then? A paper is a small study, we may say. Sometimes it can be a case study or yeah, basically it is a study that sometimes, quite often, gets turned into a journal article for an academic journal and it is a study based on data that may vary depending on your field. A paper is a study that you have conducted and that you are presenting to an audience. There is a good chance, when you present the paper at the conference, that those who organized the conference or other people may ask you to submit a paper proposal so that your paper will be turned into a journal article which is, normally, what we want as academics. Because, you know, publications are kind of vital for us, they even say, “publish or perish,” which is very dramatic and very true, unfortunately. But yeah so that is what a paper is and a panel is.

So you have many opportunities to network and meet scholars in your field. This is very important for two reasons if you want to be an academic. One, because, of course, by networking, you can create job opportunities both in terms of publications and of course, if there’s a job opportunity that opens up and somebody in your field knows that you are an expert in that area, they may, of course, ask you to send an application in, even opportunities for publications which are essential for academics. Also, another important reason for networking and knowing other scholars in your field or in similar fields to yours is that you will learn more about what you’re studying because everybody, of course, comes from a different, even slightly different, approach they may have read different publications, different books so they may have suggestions for you of things to read or things to do or other scholars you may want to speak to. And in my case, of course, most scholars are much more experienced than I am, so they may have advice and suggestions regarding how to advance in my career or how to do fieldwork or even like practical advice. So I personally strongly, strongly believe in human resources and in the value and help that we can give to each other. So yeah, I do feel that networking is paramount, not only as an academic but in general, I believe, I strongly believe that.

And the third reason is that you may get new friends. It has happened to me, sometimes scholars in your field colleagues can become your friends and yeah, it doesn’t always happen it is a fortunate occurrence if that happens but yeah, it has happened to me quite a few times. And yeah, I do like it when it happens because I mean we spend so much time doing our jobs that if our colleagues are also friends we really hit the jackpot. So yeah.

Once again, this is the third day and final day of conference and yeah, the conference has just finished and yeah, it was a special one for me because it was my University and so it was very nice to have all the scholar friends come here. Today it was shorter than the other days. So in the morning, there was a panel which, unfortunately, I had to miss then there was the coffee break and the plenary session with a roundtable where basically all people attending were discussing all the themes that emerged from different panels, which were the patterns emerging and main theme. And it was really interesting that what was noticed since this conference theme is about media and religion and the relation between the two. One, a common word that emerged from most papers and most panels was ‘reality’ and that was pointed out by a colleague here from Leeds Trinity University and I thought it was really interesting and I agree because I’ve heard the term being repeated quite a lot these days and I think that the online presence is quite challenging. What is reality and what is not, because even though we tend to perceive the online as something abstract or not real, it is becoming very real for most people? So yeah I guess perhaps, the use of social media, the use of the internet is not just challenging our concept of reality but reshaping it, perhaps. So yeah, I found it very interesting.

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Bye for now.

First uploaded 28 Sep 2019