Organising a conference

We welcome this post by one of our CHASE PhD students, Sarah Fitzgerald (and congratulate her and the team for a great conference this summer!)

If you are ever thinking about organising a conference then my top tip is to write down what everyone ordered for the conference dinner and take that list to the restaurant. Last July, at the dinner for the linguistics conference I co-organised, we achieved step one but crucially forgot step two resulting in gentle chaos.

Fortunately, the staff at Bill’s, where we held our conference dinner, were very patient and this misstep was a minor blip in an otherwise successful two day postgraduate linguistics conference.

We were able to hold the conference last July, and indeed the conference dinner, due to a generous grant from CHASE (Consortium the Humanities and the Arts South-East England). I co-organised the event, called ‘Workshopping Words and Opening Dialogues’, with Rhys Sandow, a fellow linguistics PhD student at Sussex, and with guidance from Justyna Robinson.

We have a small group of linguistic PhD students at Sussex and wanted an opportunity to meet with students from other universities and create a wider community. We also wanted to create an event that would provide training specifically for linguistic PhD students and we were fortunate enough to have two (very busy) linguistics professors agree to give keynote talks and to run workshops for the conference attendees.

On the first day, Lynne Murphy (Sussex), who writes a very popular blog on British and American English, gave a talk and a workshop on public-facing linguistics. She emphasised the need to think about who you are communicating with when you write and asked us to consider what makes good writing when speaking to a general audience. Her session provided a really practical approach to a writing skill which is often overlooked in the training provided to PhD students. 

Professor Lynne Murphy (Sussex) giving a key note talk on public-facing linguistics

On day two, Bas Aarts (UCL), who heads up the Survey of English Usage team, gave a talk on corpus linguistics and a workshop on using the ICE-GB corpus. This practical session demonstrated how user-friendly corpora can be and helped to demystify what can be a very important empirical tool for linguistic researchers.

In addition to these training sessions, many of the attendees presented on their PhD research, topics ranged from syntax and typology, to sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, while languages covered included Arabic, Thai, English, Spanish and Cameroon Pidgin English.

Professor Bas Aarts (UCL) running a workshop on corpus methodology

The event seemed to go well, we certainly enjoyed it, and several people expressed a desire to have the conference become an annual event – whether this will be the case depends on our workload and how keen CHASE are to provide further funding, but watch this space.

Shi Min Chua (Open University) presenting on her PhD research

We were also lucky enough to have help on both days from two fantastic Sussex students, Rosie Marsh Rosney and Rebecca Longhurst (now a Sussex alumna). They worked hard filming and photographing the event and interviewing attendees. Rebecca used this footage to create a video of the event for us which can be viewed here.

Conference attendees chatting during a coffee break

Although I have some experience of event management, organising this conference was still a steep learning curve. Based on our experience we would offer the following advice to any student thinking about organising a similar event:

1. Don’t do it alone – having two of us meant that we could spread the workload and pool ideas.
   
   
2. Give yourself plenty of time – no single aspect of the organisation process was difficult in itself but there is a lot to do and if you give yourself months, rather than a few weeks, for organisation and publicisation then your job will be much easier.
   
   
3. Do it – at times during the organisation process it felt like we’d burdened ourselves with extra work and stress unnecessarily, but it payed off and was well worth it. We achieved everything we set out to and more and got to have fun while expanding our CVs. Win-win!