Philosophy Community Building

In the first session of the day (starting on day two of the conference), participants discuss talks from the previous day. This gives people the opportunity to discuss ideas that arose in later conversations or percolated overnight. 

It allows the sharing of 'slower' ideas to the group, and speakers can respond to questions after further contemplation. A 'espirit de l'escalier' session helps de-centralise the importance of quick thinking in academia. 

Espirit de l'escalier sessions are one of my favourite innovations. (I owe the nomenclature to Cat Saint-Croix.)

In standard conferences, the session format is familiar: Talk then, immediately, a Q&A. Perhaps there is a quick "bio break" for comfort. This orthodox structure means that Q&As are quite individualistic. Each person shares their own response to the talk, without having discussed it with anyone first. It also favours the quick thinkers and the confident audience members: They put their hands up first.

Here is an alternative: Presentation-chat-Q&A 

The talk is followed by a chat period. Participants are asked to discuss the paper organically, as if at a coffee break. They should not simply chatter about day-to-day topics! Participants should focus on the talk they just heard. This is because the chat is not free time. It is part of the presenter's session, and should be seen as such. Everyday chat thus robs the presenter of part of their session. (Be strict about this.)

The chat should focus on making the Q&A better: What potential questions are most useful? Timid question-askers can 'feel out' whether their question seems worthwhile to a small group. The garrulous can work on shortening their question, or quenching their 'need' to talk before the Q&A begins.

The subsequent Q&A can be seen as a collaborative "report back" session: What were the most valuable insights from the discussions that the speaker, and other participants, should hear? What can simply be told to the speaker later, without the entire audience hearing. (After all, some people -- the chat folks -- already heard it. You got the idea out to some audience.)  

What does the presenter do during the chat? The presenter should feel free to 'slip out' during this session, if they think participating would hamper their 'Q&A performance'. All other participants are expected to participate, and focus on the talk topic. Assuming the presenter stays, they will be engaging in one of the conversations about their session. 

Online talks can use 'Break Out Rooms' to create the pre-Q&A discussion time.

Suppose you invited someone to speak at a colloquium or conference. You probably appreciate or respect their way of thinking. So why limit their voice to just their talk topic? Consider setting aside a few minutes during their session (before their actual talk begins or after the Q&A) to ask them a few general questions. Here are some ideas: 

• What are your further research projects / what else are you working on / where might this research go next?

• How did you become interested in this specific topic?

• How does this project relates to your other research (if not already described)

• Why this project or topic matters to non-academics/to society/ to people outside of your field? (Frame this carefully, to avoid offence! Perhaps imply it is a standard question that you ask every speaker.)

• What topics do you think are under-explored in your sub-discipline?

• What is the most illuminating approach/question in the area that you don't use/focus on?

• What is your pet hate in your sub-discipline / what do you think is an unhelpful approach?

• Can you say anything interesting about your approach to writing / research that might help early career / less prolific people?

• Meta-philosophy (methodology): what are the hallmarks of success for philosophy / the aims of philosophy?

• If you were to make a graduate seminar by combining three topics or questions that aren't often combined, what would they be? 

These questions allow the audience to hear some 'hot takes'. It could be especially valuable for grad students, or for people who didn't follow or care about the talk. It can seed good conversations at the reception / dinner. 

  
I do this for Zoom speakers in graduate seminars. Best practices: (i.) See whether the speaker is happy with this and email the questions to the speaker in advance. (ii.) Clearly schedule question-time into the session. So, for example, a two-hour session, the Q&A ends at 1:52, and the final eight minutes is for these kinds of questions. (iii.) I would only ask four questions.

Afterwards, I would seek feedback about about whether the interview time was more valuable than the extra minutes of normal Q&A. 

Interstitial times at conferences - coffee breaks, walks to dinner, etc - can be the most valuable moments for developing research ideas and community. They have high potential value.

This raises the question, can conference organisers do anything to enhance these times, to help actualise their merely potential value?

One possibility is creating a space early in the event for participants to share embryonic research ideas or unusual research interests. This might be in a handout, pre-conference email, circle share, or by writing keywords on a name tag.

These initiatives might help spark valuable conversations, by seeding potential conversation topics. Two people might both be interested in an emerging topic, for example, and be unaware of the other person's interests.  

I suspect that sharing interests would especially helps graduate students and early career people, since their research topics are less known to the group.

Sharing can thus help create equity about whose research is discussed during interstitial times (coffee breaks, etc.), without relying on the well-known people remembering to ask "So, what are you interested in?" to less well-known people.  

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Some people might grimace at what they see as heavy-handed or patronising event facilitation. To those people, remember that all these ideas are merely suggestions. Feel free to take them or leave them. But please do not negative-nelly on other people's attempts to be helpful. And do  not overgeneralise from your own preferences. I can assure, you different people appreciate very different things.  

What

• They are short, 'silly' group activities. 

• They can be facilitated in a few ways, such as.

1. 20-35 minute small-group sessions.

• This can break-up the monotony of the talks-based schedule, and add another dimension to participants' interactions. 

2. 'Assigned' over one of the meals. 

• If I was doing this, I would encourage people to do it, as an experiment, but I would convey that I don't care if they don't do it. It isn't required homework! 

I have a lot of these activities. Here are some examples: 

Examples
1.) Time Capsule 

• Give participants this question: What would you put in a time capsule for future generations that conveys the important insights of analytic philosophy / the conference themes. 

• They are only allowed (for example) 4-8 normal-length sentences. 

• Rather than bury it for future generations, your activity prompt might instead shoot this capsule into space, 

• For a 'comic' framing, check out the "Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Loft handout. Maybe at some point I will recast it as a philosophy conference activity. Check my website later.

2.) Design a philosophy-based holiday. 

• This could be a day-long holiday, like Festivus, an actual trip, or a season/week. 

• It could be general philosophy, or specific to conference themes. 

• As facilitator, you could choose or let the participants decide on these two decision points. 

• What might it include? Reading, talking, walking, games...?

• Added bonus: If you do this during the first dinner of an un-conference, your participants might thereby ideate (and thus co-create) the event itself.

3.) Philosophy story & questions

• Tell a story / anecdote that raises philosophical questions or illustrates philosophical ideas. Ask three questions about it.

• This might intimidate some people. So I recommend emphasising *anecdote*. 

• This activity might make philosophy 'come alive' or relate to life. It diversifies modes of philosophical engagement.

4.) Philosophy question cards

•  Make a set of philosophical questions available. Important: These are modelled on "Get to Know You" decks, and thus do not seem like quizzes! 

• They include things like "what is a philosophy question that you really like/get a lot from?"; "Describe a time you changed your mind in philosophy. Why did it change?"

• I have a lot of these questions. If you want a copy, email me. They might be ready to circulate. 

• These question decks can be made available at conference receptions, dinners, etc, to  help ignite conversation. 

Benefits

• These mini-activities vary the conference modes, inject new ideas, and help participants get to know each other. 

• Can help create an "ideas festival" vibe at a conference. That is, lateral communication that isn't simply the kind of chat you would have at dinner (about mundane topics or deep dives into your work), but that is fully interactive (and so isn't listening to a speaker).

• These activities can "reduce the awkward" at online conferences by seeding break-out philosophy conversations. 

• They can help "level the playing field" about who is speaking to who at conferences. 

  • • In general, I believe assigning small group activities can help create less hierarchical social vibes. Default social patterns filter people into their "social groups". This is fine. But it can help to shake this up, too.  

• Some people love being assigned tasks like this. It's like summer camp or play school, but for philosophy! Some people dislike the monotony of talk-Q&A. These activities benefit those people.

• Later knock-on effects: 

  • • These activities could develop into fully-fledged interaction sessions at conferences that you facilitate. 

    • As mentioned throughout this page, I would love to see more interactive activities on (for example) the main APA programme. And that requires facilitators & activities poised to host them. 

    • These sessions / activities / philosophy objects & games can inspire teaching activities.
      
      

Challenges

• Some people hate being told what to do. 

• Many academics are averse to novelty.

• Academics might struggle to not take these activities too seriously. It can be hard to convey to academics that some cognitive tasks are simply sandbox activities. They do not need to score an A.  

I have not developed idea, and so I do not have any details.

Someone suggested it to me, and so I am sharing it here.

Credit: Noah Saint-Croix Kunin.

Invitations and expectations are generative. They help researchers develop new ideas. This is common with publication invitations. Conference organisers can make happen with talk invitations too.

I held a conference, and I assigned one of the participants a topic for her session. The topic related to her existing work, but I knew that she did not have existing research on that topic. She could run the session as an open discussion, a talk, or any other structure. But I chose her topic. It was thus a prompt for her to develop new research, much like an invitation to publish in an edited volume can be. 

This is a bold move, so I should emphasise: I ran this idea by her first, and she was keen. I made clear that her invitation to the event was was not conditional on this innovation! 

If you want a more innovative conference, here is an easy way: Identify people who are innovative, good teachers, gregarious, or confident. And then ask them to run an interactive or innovative session. 

Many people want to innovate, but need an invitation: We can't turn up to a talk invite, and start asking the audience questions and having them throw balled up paper around the room. I mean, we can. But we won't.  

Your CFP can include a call for interactive activities and standalone 75-minute workshops. 
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Background: Academia would benefit from knowing the expression 'container facilitation'.

https://tendirections.com/the-art-of-the-container/
https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/facilitating-workshops-creating-a-container/

Container facilitation is a difficult and specialised skill (see, for example) that is taken seriously in activist, artistic, and social justice spaces (see, for example).

If you, as organiser, put on your own containers, you might need a thick skin, an idea, and a lot of time. It is a tonne of work and you could well receive pushback and criticism. Do not go into this lightly. There is a reason people charge.

Fortunately, as teachers, we do a version of it. Our classrooms are containers.

Your CFP can express interest in hosting containers of interactive philosophical activities. For an example, see The APA/AAPT Teaching Hub. Their CFPs request interactive sessions and specifies what this means. 

If your college has them, consider asking the pedagogy office, innovation centres, or DEI office whether they would like to host a session. They are often specialists in container facilitation and many are open to cross-disciplinary work like this.
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For ideas for container facilitation for philosophical research, see my tarot activity sheets, Appendix III of this Activity Sheet, the seventh-generation game (described on my teaching page as the Experience Machine Game), and some of my fringe events. See also links to showcased conferences, below.  

When you send the talk invitation, tell them polished talks are not welcome. Only embryonic ideas are allowed. 

Academic norms strongly pressure people to "look their best" during talks, and only present well-developed ideas. Presenting well thought out ideas has its place and its value. But diversifying is good. If you want create a space to nurture embryonic ideas, your invitation needs to be stern: Not letting them present developed ideas gives people the freedom to present their underdeveloped ideas. And this can be a valuable opportunity.

Tell them this:

As a guideline, if they have already presented the idea elsewhere, it is already too well developed for the research cocoon you are building. 

They will only have 15-25 minutes to present. This is because you don't want to hear every potential counter-argument and response, or rival view and its flaws. You just want them to cut to the chase of some new idea that might or might not work. It's a 'popcorn talk'. 

This creates an opportunity for the person to receive feedback on a newly emerging idea. If they try to impress the audience with a well-developed idea then they have wasted this opportunity, by giving a talk that they could have presented somewhere else.

If you are too shy to say this yourself, direct them to this website and they can read it here instead.

Registration fee exemptions for selected industry experts, journalists, and local artists can enrich the conference programme with cross-community insights.

But innovation and cross-community work also needs grace:

Here is an example. In 2025, an APA session was cancelled at the last minute. The session was supposed to be about trade book publishing. A media expert donated her time pro bono, and arrived at the conference. In the account that I heard (directly from the session organiser and panelist), the expert wasn't told she needed to pay to donate her time to the APA, and (reasonably) refused to do so. The APA showed no grace, and the session was cancelled and the room was locked, with all participants waiting at the door. 

This serves as a warning against other people who want to innovate through existing infrastructure: Know who you are working with.
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Grace is a gift, and it is how the world stays fresh. Without it, we are dust.

Without grace, we are eroded into the dry, unforgiving landscape of bureaucracy and fear.

If you want your conference to include artists, non-academic experts, people from other fields, and the general public, you must work with grace in your heart.

(Or, whatever is in your heart, bear in mind that academic norms are abnormal -- and registration fees are expensive -- to non-academics.)

This works especially well for someone working explicitly with ideas, such as a conceptual artist, curator, artist-professor, writer, or theatre facilitator.

Extend the invitation, and then decide the format together. You might interview her, for example, about how her work engages with philosophy or create a small panel about how interacting with art can aid philosophical reasoning at all stages: K-12, college, research, and the general public. Or you can create a roundtable or fishbowl about how to bring philosophy into dialogue with the arts.

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If you invite an artist, you might consider reading the 'How to Ask a Question at an Interdisciplinary Event' section.
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I've done this in class. If I did this for a conference, I'd consider doing it during a brown bag lunch, and then allow everyone 30 minutes in a nearby art gallery.

This might sound like I'm 'over-scheduling'. But you might be assuming that the rest of the day is spent in talks, or that I care whether they enter the gallery. Jettisoning assumptions like those creates a lot more room for innovating. 

Suppose you run a large annual conference, and you want to connect philosophically to the locale. Philosophers have gifts: Their ability to facilitate discussion, help people think through ideas, and provide perspectives. In turn, the academics can learn about the area and be inspired by site-specific philosophy questions and reasoning.

As the organiser, you can ask locals for local philosophy questions they would love a merry troupe of travelling philosophers to discuss. You can then host a  discussion  panel  on that topic. Indeed, you can even do it at the local tavern.

This way, you can create a novel outreach event, offer a service, and break up the monotony of the conference. 

For browny points, you could offer to create an educational resource about the topic for local schools. To do this, record 3-6 philosophers speaking for 2-5 min each on the topic -- offering their hot takes -- edit those videos together, post them on YouTube, and tell the relevant local teachers. 

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Examples from my cities:

1.) New Orleans:

a.) What should we make of Nicolas Cage's pyramid tomb stone? Should he have a right to do that? Should we remove it?

b.) Love potions: Is it okay to sell and use products designed to steer other people's affections?

2.) Knoxville:

a.) How should we understand invasive species? What (if anything) should we do about them?

Invasive species removal at Ijams Urban Wilderness generates a case study about volunteer time and resources, and an opportunity to think through the emotions of the hydra-headed snake or Sisyphean tasks of climate change.

b.) What might reparations for environmental exploitation look like? Is it too late, wrt to logging operations?

A WIP (work in progress group) deliberately stops after each few sections of the paper, for the group to discuss each section in turn. This is an innovative structure.

On hearing this, one might think 'this sounds worse than the normal structure', and thus dismiss the idea. But this thought is too quick.

Firstly, of course, this structure might well be better. Or better for them, or better for some essays, ideas, idea stages, communities, participants, or cognitive types.

But even if it is actually worse than the normal structure, a variety of structures is better. That is, mere variety itself is valuable, since it can bring new aspects of a paper, idea, or cognitive community to the surface.

Additionally, by being more deliberate, self-aware, and explicit about what they are doing when they gather, the group can be more targeted about what aims they have for the gathering. That is, they have more socially aware, aims-based meta-cognition. And this is valuable.

[Thanks to Giada Fratantonio for telling me about this WIP.] 

Event organisers, consider asking yourself these questions. See also the "Brainstorming Activities for Organisers" section, which is a little more left-field. 

1.) What Would I Miss?

If you couldn't attend conferences again, what would you miss most? 

• Pick three things. 

• You do not need to maximise -- or even increase these things. 

• This is just an information-gathering step.

2.) Why & How Does Research-Level Education Work?

1. What did I receive from my teachers and community at graduate school that helped me flourish that I no longer receive, now that I have graduated? 

2. How can my event innovate to help offer that same value to post-PhD researchers? 

Explanation

• Graduate school is set up to help people learn and think through ideas together. 

• We can use some of those same norms, initiatives, and ways of gathering to help research communities flourish. 

• Examples: Receiving and giving feedback on early drafts, giving presentations on influential or recent publications, work-in-progress circles, asking questions to the "audience", a chance to air out new ideas with people before deciding whether to pursue them, etc.

• As I emphasise (a lot!) on this page, no initiative, social form, or practice will suit everyone. Embrace that variance amongst people, but it need not stifle innovation.

3.) When you remember conferences fondly, what features contribute to this? 

4.) When you think of conferences as fruitful or helpful for your research, what happened? What conditions, if any, contributed to this?

5.) Try to recall specific conferences or moments that you think helped you develop your research 'network' when you were early career. 

• What happened? What was the environment like? 

• Could you cultivate similar moments for early career participants at your conference?  

• Don't be afraid to be explicit and goal-orientated. You can email attendees and say, for example, 'It is particularly important to me that early career people are included and heard at dinner tables. Please consider paying special attention to whether more junior people at the table have opportunities to be heard.' As long as you keep the overall length & number of emails small, participants will likely appreciate some guidance about your values as the organiser.

Suppose you want to organise an innovative event. Consider these activities. 

• You can do them alone or (better) in an early brainstorming meeting. 

• Consider raising these activities in conversation with interesting, supportive people who aren't helping to organise the conference. 

• Ideally chat about them with non-academics, such as artists, theatre producers, and friends. 

• These activities and conversations can help brainstorm, ideate, and break free from convention.

1.) Necessity is the Mother

• Pretend your event cannot have any talks or panels. (It's medical: Someone in the group is severely allergic to them.) How will you fill your time? How will you communicate? 

• Pretend your event cannot use any seminar rooms or lecture halls. But  you can use any other place on campus, your city, or the environs. Where will you meet? What problems will your group encounter in these spaces? What benefits will those spaces have?

2.) The Assignment 

This is an assignment, so you have to do it. 

• Design a paired activity on the conference theme, to use at your conference. 

• Design a small group activity on the conference theme, to use at your conference.

• Go to Melissa Jacquart's wonderful repository of philosophy classroom activities. Navigate to the ""Entire Class Activities" section. Decide which one you will include in your conference. 

Now that you have done (or at least read) these "assignment" activities, here are my thoughts:

•  As teachers, we compel our students to do things to help them think through a topic, remove mental blocks, and generate ideas. We know this 'forcing' is helpful, but (outside of a few research contexts) we don't often encounter it in our creative lives. We don't provide it for our colleagues, and they don't provide it for us. 

• The Assignment is over now, so you don't have to do anything. But perhaps you now have three ideas that you might consider using. Maybe something else in Melissa Jacquart's repository sparked an idea. And maybe you have confronted the full force of your fear about assigning conference participants a small group activity. The horror. Is this fear indicative of a birdcage of convention? (See the section on inviting open-minded and supportive people.)

3.) The 'We Know No Conventions' 'Let's Pretend' Game

• See the "let's pretend" activity in the section "start with your goals... not convention". (It includes examples to illustrate.) 

• Roughly: imagine you were designing conference from scratch, with knowledge of academics' needs, but no knowledge of established conference conventions. 

• Hold this "let's pretend" conversation with your co-organisers, in the early stages of planning. 

• Start to design the event based on participant's varied needs and preferences, but not convention. 

• Only reintroduce convention at a slightly later design stage. 

• This activity will make background conference design conventions salient, so they can be re-assessed.

Since you're teachers, I think you likely already have great ideas for how to convene and communicate. The obstacle is applying them to research contexts. These obstacles aren't financial. They are emotional, cognitive, communicative, and social. Fortunately, we're good with that stuff. (Maybe head over to the 'pep talk' section.)

Imagine you were designing conference from scratch, with knowledge of academics' needs, but no knowledge of established conference conventions.

What ideas might you have? Could you hold this "let's pretend" conversation with your co-organisers, in the early stages of planning?

Together you can brainstorm "from scratch", based on participant's varied needs and preferences. And then only reintroduce convention at a later design stage. This method will make background conference design conventions salient, so they can be re-assessed.

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An illustration:
You might think, (1.) 'People like to have the weekends off work, or at least see the city they are visiting. Academics teach M-F, which hampers M-F conference scheduling. But research-active academics typically only teach for a couple of hours, at most. So participants could travel for a weekday conference, if the programme took their (fairly small!) teaching needs into account.'  

And, of course, (2.) many academics aren't teaching or have no qualms about cancelling class for conference travel. 

Thus, maybe an organiser can build participants' teaching schedules into the conference programme. So, for example, the schedule includes (for a small number of participants) a 30-minute zoom session tailored to their class (back at their home institution). This can enrich their course and, I think, your conference. 

With enough creative design, maybe this can be achieved for a surprisingly large proportion of the participants who want it. 30 minutes is not the whole class period, of course. It's a compromise. A conference zooming into a class could be a very cool opportunity for the students and an interesting activity for your conference.

Note you might already worry that the other participants would not like this use of their time. But (i.) see the advice for innovators box below, and (ii.) this is your brainstorming stage. You might think of solutions to these problems. Maybe, for example, the 30 minutes is fully optional, and the other people are at the bar, in another talk, or doing an alternative activity. 

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Another example of person-centred (not convention-first) design:
Narrow Ridge Retreat participants chose how many sessions were on their research and -- other than my interdicting read-aheads -- those individuals decided the structure of their session(s).

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You might find the Ted Talk by Priya Parker on 'Transformative Gatherings' helpful. Parker begins by contrasting her work gatherings on conflict resolution to her other (social) gatherings. She says the former have significantly more "meaning"; she wants her other gatherings to emulate her work. 

In a similar vein, I too am struck by the contrast between philosophy research gatherings and my other idea-centred gatherings. The latter include environmental retreats, pagan workshops, and circus design meetings. The following two contrasts are salient to me: 

(i.) Philosophy gatherings are homogenous in structure; the format seldom adapts to match diverse goals. and,
(ii.) Participants often report feeling tired from philosophy gatherings and energised from the other gatherings.

These two observations help shape my approach to designing philosophy gatherings. I find things like walking together whilst discussing ideas, for example, more uplifting and less tiring than conference rooms. So I would aim to incorporate some walking sessions, if feasible.  

People talk and think differently when walking together. They might be more collaborative sitting in a circle. Ideas are more expansive, and less analytical, when the room has a higher ceiling? What happens, then, when people sit on the floor. 

Can you hold a session in a graveyard? Or, at least, spend 30 minutes in a graveyard between the lunch hour and the afternoon sessions? It could shift the tone and content of the conversations for the remainder of the conference. Indeed, it might help those researchers develop more valuable and significant long-term research relationships.

We think, feel, and talk differently in different physical environments. Yet we convene for philosophy discussions in the same six physical places. (Large conference room, small conference room, room with tables in a circle, loud restaurant, bar, walking to the bar.) This choice of convening locations might be homogenising of research.

"I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. 

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought."— Jeanette Winterson

Some of the best conversations happen on the walk between the restaurant and the bar. When designing a gathering, perhaps ask yourself, can everyone leave their bags somewhere and take a slightly longer walk? Can this be done in an accessible way, and one that is not vulnerable to the vagaries of weather?

If you want a different vibe at a philosophy event, look at what the professional 'container builders' do when they are building vibes and community. (The section 'Put Out a Call for Interactive Activities' (above) explains 'container facilitation'.)

I can't list these techniques here now. (Indeed, that is my broader point: Container building is a huge area of expertise that is largely ignored when academics default to the typical monolithic conference structure.) But here are some examples from the Narrow Ridge retreat. 

We started with morning readings; one poem each morning. We spent 40 minutes each afternoon alone in nature, ideally returning to the same space. We did a labyrinth walk, we watched the sunset, followed by stargazing led by an expert and a no-lights night hike. We had a gratitude circle before each meal. Rather than applauding a speaker, we clicked. I introduced some, but not all, of those practices into the event.

Why? Because we aimed to create a different vibe; to signal that this was a different kind of philosophy event. And partly because some of those things are effective for some people. No one thing suited everybody: Some people disliked the gratitude circle and loved the labyrinth walk, for example, whilst other people were the exact opposite. 

What do I mean by 'effective'? I mean (i.) it changed how participants thought, talked, and related to other during the event in ways that were beneficial for the research projects, the research relationships that were formed, and (maybe) their character as researchers or as agents in the broader research community. (ii.) these benefits outweighed the negatives, such as annoying people to the point where they couldn't think straight and (iii.) the activities didn't take up too much time or detract from the overall research mission of the event. 

You might think, how do I think up innovations? Firstly, many came from the other participants, emerged organically from the vibe, or were suggested by the land. Secondly, you don't need to start from scratch! Emulate the container builders. How? Either go to facilitated spaces, or open-mindedly chat to people who do. And raise the question (to yourself or others) of whether each practice, activity, or innovation can be effectively adapted to academic research contexts. 

Re. "Effective"

What does "effective" mean? It means meeting some aims or enhances values in a ways that isn't (in some other way) bad or costly. This page doesn't yet have an section on aims for philosophy events. Instead, "aims" are interwoven into many sections. 

You can have a fairly expansive set of aims. 

Some activities are valuable simply because they change the Overton window of what is possible at a scholarly event, for example. I had an ambitious idea for an collaborative art event. Everyone said 'It won't work. There is no way that academics can be sufficiently collaborative at a conference.' That may be true now, but creating art together can change a community. Maybe I could do less ambitious collaborative art project now, and in a few years, try a more collaborative activity. 

Maybe philosophers making that art together isn't valuable, but making the community more collaborative is. (I think the art project also had research value, but I didn't pursue it because I had other ideas instead.)

An activity might also be effective because it changes how philosophy appears to outsiders. Undergraduates can later learn about it and think 'Oh, maybe philosophy is a good subject for me.'

Other values include enhancing the community, skillset, potentiality, and ideas-horizon of participants, including yourself. If you can facilitate an interactive research activity at a friendly invite-only eight-person workshop, maybe you can later offer it at the APA, to help enrich the APA main programme, for example. 

Even Broader Aims

(1.) Consider the Japanese concept of chindōgu. (Roughly speaking, it refers to "un-useless" inventions: Not useful; not completely useless.) Un-useless conference activities might be valuable precisely because they aren't aimed at any particular philosophical 'output'. They might elicit more openminded thoughts or build more creative community.

(2.) Innovations can become useful in unforeseen ways. I recently had my creativity students figure out how to make mix-and-match instructional manuals, for example. It was a cognitively challenging, but un-useless, design task. I then realised that mix-and-match instructional manuals could generate (much needed) explanations of (and publicity for) the pathways to gaining majors and minors in my department. 

Similarly, I didn't see how the Love lexicon workshop (below) could be useful in research contexts when I designed it. But I then realised it could improve the foundations of the very next research talk I attended. (See Appendix III of the Love Lexicon APA activity sheet, below, for details.) 

(3.) For some workshops, I aim simply to have some* participants enter the euphoria of creative communal thought. That is an unusual aim for contemporary academia, because it isn't a set of outcomes, such as a new publication. It is just the joy of thinking together. These joyful intellectual moments build community, sparks interest and is -- most of all -- valuable in its own right.

* re. "Some": in any group, there is an inevitable diversity of experience. Don't fight it! Embrace it. 

re. "creative communal thought."

On that topic, here is a quote: 

 “A couple people seem to be reticent about the term ‘study,’ but is there a way to be in the undercommons that isn’t intellectual?

Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we were using the term ‘study,’ I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.  The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity.

The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities was already there. To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.” [paragraph breaks added]
― Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

[This section is a work in progress.]

Innovating Radically? Start Fresh, and Start with the People
Here is my advice for very innovative events, such as unconferencing: Do not take an existing annual event, with existing regulars, and change it. You might encounter resistance and confusion from the regulars. Instead, start a whole new event, and begin with the invite list: Who do you want there? Who is "up for" innovation? Who would appreciate innovation, and go with the flow? 

Invite those people, and leave the old guard to enjoy normal events. This is easier and more valuable for everybody. 

My advice: The more that you want to innovate, the more picky you should be about the invite list. If you're just adding (for example) the espirit de l'escalier session to a normal conference format, anyone can attend. If you are fully unconferencing, don't invite folks who express cynicism about the idea. Facilitating is hard, and you owe it to yourself to make your life easier. Setting yourself up for success, by creating the right team, will likely be better for the other participants too. (I can't follow this advice well because I have a penchant for rebels who hate being told what to do. I'm not one, but most of my buddies are like this.)

Communication is Crucial
Communicate clearly in advance; don't throw innovation at people who were expecting a standard structure. The default expectations are so strong that it would be a bait-and-switch.

If it's a CFP-based event, signal hard that it is unconferencing or highly innovative in structure. You want to attract the people who will make it a success. You cannot make it a success alone. You need buy-in from the participants, and that means attracting the right people. 

Best Practices: Be Mindful of Needs
Be mindful that people have needs. Here are two examples. There are many more. 

A lot of people, if they are presenting, need to know well in advance what day their presentation will be on.
A lot of people rely on powerpoint. You don't need to provide it. They can do without. But be mindful of their default expectations. 

Be Wary of Inviting Senior, 'Big Name' People to 'Cocoon-Vibe' Events

If you want a collaborative, creative, 'embryo-forming'*, or collaboration-building event, you need to think about who is there. Get creative, open-minded people in the door. But, more important than admission is exclusion: Who is not there. You need to keep the 'wrong' people out.

What do I mean by 'wrong'? I mean wrong for your event.

I have watched the entire mood lift as one 'wrong vibe' senior speaker leaves a dinner table to catch a flight. Almost immediately, the remaining people relax and start talking freely. Their leaving was like hitting 'reset' for the precious few remaining hours of the conference. One 'Big Name', if they aren't chill, will kill a 'doula supportive' or 'playing with thought' community vibe mood; people won't relax and bond, and the new ideas won't flow. 

Similarly, one person (at any career stage) who comes across as judgemental, 'smarter-than-thou', or who other people want to impress, will stifle free-flowing creativity or candour. 

Senior, highly strung, and censorious people play important roles in academic events. They are valuable members of our community. But their presence is not an alloyed good at all events. If you want a Doula-Cocoon event, and are considering inviting a Big Name, I recommend that you first know them very well, and know that they will work to constantly signal 'I'm relaxed and open-minded' to everyone around them. 

Success can be a curse. Or, at least, it has costs. Well-known people have to work extra-hard for people to relax around them; a lot of people don't even aim for that effect. It pains me to say it, but some moods simply don't happen with a man in the room; similarly, some bonding simply won't happen with senior people around, however cool they are. If you want genuine relaxing, bonding, and new-idea-nurturing vibe, be extra cautious about which (if any) senior people you invite.

Note, though, that different philosophy events have different aims. They have different roles in our broader ecology of research communities. For many events, inviting senior people is an excellent idea. 

 *  'Embryo' is a metaphor. See the Art of Gathering Statement, for example. 

Get Feedback
"Listening is the first step and the last step" -- Cantus Fraggle

I recommend signalling hard that you are receptive to feedback, including anonymous feedback, and keep those channels open and well-advertised for a long duration after the event.

Consider, for example, the well-established events that people are invested in: Midsouth, Athena, Metaphysical Mayhem, RoME, etc... When organisers have open feedback channels they can receive ideas, critiques, gratitude, etc. for many years.

Metabolise Feedback
Innovating requires trial and error: Performance-Feedback-Self Assessment-Revision.

I recommend that you proactively seek feedback, but take it with a thick skin and a grain of salt. Bear in mind that people tend to over-complain about community organisers and culture bearers.

Expect negative feedback. This is because (a.) People criticise social organisers a lot. I once received negative feedback from someone because their own plus-one didn't clear up a mess that the plus one made during a large event at my house. I didn't even know about the mess until the complaint, which was days later. (b.) People are extremely varied in what they prefer. No event or gathering will suit everybody -- you can't please everybody -- but this is generally under-recognised. (c.) Social innovation attracts criticism: Innovation is salient; defaulting to the norms is largely invisible. (d.) People often understand innovation as a criticism of existing social forms, and thus get defensive (or get on the attack). I have received a lot of push back simply from saying that innovation into diverse modes of gathering are good for philosophy. I think some people feel threatened because they falsely think I am criticising their way of doing things. Innovation is good even when there is nothing bad about talks. 

Thus, you should expect criticism, alas. You are swimming upstream. That can feel hard. But (and here is a pep talk) if everyone simply goes with the flow, it leads to social  homogeneity. Research needs variety and creativity.

Acknowledge the Resistance and Obstacles

If you want to innovate, you'll encounter obstacles. One is fear. The norms are so strong that even the relatively small changes, like adopting the 'presentation-chat-Q&A' structure requires courage. Breaking up an audience into groups and have them do an activity is terrifying. Its much easier to just line up a set of normal-structure talks. I've suggested some ways to reduce these obstacles, such as bringing in other people to facilitate interactive events, via CFP, or starting with small groups, small changes, or different contexts (such as public philosophy outreach or the classroom) to build your skills and confidence. 

But maybe its also worth acknowledging these obstacles and talking through them. They aren't financial. They aren't time. (Compared to an essay, for example, a few hours of innovative conference prep makes a big impact.) To be frank, they probably aren't having the ideas about how to do things differently.

They are applying those ideas to research contexts. The obstacles are emotional, cognitive, communicative, and social. There's social inertia, for example, and fear of public failing or flailing.

This might help: 

• In theory, philosophers are mavericks. We pride ourselves on doing things differently. If reminded of this, maybe your innovations will seem fitting, rather than like some external and inappropriate silicon valley, life coach, or crystal-loving neo-hippy shit that infiltrated the pure and rigorous hallways of analytic philosophy.

• Philosophy has a long and rich history of varied modes of gathering. Maybe the homogenous 'talk Q&A' modes of gathering are a recent phenomena. (Maybe a bi-product of university travel funding structures?) I'm not a historian, but let's gesture vaguely at our history. Consider the peripatetics, the gatherings at the agora, the askēsis practices of the ancients, the cafe traditions of the enlightenment, the 'at homes' and 'salons' of bohemian intellectuals, and the interlocking ecologies of gathering structures in fecund periods of thought (see chapter 8 of the doctoral version of The Viennese Students of Civilisation, for example. Maybe Chapter Two in the published version.) 

• From a historical perspective, then, maybe it's talks and Q&As, not other activities, that need justifying.

• Consider also the 'living philosophy' ideas of thinkers like Simone Weil and Ignatius of Loyola. [Connection not typed up...] therefore art galleries, philosophy interviews facilitated by tarot, etc. 

The 'Doll's Tea Party' Worry

There is another worry: Coming across as authoritarian, unchill, or weird. 

Some factors that may contribute to a 'participants at a doll's tea party' sensation: 

• A lot of time sitting and listening, esp. to self-appointed experts, with limited opportunities to ask questions or have discussions. 

• Very little 'down time'. 

• Facilitators who had unpopular innovative ideas about how to manage sessions, where those management strategies were used for every session. 

• Innovations and structures that disempower participants, increase hierarchy, or convey the sense that there is one 'correct' way to do things.

• Relatedly, telling chairs how to chair can be unwelcome to some people (not to everyone).

• Listening to the same people a lot. The sense that there is a lot of talented, interesting, and insightful people in the room, but not a lot of ways to get to know them or learn from them.  

• The event being dominated by one or a few people, especially if they come across as privileged or uptight.

• A sense that you're being judged.
  
  

Some features that could mitigate this: 

• Keep the facilitated activities short.

• Have varied kinds of innovation.

• Give participants control over innovations or structure, such as (for example) letting speakers decide how to divide up their allotted 140 minutes (into one session or two, for example). [The danger here is that you flood their inbox with emails, trying to communicate with them through these decisions.]

• Delegate power.

• Make activities optional. Philosophical art gallery trips, activity sheets, etc can be optional. Think hard about what you care about as the organiser*, convey that to the participants, and convey that you are happy for the rest to slide.

• Charisma. Hate to say it, but this is a big "doll's tea party" factor. (For this reason, btw, it helps if facilitators are well-rested before the event starts. Increased executive function increases apparent charisma.)

• Overall vibe. If you take an event that comes across as chill (such as the MidSouth or (I think) RoME), you can add facilitated group activities, and they will be read as fun and fringey. If you have a departmental culture or personal leadership style that comes across as uptight, it's harder to pull off. **

When I arrived at Rutgers, the slogan from our department and graduate programme leadership was "you are always in the context of assessment." As a result, it would be harder for those people to facilitate a creative side quest activity in our community, for example. 

• Proactively seek feedback, ideally throughout and also anonymously at the end.

*Don't kid yourself that the answer is nothing. If you organised a conference, you are invested in it. Be honest with yourself and others about it.

** This gets interesting though: Do people who seem 'chill' sometimes 'top from the bottom' by hiding what they care about? Maybe chillax 'do whatever' teachers are more authoritarian, in a patrimonial way, than the 'here are the rules, rubrics, expectations, and late penalties' teachers, because the 'chillax' ones haven't made their expectations and rubrics transparent. Students instead have to constantly second-guess what the 'chillax' teacher values and model themselves on him, rather than the rules. So, similarly, is a facilitator says (for example) that they don't care whether participants use the 'philosophy in the art gallery' activity sheet, do they come across as crypto-authoritarian? Or, at least, do they seed that fear? (This also relates to the costs of career success; with career success, it's harder to shed perceived authority.)

Final Pep Talk

Finally, current academic norms foster zero-sum thinking, competitiveness, and resentment; build the community you want to retire in.

Suppose you are running an online conference. You know that organic, small group or one-on-one chat is crucial. Without it, participants won't meet new people, and (other than asking questions), they may as well have listened to recordings at their leisure. Conversation is a generative force. For many people, it is where the 'magic' happens, such as kindling new ideas, talking through objections, or realising which parts of a theory need to be explained in an essay. Informal, unfacilitated chat contribute a lot of the value of convening. 

You also know it will be awkward as fuck. 

Arriving into 'break out rooms' is awkward. The transition from facilitated Q&A to general chat after a Zoom talk is awkward. In that contexts, sometimes the sense of 'awkward' never fully dissipates. 

Leaving online chats is awkward. Starting them is awkward. Waving on Zoom is awkward. Not waving is awkward. Overlapping talk is awkward. Silence is awkward. Telling people they're muted is awkward. Letting them voice silently is also awkward. Eating on camera is awkward. Cat butts are awkward. (Also, kinda funny.) It's all fucking awkward, but these moments are an inevitable part of getting through to the good stuff. 

So, you're facilitating an online conference. Here are some options: 

1. No Chats. Fear the awkward and thus do not create any unfacilitated, informal, or interstitial spaces for small group or one-on-one chats at your online conference. I have strong views about this option.

2. Laissez-Faire. Simply let the awkward happen. It also happens at in-person conferences, after all, when people crowd the speaker after a talk, insert themselves into coffee break chats, avoid introductions because they can't recall the relevant names, find secluded bathrooms to poop, and ignore the old guy who fell asleep during the talk. None of this is bad conduct. It's just normal people navigating the 'meat space' awkward that they are accustomed to.

So, similarly, the laissez-faire approach simply let's it happen. Create the social spaces, and most of the awkward dissipates within seconds anyway. 

3. Acknowledge it. Include in your 'hosting' messaging that some inevitable awkward happens, but remind people to ride it out, since humanity is relatively new to online conventions. This might be a version of 'causing the awkward', below.

4. The Facilitator's Slide. Start with something like a name game, orthodox introductions, or 'get to know' you questions. This might be after a talk just ends. (Unconventional timing, but people will go with it.) 

Now slide into another activity that seeds the informal, unfacilitated discussion. Don't draw attention to what you did. Then stop facilitating. You're done. It's 'informal chat' time now. I label this time 'stay-and-chat' on a programme, and I make clear that people can leave whenever. 

Given that you're the host, people will continue look to you as an authority, but you can signal lack of authority by moving to the kitchen and making dinner on camera.

I would similarly signal "unauthority" at Playhouse events. I'd give the first participants to arrive some tasks to help set up the event, and then disappear. It set the tone. (Those were usually 'radical co-creation' events.)  

Facilitation is a skill. Like all skills, it can be developed through practice. So feel free to think of the 'facilitator's slide' as a way to 'cause the awkward.' That way, if it goes wrong, it goes right.

5. Cause the Awkward. Here is the thought: If the organiser causes the awkward, the participants can relax because they have someone else to blame for the awkward. Teachers do something similar when they 'compel' students, such as recalcitrant teenagers, to do something that they secretly - perhaps unknowingly - want to do anyway, such as learning to partner dance. The requirement (the apparent lack of freedom) gives them the freedom to do the thing. 

Similarly, the facilitator compels people to start speaking, and suggests or requires how that interaction will go, at least at first. Ideally, the interactions then continue on their own steam, but perhaps in a less hierarchical, or more focused or creative, way than they would have done without the initial facilitation. 

Maybe by appearing to disempower the participants (by giving them an instruction) you actually empower them. Why? Firstly, they can choose to ignore you or follow the instruction. More importantly, participants now have a social tool that allows them to interrupt a tangent, unfruitful chat, tense moment, or conversation-dominating person, by strategically returning to the 'group assignment'.

Ideas [scruffy section]

• See the 'mini activities for groups' section (above), for some ideas. I don't want to duplicate material on this webpage, so I'll probably just add ideas there.

• Before creating break-out rooms, do one of these: 

1. Provide 1-3 questions for the group to seed discussion.

2. Ask the question 'what would be a good question to ask at this juncture?' Tell participants to think of those questions and articulate them in the break out room. 

3. Give the group(s) an assignment to report back with (like your the teacher doing the 'small group-report back sequence). 

• If it were me, I would aim for those questions and activities to float on the border between scholarly and quirky: Not simply a straight dive into the ordinary hard research questions of philosophy; not simply 'what are you eating for lunch and how are the kids'. They are more like... creative ways to re-understand a philosophy topic, using left-field thinking. (I'll try to swing back and list these kinds of question / activity. But maybe they are in another section on this page.)  

Other than not creating any opportunities for informal chats, I think any of those options can work. The decision depends on the character, skills, values, and preferences of the facilitators and participants, size of the conference, and many other factors. 

That said, I'll say a few things in favour of 'cause the awkward', because it obviously needs motivating compared to the others. 

Why cause the awkward?

a.) Benefits for your event:

'Cause the awkward' is a bold move, but the hope is that these activities will lead to more fruitful conversations afterwards, and might be a way to (i.) speed up or reduce the awkward, (ii.) externalise the awkward onto you, (iii.) harness your pre-existing teaching skills and activities to enrich research contexts (see the section 'A Guiding Question for Organisers: Why & How Does Research-Level Education Work?'), and (iv.) improve and diversify the conference by following Priya Parker's admonition, “Don’t Be A Chill Host”. (See also the 'surreptitiously empowered' point, above; pro-active event facilitation protects participants from other participants.) 

b.) Downstream benefits

'Causing the awkward' might illustrate how tackling the obstacles of online life can enrich in-person life: Maybe the 'cause the awkward' activity ideas will inspire and enrich in-person conference facilitation. Facilitators can gain skills, and participants will have experiences that can alter the Overton window towards more varied, creative, and inclusive conference formats.
In other words, maybe these activities can lead to more equitable, fair, and fruitful conferences by initiating conversation structures that are less dominated by social hierarchy and pre-existing relationships, and allowing participants to steer conversations in fruitful ways. 

Suppose one wants to run a wilderness conference, but worries that it is exclusionary: How would wheelchair users attend, for example? I am not an expert in this, but here are four thoughts: 

1. Consult with experts! Don't reinvent the wheel. Others have forged these paths before you. There are many accessible nature groups, who want to help. Google your region to find one.
   
   

2. I think that if is possible for tall ship sailing, it is possible for philosophy under the stars. (I have a background in tall ship sailing. I never sailed that ship, but I toured it during voyages with a sister charity.) These innovations need people to try it, whilst learning from disability groups. 

Innovation in these directions can help make philosophy more inclusive and accessible to all, including when back in orthodox campus and hotel based gatherings. If we expand what is possible for academic gatherings, including in nature, it can change the norms when we convene in cities.

3. Ask specific individuals. If you have specific individuals in mind, ask them for ideas. They are the true experts
   
   

4. Facilitation is a skill. And all skills can be developed. This means you can break the mould now, to change what is possible later. Perhaps consider facilitating a wilderness conference as a developmental stage: That is, running initial conferences in the wilderness can help you better understand how to do this with various disabled participants. (Note, though, that forging ahead cannot replace consulting with the experts!)

Here is my view: If you think convening in nature is a cognitive and social benefit, then (I think) it is worth transcending these apparent boundaries, towards more inclusive and radical modes of gathering.

Academics are, as a class, quite wealthy. Not all academics, of course. But many studies show that typically academics were brought up in middle class or professional class homes and had at least one parent who went to college.
Academia breathes middle class norms and barely realises it: Restaurants, hotels, flights, seminar rooms. No visible bra straps. We all at least pretend to know who Chopin is. Similarly, academia's assumptions and norms are city-centric
These norms and social expectations are an accessibility issue. And it isn't just the financial cost of the city and the middle class. Even when other participants code switch and fake it, they are still acting in a different world. And, in academia, this world is assumed to be superior to the alternatives. Or maybe academics don't realise there are alternatives. We are playing acting in a tea party that is treated like the only way to eat.
Can someone bring you to the lower decks of the Titanic? It's a party.

 
Varying conference modes and locations can make academia feel more inclusive whilst also enriching the mainstream. Academia can learn a lot from fringe, outsider, countercultural, lower class, creative, rural, historical, and foreign norms.
Food trucks, for example, can lead to better social interactions and are (to some participants) more comfortable and familiar than restaurants. Parks, woods, and water edges are normal places of bonding, not abnormal. Restaurants, by contrast, are the weird, challenging places.

Is hosting events in the countryside expensive?
Folks often assume that my wilderness retreat was expensive. Not at all! It was five days long and cost $150 per person, for full room and board. That is $30 per person day for all food and lodging. All meals, refreshments, etc were included. We only had to bring alcohol. Assuming that the wilderness is expensive assumes the wilderness is a tourist place with tourist prices. But it is also--from a different perspective--our home.
But one can't simply slip into the Titanic's lower decks, or cold-call request a $30/day all-inclusive wilderness retreat. That won't work. Academia needs insiders with those connections, and those insiders must trust the mainstream academics to behave appropriately in those spaces. Otherwise they can't come in. (Jennifer Lackey shares a related insight about how time-bound academic sessions clashed with Indigenous convening norms in her epistemic reparations project.) Experimentally adopting different academic modes, ways of gathering, and places of gathering can cultivate the social flexibility to allow academics to learn together in more spaces and in more ways, and with more people.

Also check the general creative approaches to philosophy showcased at the bottom of this page. Some of those ideas can be incorporated into a conference. 

A. Innovative conferences

• Philosophy in the Wild

• The Coffee Break Conference of Aesthetics

• The New Ethics of Belief Retreat

• The APA/AAPT Teaching Hub. Their CFPs request interactive sessions and specifies what this means. 

• I have heard that Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach is fruitfully innovate in mode. The website doesn't currently contain details, alas.

• Cogtweeto: Aims to to provide a decentralised, accessible forum for philosophical engagement, beyond the standard conference model, through Twitter.
  
  

B. Innovative Public Philosophy Events

The above "conference innovation" suggestions focus on research contexts. But innovations in research, teaching, and public philosophy gatherings (modes & communication) are deeply interconnected. Facilitators and innovators inspire & empower another. Public philosophy programming should not be simply talks & Q&As in which the public listens to experts.

•  Night of Ideas includes gallery tours, poetry readings, etc.

• See innovative public philosophy examples in Ian Olasov's excellent essay Philosophical Spaces.

• Public philosophy whilst walking initiatives, such as one described in the Olasov article (above) and Paul Knights leads 'Philosophy on Foot', a growing programme of 'walking enquiries' in the Yorkshire Pennines. Participants discuss 'philosophical ideas, oriented around the history and ecology of place, and the values we express in our relationship to the landscapes we cherish.' 

This isn’t about organising innovative events, per se. But it is about the quality of interdisciplinary events. And inter-disciplinarity is related to innovation. (If nothing else, it helps you get funding.) 

Interdisciplinary events get a bad rap. 

And, at interdisciplinary events*, philosophers often get a bad rap.

As a group, we ask the wrong questions. Our colleagues don’t like it.

fwiw, here is my advice about how to ask a question at an interdisciplinary event.*

Ask yourself: What can I ask about,

1.) that the speaker wants to talk about, and
2.) that the audience wants to hear the speaker talk about,

such that,
 

3.) many people (including, ideally, the speaker herself) will learn something from the speaker because she speaks on that topic.

Ask that question. 

You’re a philosopher. You are probably especially well-positioned to do this. 

And, yes, you can probably also raise a cutting objection. Generally speaking, don’t do this.

And, yeah... you can probably make suggestions to drastically improve the direction of the project, from our perspective. Maybe try to refrain. 

Despite what you have been told, it is not what the event if for. And despite what your discipline trained-brain tells you, it won’t improve the event. 

If you want to improve the event, hold off on objections and (maybe even) major suggestions until the main event ends. You can try to catch the speaker later, without the audience.

____

To be honest, I am ambivalent about the “refrain from major suggestions” part. I might cut it. Why? Because such suggestions can satisfy a different good-making conjunction:

1.) The speaker can think better about the topic in virtue of your suggestion / it would be good for the project if the speaker acts on your suggestion

and, importantly,
 

2.) The audience will learn something that is interesting to them because you spoke about it.

That is hard to pass up. It feels like that is what we, as academic event attendees, are meant to do. Hence, my ambivalence. But I do think meeting the first three conditions enhances the event more, qua the intended functions and success conditions of most interdisciplinary events. 

If you can make the speaker learn something from hearing herself speak… mwah. Chef's kiss.

And, in either case, if the second conjunct is missing, think of a different question.

_____

Note: By "interdisciplinary events", I mean things like humanities centres, artist’ talks, campus programming, book clubs, and the like. I do not mean specialist research events like the PPE, SSPP, or the Consciousness conference. 

They are full-on research events and, as such, you should feel free to be your normal know-it-all, lecture-disguised-as-question,  objection-first, nitpicking gadfly philosopher self. It's what we all signed up for.