by Mustafa Banister, Kenneth Goudie and Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont
On the 17th of December 2018, we organised a MMS-II workshop here at Ghent University entitled ‘Fifteenth-century Arabic Historiography: Historicising Authors, Texts, and Contexts’. This was not, however, your usual workshop.
Now, “workshop” is a bit of a catch-all term in academia: it’s supposed to imply something more intensive–and shorter–than a full-blown conference. As a reminder, in a full-blown conference a group of academics gather to discuss a topic (like “Premodern Food Cultures Conference” or “Angels in the Medieval world”) and some of them present their research for about 20 minutes, maybe 30 if the conference organisers are feeling generous. This is followed by two or three questions, and the whole conference usually lasts no more than three days; replete with coffee breaks, lunches, and restaurant trips. Everyone might go for drinks on the last evening. In a nut-shell, that’s a conference. Some say the cops “serve and protect”. Academics “serve, create, shape and transmit”. Something like that. So, when you go to a conference, it shows you are part of the game: you have something to say and, what the hell, why not go and say it!? It’s classy. It ups your reputation. But it’s just you facing off with a small audience.
So, when you hear “workshop”, you might expect something else, like, say, working together or collaborating. Didn’t everyone always hate “group projects”? Yes, it seems strange — specialists, working together? Not quite. The truth is, however, that often the typical conference format tends to take over. The “workshop” ends up as little more than a conference in all but name in which the participants are divided into panels of three or four and take turns presenting their research to the audience.
So we (read: Jo and Maya) decided that it was time to flip the script: we weren’t just going to invite a group of people here to listen to our papers. Oh no. We, the hosts, were going to make them work for it- even sweat for it. Of course, we (read the postdocs: Mustafa Banister, Rihab Ben Othmen, Kenneth Goudie, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, Tarek Sabraa, and also Clément Onimus from Paris) were going to have to sweat for it too, but that’s all part of the job. The idea was: let’s put the “work” back into workshop.
If such a crazy idea were to be presented in a conference, it may have started like this: “In a ground-breaking text, Bourdieu once wrote “there is an implicit in every discourse, be it oral or written” [yeah, superficial, but “Bourdieu” captures the audience]. The way academics interact and work together is itself the product and part of the reproduction process of norms of knowledge and power which have a deep impact on the epistemology [capture the audience] of human sciences. Today, we would like to introduce an idea that, beyond the revolutionary challenge [inspire the audience] to the Academic community [warning to the audience] and the threat [mixed feelings in the audience] posed to the framework of our community’s normativity [always present yourself as an insider] and the every-day routine of work-related discursivity, will underline the possibility of change [audience suspicious]….We are proposing a new workshopformat [yeah, that’s it. Audience reassured but audience in expectancy and awe!].
The Amazing Workshop (AM), as it will be later recalled in histories of the twenty-first century, when some brilliant minds tried to understand how this global revolution first started, originated from a ground-breaking idea. It was important to us that everyone involved remained engaged with the papers and were able to interact in a way that transcended the traditional one speaker–one audience format, which typically makes it easier for the audience to tune in and out of a given presentation. So that was the first thing to go: there would be no “audience” and–more importantly–no “speakers”. Ground-breaking.
Instead, we decided to limit the number of participants: it would be a closed group, consisting of the six researchers on the team plus six respondents (Frederic Buylaert, Malika Dekkiche, John Meloy, Arjan Post, Eric Vallet, and Jo Van Steenbergen). Now, you may not have heard of them, but they are internationally-acclaimed researchers in their respective fields.[1]The area expertise of many of the invitees was a real asset for us: at one point one of the respondents observed that some of the main experts on the 15th-century Islamic World were currently convened together in the same room!
Secondly, the papers were pre-circulated, with the proviso that they were first drafts, and the respondents were each asked to read all of them and to prepare detailed responses to two of the papers: the hope here was to generate feedback which was both thoughtful and insightful, and which would help us eventually transform the papers into articles.
For the actual format of the workshop, we kept it simple: the day opened with an introduction to MMS–II itself, followed by a so-called “speed-dating” ice-breaker session. Initially, we had been a bit apprehensive about having to repeat our research topics to each of the six respondents during this session, as we thought it might get a bit stale, but we quickly found that any awkwardness almost immediately evaporated; instead, it became a fun and easy-going way to break the ice before the work of the day actually began.
And the day was work.
After a coffee break, we had two preparatory sessions of thirty minutes each. Basically, while everyone had been asked to read all the papers, each of our papers had only been read in detail by two of the six respondents. These preparatory sessions gave the other four a chance to comment on our papers. These discussions were light but informative and were a great way of helping us to really clarify and crystallise what our papers were about (the downside of workshopping early drafts–half the time you don’t know what the goal of your paper is!) before the “main event” of the afternoon’s intensive sessions.
There were two of these, each lasting an hour, in which two postdocs sat with their two respondents and really got to grips with the papers and the ideas. These sessions were hard work, where we really had to justify our decisions, our choices, our methodologies, even our understandings of the nature of history! We’re not going to give you a blow-by-blow recount of what happened in these sessions, suffice it to say that while they were hard and exhausting, they were also incredibly rewarding, and we now have clearer ideas of how to transform our papers into articles. Essentially, we had our ideas peer-reviewed before we had spent a long time trying to develop them, thereby saving considerable time and energy. It works. It has constraints and it’s tiring, but it works. If an academic workshop was ever going to offer immediate results in helping to produce high standard research, then this is it. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see the fruits of our labour in the not too distant future!
[1]Advertising in this blogpost helps covering the editing’s cost process.
