Conference Self Care
Ah yes conferences, the playgrounds of academics. You laugh but actually conferences have in my experience at least been exactly that. They have been spaces where academics work hard and play hard. Good conferences offer great papers and discussions, too much coffee and sugar and then too much rich food and alcohol to top it all off. Late nights, early mornings, not enough exercise… it is of course a recipe for disaster. Increasingly I am distancing myself from the work hard play hard thing. Don’t do anything hard! Conferences are fabulous. They offer opportunities for catching up with colleagues and friends, for lively and sometimes heated discussions, for quiet reflection on new ideas or new thoughts on old ideas. They’re an escape from the daily grind of the office. The coffee and lunch breaks as well as the evening social activities are often as much part of that, if not in some ways more important in renewing connections and helping ideas form. So yes it’s work and yes it’s play and I am not by any stretch of the imagination advocating being a saint.
However, there is also a darker side to conferences and conferencing. The crippling anxiety some academic feel before and during their paper presentations, the pure horror at having to be with other people for a significant amount of time, the pressure of being on the ball and on your game all the time, the pretense of hyper performance and the glorification of busy. Saying ‘actually I achieved everything I wanted to this summer because I decided I wanted to do fuck all and just have a proper rest’ somehow sounds and feels less acceptable than the frantic, but oh so familiar ‘oh my god I can’t believe the summer’s over, I haven’t even really started on my to do list yet’. This is bonkers.
I used to attend pretty much every session and all socials at all conferences I went to. I was often last woman standing and first woman up. I used to be able to function feeling pretty crap and hungover and usually didn’t even really notice until I got home. I don’t actually know if I can still do that but the reality is that I don’t want to. There are better ways to do the conferencing thing and get a lot out of it but also preserve sanity and health. I started editing this post yesterday. I’d actually started writing it at the conference in Mexico last year (June 2017 archive for the posts from the conference if anyone wants to have a look) but I think I have always tried to be too generic – to give advice that works for everyone and it just sounds vague and unhelpful. So I have re-written the thoughts below to focus on what it is I do, don’t do, should do, wish I did…
- We all have different conference tolerance levels that probably also change over time. Very few people can take in every session – particularly if they are packed in. Tuesday I went to one session and then had a power nap. I was sad to miss the session I missed but that’s life. It is always possible to ask for the paper or have a conversation with the presenter at a later date. Yesterday I felt pretty good so I went to all sessions – however…
- … I had too much coffee. This is a real thing at conferences for me. It is so easy to
just keep drinking the stuff at every break and before you know it you had some at breakfast, before the session, after the sessions, at lunch, after the afternoon session… and I didn’t drink anywhere near enough water because I forgot my water bottle in my room. I need t carry a water bottle or I just don’t drink – possibly because I’m an idiot. - That links nicely to food – you don’t move much if you are attending several sessions. I have liked walking from building to building at the SLS conference this week. There is something nice about those few minutes of fresh air but often you have to work much harder to achieve that. In Mexico for example everything was in the hotel and I had to make a conscious effort to go outside, breathe, make sure I actually saw some natural light. Oh hang on I was going to talk about food – yes well even though you might not move much, your brain is working bloody hard, or at least mine finds it hard! So you need fuel but you don’t need a full English breakfast, pastries, cookies, a huge plate full of sandwiches, wraps, cake, a 4 course meal….. I love a little conference indulgence and I am currently sitting in my room with a Cafe Mocha which I almost never have at home but which just feels lush on this sunny but cool morning. A little indulgence isn’t a bad thing. I now usually have whatever sweet thing is offered with morning coffee because the afternoon version is usually bigger, heavier and more likely for me to induce a complete afternoon sugar crash. Yesterday I had both and had the most awful sugar headache through the final plenary session.
- Social events – I’m not a fan of people so these used to be pretty awful unless I already knew people in which case they were marginally less awful. Now I just don’t go unless there is a specific reason to. So Tuesday night there was a dinner which I hadn’t booked for but then last minute I had the chance to catch up with a wonderful academic and friend so I got a ticket and we spent the evening hovering at the edge of the drinks reception and at dinner creating our bubble around our conversation and then I left early. I did not go to the conference dinner last night. I have a low people tolerance level. People exhaust me so conferencing all day and then playing in the evening is a huge ask and I need time out, serious time out, half an hour isn’t going to do it. There are some conferences where social events are really part of the deal or where my role requires me to be there. I adjust accordingly during the day and I make sure I know who is going
- Sleep – well I stopped writing at about 10pm last night and went to bed. That is a late night for me in general terms. I am usually ready for bed, tucked up and probably asleep by 10pm. For a conference it’s an exceptionally early night. Sleep is important but I often don’t get enough. I was wide awake at 5.30am this morning and yesterday. If I need a powernap I’ll have one
- Exercise. Like I said, its easy to hardly move at all. I like exploring places with a little run and recently I have run regularly at conferences. In Mexico I even joined the organised fun run. Not the greatest experience so today I have not joined the SLS conference fun run. I did my own thing yesterday and quite honestly, this morning I just could not be bothered. Instead I got up and played with some ideas on my paper. I may go at lunch time though but I have also learned not to see this as another thing I have to somehow squeeze in while I’m at a conference. I will do it if, and only if, I really want to
- That brings me to the last and possibly most important point – conferences can be really anxiety inducing. They can push all my buttons – the ‘am I good enough’ buttons, the lack of sleep buttons, the too much caffeine buttons, the I don’t belong here buttons, the alcohol buttons, the sugar buttons, the ‘oh my good people are hideous’ buttons, the noise buttons, the ‘here’s another bloke in a suit explaining the world to me’ buttons, the ‘I feel really stupid’ buttons and the ‘there’s all this other work I should be doing’ buttons… there are more I’m sure, I have a lot of buttons. So more and more I am learning to listen to myself and take note of rather than dismiss the early warning signs. Yep, I can function perfectly well through high levels of anxiety and even minor panic attacks. Unless you know me very well you would never know but it’s not actually much fun, or healthy. Sometimes that means doing less at a conference and missing sessions, sometimes it means being very selective about the people I spend time with and sometimes being borderline rude (sorry) and walking away. It means choosing sessions as much by who else will be in the room as by topic, it means being ok about not asking questions or making a contribution. Perhaps counter intuitively I have become quieter and am less likely to ask questions as I have become more confident in what I know and don’t know. I am ok with giving my brain more time to process and I am ok with emailing someone later if something does occur to me that I really want to talk about.
So in short, my conference self care for me is about drinking less caffeine (rubbish at it) and alcohol (pretty good at this lately and this time not drinking at all given the Great North Run at the weekend), getting enough sleep (not great at it), eating well including some conference indulgences but as with running – eat to fuel (mostly good), drinking enough water (ok as long as I remember my bottle), being aware of when I am getting to capacity and dipping in and out of things (good) and allowing time, space and activity for the adrenaline that will inevitably build up when I have to spend time with people in a work environment like this to dissipate or be burned off (pretty good).
I should also say though that actually going to conferences is a form of academic self care for me. It allows me to connect with people across the discipline(s) I work in. It gives me a check on where I am with my research and what else is going on and how what I do fits into the bigger picture. The discussions, whether formal or informal, are good for the soul and for perspective. I often find them challenging from a sanity perspective but not attending and sharing my work and listening to others would be far far worse.
Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) conference Day 1
I have not been to a Society of Legal Scholars conference for some time. I was looking forward to it. I was particularly excited to be able to go to all of the conference rather than just the half in which my paper was scheduled. I am doing 2 papers in the Legal Education section – more on those another time.
Travel to London was uneventful. I like uneventful. I got a fair bit of work done on the train in spite of the supposed quiet coach being the noisiest coach I have been in for a long time. Is it the thing where you’re told you’re not allowed to do something and therefore immediately want to do it? I got the tube out to Mile End and found the campus and even the right building very quickly. I also managed to get a ticket for the dinner at the end of day 1. I hadn’t booked because I wasn’t going to go but then the opportunity for a catch up with Richard C arose so I really wanted to go.
I had arrived in time for lunch – a rather ordinary pasta with a veggie sauce (I think there was a chicken one too) and then I headed to the first session. The first paper was great. I expected it to be. It was a paper by Marc Mason (Westminster) and Steven Vaughan (UCL) reporting on their research with LGBT+ barristers in England and Wales. Bonus points if you ‘get’ the title ‘Going to the Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Gay Bar…’ (if you do, your taste in music is as horrendous as mine!). The paper was fascinating and sort of heartbreaking and a little puzzling…. For a start the survey Marc and Steven did shows quite clearly that the Bar Standards Board statistics on sexuality at the Bar are hugely underestimating the number of LGBT+ barristers across the levels. That in itself means that there is something going on there because some are clearly happy to take part in surveys and interviews for research purposes but are not happy to declare their sexuality as part of the BSB statistics reporting. I wonder why that is. The paper’s sections on homophobia and on the performance of being out were fascinating. The data shows that homophobia is quite common but also that barristers play it down as nothing serious and no big deal. I’m really interested in this lack of advocating for themselves. Where does this come from. Is this a professional thing? Do they advocate for each other? This is fascinating and I’m not sure how we’d get to the bottom of this fully. I’ll ponder this.
I loved the notion that came up in one of the quotes about challenging or disrupting the ‘normal rule of engagements’. So men (mostly) finding it difficult to work out what exactly is going on when faced with a powerful lesbian QC, knowing something is slightly ‘off’ and not being able to work out what the rules of engagement now are. I like that. The section on performance of being out (or not) was depressing because there was lots of evidence of concealing sexuality and lying and because clearly there is a huge amount of the ‘bleached professional’ going on. Where barristers are ‘out’ they are often out in relation to their partners only – so they build their professional gay identity around having a same sex partner rather than on being gay – playing the ‘good gay’ game and performing heteronormativity albeit within a same sex relationship.
The second paper was by Ben Waters (Canterbury Christ Church) on ADR and Civil Justice. I also enjoyed this paper although it’s not really my thing and I was still reflecting on the previous one so drifted in and out.
Anyway it was a fabulous start to the conference. Next I was going to hear more legal education/legal profession stuff and listen to Nigel Duncan (City) on teaching legal ethics but over coffee I realised that I was really flagging. I decided to check into the accommodation and have a little power nap so that’s what I did. Then I headed back to the publisher exhibition area and spent a lovely half hour looking at books (sooooooooo many books, so little time to read….) and then people started filtering in from the sessions for the drinks reception. At the reception I met up with Richard C and we spent the evening talking about well being and anxiety in the legal academy and it was lovely. I left dinner when Richard did and then I went to bed early and fell asleep almost immediately. A good day and a sensible one! I have a blog post started over a year ago on conference self care and I think maybe now is a good time to look at that draft and finish it. I’ll see if I get to it today.
Law, Weight, Language and Race T-shirt Sizing
Today I gave a short presentation on weight discrimination in EU Law at the 6th Weight Stigma Conference held at Leeds Beckett University. Some times talking to mostly non-lawyers about law is fabulous, sometimes it’s not and today I found the room really hard to read. It was part of a long session following lunch so maybe people were experiencing their afternoon slump (I was) or maybe it had something to do with the presentation before mine. It was on UK (let’s ignore the fact that there’s no such thing as UK law really) anti-discrimination law based on weight. It was how I would imagine I would have been taught employment law if I had chosen to study it. It was so doctrinal/black letter in its approach that even I was bored and I get excited about anti-discrimination law! It was all definitions and them (the fat people who might want to claim) and us (the presumably not fat lawyers). It was mildly patronising – fat people should not fear discrimination and the law does protect in some circumstances. I’m not sure many who are fat would agree with that. But anyway, the atmosphere in the room was odd when I went up to give my presentation.
I introduced myself as a feminist EU Lawyer and sometimes more, sometimes less overweight marathon runner. There were some laughs. Phew. More laughs when I mentioned my drawer full of race t-shirts which don’t fit and which might just cover half a boob. Then down to the serious stuff – law is not going to solve that sort of discrimination. So very briefly my argument was:
There is no prohibition on weight discrimination in EU Law. Directive 2000/78 covers discrimination on a number of protected characteristics in the employment context. Disability is one of those protected characteristics. To gain protection (or more accurately redress) from the law, weight discrimination has to be brought within definitions of disability discrimination. English Law is firmly rooted in the medical model of disability – the problem is the impairment – whereas EU law offers some glimpse of hope because it includes the social model as outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability – the problem is social barriers. That glimmer of hope may have been extinguished with the CJEU’s decision in Kaltoft though which, in an obesity case, reaffirms the social model and then reverts back to a medical model in the key part of the decision. So in short – law is complex and tricky in this area.
I also think theoretically linking weight discrimination with disability discrimination is problematic. Of course some people with very high or very low weight can bring themselves within the definition of disability but many cannot. So lets think about my experience (in the absence of detailed research on this as yet, I am drawing on what I know from my experience!). Even if law applied (it doesn’t) it wouldn’t solve my problem of short half marathon and marathon cut off times and utterly ridiculous race shirt sizing (I have an XXL t-shirt which I literally cannot get over my shoulders). So the cut off time would indirectly discriminate against heavier runners – we are more likely to be slow, the lack of t-shirts that fit more than one boob is direct discrimination but there is no protected characteristic – I’m nowhere near the definition of disability in this context – not even on a fairly expansive definition of the social model. Maybe using the example of running is flippant, I’m not sure. I just know that exercise and sport are the things that have caused me personally the most anxiety in relation to my own weight. It’s where I know I experience discrimination and bias all the time.
So I don’t think the legal framework as it stands is helpful. I am also not sure that adding weight as a protective characteristic is all that helpful. Let’s start with the symbolic power of law – let’s not underestimate that. It is certainly important because it’s a clear statement that certain types of behaviours and actions are wrong. That can be really important for individuals. Law can be useful to help educate and raise awareness. Yes, I agree with all of that BUT let’s be really careful here. Law always always always has unintended consequences and often they can be incredibly harmful – we need to think about whether adding weight as a characteristic would cause a backlash, would it drive discrimination ‘underground’, make it less blatant and obvious and thus harder to tackle in other ways?
How would we define weight discrimination? How do we define weight? Can discrimination here be based on too low, too high or too average? How would this work in practice? Where would we draw the lines? What measure would we use – surely not BMI? Does it depend on context? I don’t know where to start with this! Every possible way I can think of can potentially have totally absurd consequences.
Law also has some inherent problems. It relies on discrimination happening. Law cannot prevent discrimination and we know from other protected grounds that the possibility of being taken to court is not, in practice, deterring people from discriminating at any significant rate. Law reduces us all to single characteristics. We can be fat, thin, white, black, female, male, gay, straight…. we cannot be a combination of those in law. It can’t actually cope with people. Law does not understand intersectionality and weight discrimination rarely, if ever, exists in isolation. And law cannot tackle stigma. Equal marriage hasn’t stopped homophobia – anti weight discrimination law won’t stop weight stigma or bias – we need other solutions.
There are practical problems with law too – bringing a case is horrendous. I could not, in good conscience, advise anyone to take a discrimination claim to court. It’s financially and emotionally draining – as in completely – until you have nothing left. It’s a significant undertaking and our legal system favours those with money and social capital, if you don’t have both along with an unlimited reserve of resilience, just don’t do it! Oh and of course, don’t even think about trying if you do not have absolute concrete proof. And that is going to be harder and harder to get. If weight becomes a protected characteristics then discrimination may become more subtle, less obvious, more like the discrimination based on race, gender or sexual orientation some of us have clearly experienced but would never be able to prove. We’d just know, everyone would just know but the law demands proof – even of the blatantly obvious.
So I think what I am saying is that law is part of the theoretical and symbolic answer but not really part of the practical solution.
In my presentation I used the language used in much of the literature I read – non-ideal weight. This caused a noticeable reaction in the presentation before mine where it was also used. I actually meant to start with explaining why/how I was using it but I got caught up in my race t-shirt story and forgot. I get how the language is problematic and I meant to say that legal literature appears to use it as a shorthand way to cover very low and very high weight and that it does not denote a value judgment. So just to be absolutely clear – I was using it as a sort of legal category or shorthand with no assigning of value intended at all. I guess though that the legal literature might want to re-think that language use and I will be for my written paper.
Anyway, watch this space – full paper coming in due course….
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