Any Idea What Any of These Mean?
July 6th, 2009 | 
Author: Strangely hilarious but sadly true — here are some actual panel titles from the “2009 Conference on Communication and the Environment” conference held in Maine last week:
- “Contesting Property and Production: Dialectical Hegemony in the Case of The Earth Liberation Front”
- “Uncertainty Reduction and Media Complimentarity in Environmental Communication During Wildfire Emergencies”
- “Articulating “Resilient Habitats” in the Era of Climate Crisis: A Rhetorical Battle for Hegemony at the Nexus of the Material and Ideological ‘End of Nature’”
I don’t know about you — but these communicate absolutely nothing to me. If any of you out there can help me understand what any of these panels are about and what useful thing you might learn if you attended, then you will be my hero. Post your suggestions in the comments field below.
Thanks to J.K for sharing!
Posted in Fun
These appear to be panel titles designed to enhance the understanding of methods used to redirect the attention of the attendee from the knowledge of the panelests while at the same time discouraging attendance which might understand the underlying meaning of the lackluster intent of the speakers and further add to the knowledge of the panelests and audiance. Or more simply put BS.
Remember, these people are not talking to us. They have to throw in those “hegemonical nexus” terms so that their academic peers can locate them within the niche of 25 other people who are talking about that same thing.
If I were editing their papers for an “applied” journal, here are my guesses:
1. How The Earth Liberation Front Communicates Its Anti-Capitalist Message
2. How The Media Contributes to Public Awareness of Emergency Wildfires
3. Communicating about Habitat in the Context of Climate Change
This reminds me of why I chose to leave academia. I couldn’t stand the dialectical hegemony!
um, uh, um…..
They are enamored of the word “hegemony” aren’t they?
What I learn from this is that it is a conference that I have no interest in attending. If I can’t understand the titles what on earth could I possibly learn from the panels.
God forbid humans actually learn complicated words . . . and then . . . gasp . . . use them! The nerve.
Please remember this is for an academic conference; people in this area do plenty in other applied settings. (For example, check out this EC blog: http://indications.wordpress.com/ which, you will notice, also responds to this blog.)
Within an academic context, I this language is fine. It would be like an academic going to a business marketing meeting and crying “why all this marketing jargon!”
Come on, people. Live and let live.
I’m glad to see that Eric filed this under Fun. It is always good to ridicule things to get a little perspective. (Believe it or not, those of us on the academic side do our fair share of poking fun at our own use of jargon.)
Over at the Indications blog, Mark Meisner has blogged about this (linked above). To his and other comments there I would add a few other points.
First, some of the comments seem to take this as a serious and accurate reflection of scholarly research. But it should be obvious that the fun of Eric’s post comes from the fact that the examples are cherry-picked. Just as some authors give narrow or arcane titles that signal particular ideas, others use broader titles that may be accessible to a general audience but say less about the perspectives, methods, or theories related to the paper. For example, the conference also had presentations titled “Collaboration Avoided: The Construction of an Oil Pipeline in Minnesota” and “Public Participation in Energy Policy: A Case Study of the San Juan Citizens Alliance.” Both types of titles are useful in their own way.
Second, I’m a little surprised at how quickly some have jumped to conclusions about the content and quality of the presentations based solely on these titles. I was on the panel with the habitats paper, and it was an extremely thorough analysis of how the key points of contention in public lands management are shifting as agencies give greater attention to climate change. I suspect environmental communication practitioners would learn a lot from the paper, regardless of the title.
Finally, for what it’s worth, much of the discussion at this conference–and at prior COCE conferences–focused on how to strengthen connections between environmental communication scholars and practitioners. Many of the attendees already straddle this divide, through consulting, facilitating public participation, or doing advocacy and activism alongside their academic work. But there is a clear desire for more involvement from those outside the academy. The journal Environmental Communication, for example, has a Praxis section that seeks to publish, among other things, case studies and reflections on “best practices” by professionals working in the field.
All this to say, I would hope that readers of this blog would think twice before dismissing an entire field of potentially valuable research based on a few paper titles. The next COCE is in El Paso in 2011, and it would be great to have you there.
As someone who DID present at COCE, I have to say that I agree with almost every comment here. Academia has some severe limitations, but if assistant professors want to keep their jobs, they must conform. So it is, and so it will be.
The COCE conference was the BEST conference I’ve attended in the past 10 years. The actual presentations were clearly communicated, diverse, and–honestly–interesting. I’m an advertising professor, picky about language and totally down on academic publishing. COCE was like a breath of fresh air.