Reflections on Chairing: Post Conference Rambling Part One

From my brief period of conference excess (two in one week), I'm hoping to post reflections on different aspects of the charming, but also strange, bubble-world that is academic conferencing. Today's post is brought to you by the kharma of public transport, which provided by with a train seat and minimal level of elbow room in which to draft my reflections on chairing.

Conference chairing is a rather particular ritual that is confined to the conference bubble, and in may way naturalised there - it is unremarkable until things go wrong. But for people that don;t have previous exposure to conferences, here is my guide to the ritual - from both sides of the experience.

Being Chaired:

- Be on time for your presentation session, or even early, It saves your chair from anguish.
- Be tolerant of chairs who may not be a linguistically ept as you. (I had to deal with Ancient Greek, Latin and Italian - and my high school language training in Japanese really didn't help). Be prepared to offer your chair phonetic versions as well as correct spelling.
- Have a biographical statement prepared - either written out or clearly in your head to tell your chair. Sometimes chairs are swapped at the last minute, they may not know you or have time to find out about you - so having a brief spiel ready to go can be very handy.
- have any audio-visual presentations ready to go, and have some idea about how to work the equipment (it may be worth doing an advance run-through, if that can be arranged).
- stick to the time limit - don't force your chair to become the bad cop and cut you off.
- make it clear when you finish answering a question (this is a combination of content, voice tone and body language), so that the next questioner can be asked to go ahead.

On Chairing:

- Get there well before the session begins.
- Check that there is water for the speakers.
- Check what the audio-visual requirements of the presenters are, check that the equipment is there and working, check that the presenters are confident in handling the equipment. If you are not confident yourself with the technology, check in advance about what audio-visual/technical support is provided by the conference.
- Decide on format - and talk to speakers about this - before beginning of session (eg questions individually or all at end). Some considerations in making this decision are how well the papers tie together and how people likely are to be session hopping.
- Have some kind of introduction prepared for each of the presenters. This should be at least their name and the title of their paper, but it is nice to expand beyond that. Keep it professional though - it really isn't relevant if the presenter likes long walks on the beach at sunset! This may also involve acknowledging funding sources that have enabled the presenter to be at the conference, or for the session to run.
- Signal time limits if needed. Enforce time limits if needed.
- Run the question list - make sure look around the entire room. It can be worth doing progressive speaking list (move up people that haven't asked questions already). Hopefully, it won't be neccessary to intervene if questioning descends into personal attack or pointless repetition - or if comments become far too rambling and irrelevant - but in the worst case, this might be part of the job.
- Have at least one question ready for each paper in case of the dreaded silence.
- End questions at the time limit
- Thank speakers (applause after each paper, and after questions.)

And around then, I arrived at my station.