By Liz McKibben
Alright! Sign me up!
This reaction was unusual for me. I don’t really like conferences. I’d rather sit snuggled up at home and read an article than watch somebody narrate their PowerPoint slides. They often feel like a self-serving platform that we attend just to plump up our academic CVs. Surely, I’m not the only person who gets unbelievably bored? Maybe this one will be different. I was seduced by the promise of shocking newness.
I walked up to the registration desk and signed in. The conference organizers checked my name off a list and handed me a koru pendant. These pendants are a profound symbol in Māori culture, representing transformation, and new beginnings. The exchange is also significant: a connection between the giver and receiver through space and time. I was reluctant to wear mine at first. Who needs another white woman wearing an indigenous symbol? So the pendant lived in a box in my bag for the remainder of the day.
The conference began with a Pōwhiri (Māori formal opening ceremony). It was joyous. The room was packed. As we sang “Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi,” our voices came together in a resonant, embodied vibration. A good vibe that continued as we dug into an expertly catered morning tea.
But my good vibe was soon interrupted.
To step away from the fast-paced, “go, go, go” style of conference, ISIH allotted each presenter 40 minutes to present and discuss their research. Longer formats can open space for dialogue and creative presentations. Yes! Awesome! Despite this invitation, many sessions nestled back into the comfort of the all too familiar PowerPoint. Oh no….I found myself drifting.
Until the first keynote.
Annemarie Jutel’s vivacious energy captured the audience. She presented her critical diagnosis scholarship through cartoons she had drawn. These images challenge us to represent ideas in new ways. To think beyond intellectual and diagnostic classifications that “obfuscate the idiosyncratic.” She was unphased through a technical glitch and had a queue of people waiting to speak with her afterwards. It was inspiring; and kept coming up in conversation throughout the conference.
The next morning, I was dismayed at how few people showed up for Erin K Stapleton’s keynote. Erin began by apologizing for the intensity of the topic. I wish they hadn’t! Their talk on masculinity and the fear of feminization during Melbourne’s COVID-19 protests was a refreshing divergence from cautiously polite critical inquiry. It was evocative. The palpable real-ness of their work was a powerful display of theoretical research that matters. And it mattered that there were far too many empty seats for a critique of white masculinity.
After another incredible lunch (huge shoutout to the caterers!), the growing crowd gathered for Pouroto Ngaporo’s keynote. This talk is the one that I continue to think about the most, and the one that I most associate with the spirit of the conference.
In some ways, it felt like a crash course in Te Ao Māori (Māori worldview), one that I gratefully accepted. His words on belonging, connection, and living in a Māori world began to shift something for me. He made a room full of mostly white faces stop scribbling down words. I stopped feeling the need to extract some profound intellectual lesson, and instead simply felt. Felt his Māori love and pain and pride. The feelings that I, a white American, cannot know on my own. But it wasn’t shocking.
It was electric.
Time ran out, and the crowd scurried off to the next session. I skipped out, opting to sit outside and contemplate my family lineage as I watched the breeze ruffle a tree. I pulled the koru pendant from my bag and placed it around my neck. Somehow, a little bit transformed.
I came back the next morning feeling activated. Excited. Ready. Time for some talk about assemblages!
I wasn’t ready. Ian Buchanan anchored his discussion of Deleuze and Guatarri with an analysis of Muriel’s Wedding (the film, which I haven’t seen). As he spoke, I found myself barely able to follow along. I can’t believe that I wish he had used some slides. Something about molecular lines? I doubt I was the only one lost in jargon and an off-beat pop culture reference. A handful of people walked out as he spoke. Yikes! Shocking?
I’d be offended if that happened to me, so I stayed. But I was uncomfortable. Academia doesn’t need to be that hard to understand. I was too shocked. And probably not in the way he had intended. Maybe, a trick to challenging academia is in holding (some) space for the people and ideas that our instincts want us to reject.
But it was, once again, time to move on to the next sessions. People began to head home.
In my session I performed an auto/ethnographic narrative on yoga pants and called it a day.
It’s been about three weeks since the conference, and my mind still wanders back to the questions it evoked in me.
… Are we really showing up differently?
… Are we showing up in the places we should?
… Why do we keep leaving at the first sign of discomfort?
… Are we slowing down enough to really engage with each other? With ourselves?
I’m not totally certain that ISIH completely delivered on its seductive tagline. But that might be an impossible task. Conferences are a feature of ‘traditional’ academia, a system bound to fast-paced neoliberal ideals. Maybe, we should start calling them something else. Changing the classification, to change the essence.
I would like to attend ISIH again (if they accept me back after this review and I haven’t destroyed my academic career). To see if I could be shocked by newness. I wasn’t this time, but I was certainly jolted into imagining what that newness might be. And I am reminded to think of a better future every day when I see my koru pendant hanging by the door to my room.
You can read more of Liz’s presentation to the ISIH Conference here: Stretchy and Tense: A Diffractive Auto/Ethnography of Privilege With Yoga Pants – Elizabeth McKibben, 2024 (sagepub.com)
About the author
Originally from California, Liz completed her Masters at the University of Hong Kong before traversing the globe as a yoga instructor. She now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand where she is in the third year of her PhD at Te Herenga – Waka.
Her research explores the various tensions in the yoga industry. In particular, she is interested in the ways that powerful norms are both conformed to and resisted with/in spaces of yoga practice. Her PhD draws on creative auto/ethnography to interrogate and visibilize whiteness.