I went to the IIPPE one-day political economy workshop in The Hague, which I could, remarkably, attend cost-free (well, save for my transport costs). The talks were certainly interesting in content, but as a communication exercise it was a failure, since the presentations consisted largely of rattling off densely written powerpoint slides as fast as possible.
Professor Simon Mohun's talk consisted of a very truncated (and not very easy to follow) summary of Duncan Foley's book Understanding Capital. His main error was, that he confused total value added with gross national income, and he confused Marx's theory of value with Ricardo's theory of value. But for the rest it was pretty interesting. He is a very eloquent speaker, who always completes his sentences. Samantha Ashman gave a talk about financialization which was very comprehensive and very promising, but she had so much material and so many nuanced assessments of what various authors had to say, that she struggled a great deal to present a coherent narrative in the time available, skipping from one issue to the next. The story narrative was much bigger than she could reasonably convey in one lecture. Duncan Lindo presented a great introduction to financial instruments (especially derivatives), but again he tried to compress a lot of complex issues and problems in a very short time, which meant he was also rattling off his powerpoint slides, to the point that it was impossible to keep up with. So, generally, although the scholars were very kind and helpful, and presented lots of content, the workshop largely failed from an educational point of view. A plus though is, that (upon inquiry) I discovered the students will in due course get copies of the powerpoint slides from the presentations. I had the option of going to the three-day IIPPE conference of scholars, but although some papers looked very interesting and worthwhile, I have decided not to go. The reason is that each day consists of four two-hour sessions in which there are usually four papers per session, with each academic having, say, twenty minutes to present a paper, and then perhaps 10 minutes for discussion. I suppose this "pressure cooker" format of the conference means that a wide range of papers can be presented, that many academics can claim credit for presenting a conference paper, etc. but basically it is not really possible to digest and discuss so many papers in such a short time, and it is hardly comfortable to do so. I was pretty tired already after one day, plus a pub session, plus a long talk in the one-hour train journey back to Amsterdam, and after another three days I think I'd be knackered. Another aspect was that a number of presentations which I would have liked to attend were being presented at the same time. What I realized was, that conferencing has been turned into a reified commodity, delivered assembly-line style with an emphasis on visuals. You might as well show a prepared video of the talks, and discuss the video a bit afterwards. It was really unnecessary to have the speakers there, since they were merely an appendage of their powerpoint slides - except for answering queries, but you could set up a helpline for that. J.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
