Part of our job as professors of German at Carleton is our continuing involvement in research activities, such as writing articles and books or producing other scholarly products, for example translations, blog posts, exhibitions, and more. Included in this research is a maybe less well-known activity, the presentation of our work at regional, national, or international conferences. In this post, I give a summary of this year’s GSA conference and reflect on the complexities of the role of such a conference in our field, which also has some implications on questions of social justice.
In mid-September, Dr. Seth Peabody and I went to the annual conference of the German Studies Association (GSA), which was held in-person in Houston, Texas, this year. Usually, Dr. Kiley Kost participates in this conference as well, but because she is spending her fall term with 17 students in our Berlin OCS Program, she was only involved in pre- and post-conference activities. The GSA is a “multi- and interdisciplinary association of scholars in German, Austrian, and Swiss history, literature, culture studies, political science, and economics” and when we “go to the GSA,” we mean attending its annual conference. Among professors in German Studies, the GSA’s annual meeting is one of the most significant conferences in the profession.
For the conference, Seth co-coordinated activities with the GSA’s Environmental Studies Network, an interdisciplinary initiative within the GSA focusing on the intersections between German Studies and the environment. Seth helped organize a series of panels around the topic of “Emergence and Emergency” and served as moderator for one of these panels. He also gave a presentation entitled “Companions and Combatants (or, Hugs, Fights, and Bites): Curating Multi-Species Environments in Die Geierwally.” Seth used theories from ecocriticism and animal studies to offer a new analysis of a film that has been remade numerous times over the course of German film history. For this talk, Seth presented research that resulted in part from collaboration with Student Research Partners Nadia McPherson and Esme Krohn.
In addition to panels focused on individual research, the GSA also includes events and discussions on broader topics in the field of German Studies. Seth led a discussion and strategy session at the GSA entitled “Building a Sustainable GSA in Response to the Climate Emergency,” based on a climate emergency report prepared by Kiley and her co-authors in the GSA’s Climate Action and Technology Committee. So, while Kiley was not at the conference in person, she did important leg-work beforehand and continues to be involved with the network itself throughout the year.
I co-organized a panel called “Halloween in Ostberlin: Memory, Space, and the East” about East German culture, for which I also functioned as a commentator. In this latter role of commentator, I read all the papers before the actual presentations happened at the conference and gave the authors feedback on their content and writing. I then wrote a commentary that I presented at the conference itself. This commentary was meant to help the audience contextualize the presentations and tease out connections between them. The presenters in the panel were scholars at U.S., Australian, and German universities whose papers addressed the erasure of East German architecture, artworks, spaces of memory, and socio-political values. The scholars showed that post-unification entities have tried to reduce the socialist past to its inhumane characteristics, while conveniently redefining their own ethics, especially concerning topics of surveillance, cosmopolitan goals, or environmental concerns. In order to edit this history, the socialist past must be forgotten, erased, or redone. In my commentary, I argued that the presenters’ findings echo what many GDR researchers in the recent past have demonstrated: the existence of some kind of twisted continuity where post-1990 discourse seems to want to forget about the complexities of pre-1990 realities.
While my commentary will not be published, presentations that are given at the GSA or at any other conference are usually articles or books in the drafting stage so that scholars return to their work after the conference is done and edit it for publication. In this way, conferences are an important guide post for our research activity. Panels are often too short to get into detail on a new scholarly topic, however, and as a result, the GSA created the option of three-day long themed seminars within the conference. These seminars explore new avenues of academic exchange and foster extended discussion, rigorous intellectual debate, and intensified networking between ten to twenty scholars. In fact, two of my own articles grew out of work that I did in two such seminars in the past five years. The seminars and the broader conference also provide academics with networking opportunities so they can get to know other scholars, their projects, and share their ideas more informally. Publishing houses and other initiatives are on site as well so that researchers can meet with publishers and editors to discuss or celebrate their work, as I did with a DEFA Film Library representative who took my picture to use as an online teaser for my new, co-written, DEFA Teaching Guide!
While conferences are valuable activities, they can be a tricky endeavor as well: the GSA conference happens only in-person (besides two years of online conferencing during the pandemic), and scholars have to fly (from places as far as Australia) to a city in the United States that hosts the conference in a large and expensive hotel. Actually seeing the area surrounding the hotel becomes difficult when one does not have a lot of free time and relies on ride shares or (often non-existent) public transportation out of downtown. Public agendas and local politics at the conference site are sometimes at play as well. Many scholars within the GSA feel that an on-site conference must engage with its location, which, for the last conference in Houston included discussions about recent reproductive rights legislation in Texas. While some academics chose not to attend the conference because of local politics, others made a point of finding ways to advocate for and support local groups who have been affected by this legislation.
Other conferences, such as that of the initiative Diversity, Decolonization and the German Curriculum, have gone fully online and thus avoid the impacts conference travel has on the individual and the environment, be it through the impact of means of transportation and hotels, or the time and energy a person can devote to business travel because of personal and professional commitments. With a decision to go online, conference organizers also account for the fact that academia increasingly relies on faculty members working in temporary positions who may not have access to travel funds from their university. Online conferences help to address equity concerns that would further disadvantage scholars in these already precarious positions. Through their roles on the GSA’s Climate Action and Technology committee, Seth and Kiley are advocating for changes that will address these issues; the initial recommendations that Kiley co-authored in 2021 can be found in the committee’s Climate Emergency Report. At Carleton, we are fortunate to have research funds that can be used for conference travel. Carleton’s trimester system, however, complicates our participation in another way: since the GSA happens roughly from Thursday to Sunday in the first or second week of Carleton’s fall term, participation in conference events requires us to adjust our teaching schedules very early in the term when class communities are just starting to emerge, Teaching Assistants and Language Associates are being trained, and the flow of a term is still developing. In order to attend a conference in person, we are forced to juggle family responsibilities, spend time away from the office and home, and devote long hours and energy to conference proceedings.
As you can see, academic conferencing is complex, which makes the work of initiatives such as the Climate Action and Technology committee of the GSA so important. But meeting and (re)connecting with colleagues in person is indeed a very satisfying experience of the job and hard to replace with just another zoom meeting. Ironically, Carleton’s German professors met up with St. Olaf’s German professors at the GSA in Houston and we discussed present needs and future collaborations. Finding adequate ways to allow our work to be successful while also eliminating inequities is an on-going process that Seth, Kiley, and I have been participating in over the years and will continue to do so.