The Exhaustion of Performed "Engaging-With" In Three-Day Conferences

and why I say no to "critical collegiality"

The email arrives on a Friday evening, sandwiched between conference reminders and administrative requests. Polite, professional, utterly reasonable:

"We intentionally keep the conferences small in order to foster critical collegiality and discussion, which in turn depend on the active participation of all delegates throughout the entirety of the conference."

My chest tightens reading it. Not because I don't understand the logic—I do, completely—but because of what happens to my body when institutional politeness packages coercion as care. The phrase "obligation to participate" sits heavy in my stomach like undigested food. My skin feels too thin, my nervous system already anticipating the three days of performed involvement and dedication that await.

I know what we mean by "active participation." The nodding at appropriate intervals. The thoughtful questions that demonstrate you've been listening, "really listening", not just waiting for your turn to speak. The coffee break conversations where silence and disappearance reads as antisocial rather than contemplative or just recharging. The way your face must register the right amount of intellectual commitment, concern, curiosity—but not too much, never too much, because intensity makes people uncomfortable.

The tyranny is in the word "active."

As if thinking could only happen visibly, as if understanding required constant demonstration, as if the most valuable responses to complex ideas were always immediate and articulable.

I know how I've done my best thinking in the margins of conferences—walking alone between sessions, sitting quietly while others debate, letting ideas settle into my body like sediment in still water. But none of this counts as participation. None of this contributes to this idea of "critical collegiality."

Critical collegiality…

The phrase makes me want to disappear into my strongest noise-cancelling headphones, to find a room where light filters gently through half-drawn curtains and all the demanding voices fade to nothing.

It sounds like academic care, like intellectual community, like the kind of scholarly conversation that makes conferences worthwhile.

What it means to me, however: perform your being-very-involved in ways we can recognise and measure. Speak at the prescribed volume. Ask questions that sound like questions rather than observations. Disagree productively, not passionately. Show us you're here, present, contributing to the collective endeavour of knowledge production.

But what if the artificial conference room lights make you feel like you're being interrogated? What if the moment someone asks "Any thoughts on this?" your mind goes completely blank, not from disinterest but from the sudden pressure to have an opinion ready for public consumption? What if you're the person who needs to let ideas settle overnight before you know what you actually think about them, who does your best processing while walking alone after the session ends?

I am that person.

At times.

The one whose most honest response to a brilliant paper is often silence—not vacant silence, but the kind that comes from being so overwhelmed by the connections suddenly blazing across your consciousness that speaking feels like it would shatter something fragile taking shape in my understanding.

I've watched myself disappear in conferences that demand active participation for the whole period of two or three days (and if we're honest, I think, all conferences imply that you participate in everry session from morning to evening, plus the conference dinner and the socialising activity). Not physically disappearing, I mean—I'm still there, still nodding, still producing appropriate facial expressions—but intellectually, emotionally. The energy required to perform involvement uses up all the energy I might have had for actually engaging with ideas. I become a participation machine, manufacturing responses that sound thoughtful while my real thinking shuts down under the surveillance of mandatory collegiality.

Sometimes I've disappeared literally too. Slipped out during coffee breaks when the sensory overload became too much, when the forced networking felt like sandpaper against my skin. Found myself walking empty hotel corridors or sitting in bathroom stalls just to regulate, to find a pocket of quiet in the relentless sociability. Travel makes it worse sometimes—cancelled flights that strand you overnight in airports, delayed connections that scramble your carefully planned routines, the constant adaptation to spaces and schedules designed for different kinds of bodies.

By the time you arrive at the conference, you're already running on empty. And then there's that familiar voice whispering that you don't belong here anyway, that everyone else knows something you don't, that your presence is a mistake someone will eventually notice. Imposter syndrome thrives in spaces that demand constant performance of intellectual belonging.

The "small conference" is supposed to be intimate, personal, conducive to deep conversation. But intimacy cannot be demanded. Community cannot be legislated. The "stringent selection process" that admits only those willing to participate "for the full duration" creates not collegiality but compliance. Everyone performing their commitment to the collective endeavour, everyone demonstrating their worthiness of having been selected, everyone afraid of being caught not participating actively enough.

I think about the conferences I've loved, the ones where I found myself thinking differently about a topic than I had before. They were places—often also online—where silence was allowed to exist without interpretation, where you could listen deeply without having to prove you were listening, where ideas could develop slowly without the pressure of immediate articulation. The best conversations emerged organically, in chats and after-conference emails, but also in random meetings beyond conference settings, when people stopped performing their scholarly selves and started thinking out loud about things that actually puzzled them.

But those conferences didn't announce their expectations upfront. They didn't make participation a condition of attendance. They trusted that people who chose to be there would engage in whatever ways served the thinking, not whatever ways served the optics of involvement and participation.

I keep returning to a question that makes me uncomfortable: which kinds of minds and bodies get counted as present, as contributing, as intellectually valuable? Tobin Siebers writes about "disability aesthetics"—how certain ways of being in the world get marked as deficient when they're actually just different approaches to experiencing and processing reality. The conference email assumes that valuable contribution looks the same for everyone, that intellectual participation manifests uniformly across different processing speeds, different comfort levels with public speech, different needs for sensory regulation.

Such participation requirements don't explicitly exclude anyone—they're far too polite for that, too wrapped in the language of academic inclusion. Instead, they create conditions where only certain kinds of intellectual performance get recognised as legitimate forms of "participating". If your mind works slowly, if your best insights emerge through writing rather than speaking, if you need movement or strategic withdrawal to process complex ideas, you become invisible under such metrics of active participation. The system doesn't call you deficient, of course; it simply doesn't see you at all.

I catch myself doing this constantly—second-guessing whether my quiet absorption during presentations actually counts as engaging-with, wondering if my need to walk alone after sessions means I'm antisocial rather than thoughtful. The voice in my head starts sounding like those conference emails: polite, concerned, gently suggesting that maybe I'm just not trying hard enough to participate properly. It's insidious how quickly you can start measuring your own mind against standards that were never designed for how you think.

Sitting with that email, I think that underneath the polite language, it isn't really about intellectual community at all—it's about fear (starting to see a pattern here throughout the texts so far…).

Everyone's fear.

The organisers, terrified their carefully curated event will feel flat. The participants, worried they'll waste money on conversations that don't ignite anything. The institutions, desperate to prove these expensive gatherings produce something measurable for the grant reports.

So we invent participation requirements—or rather social contracts—like insurance policies against disappointment. But you can't insure against the unpredictability of intellectual excitement.

Don't insight arrive sideways?

In the pause between questions, in the offhand comment that makes your worldview suddenly rearrange itself, in the thought that surfaces three days later while you're making coffee.

None of this necessarily happens on schedule or in formats that read as "active participation."

What we end up with instead is intellectual theater. Rooms where everyone performs the gestures of deep thinking while monitoring themselves for adequate participation.

The crushing part is how this system sorts people into visible and invisible scholars. I'd rather spend conferences listening deeply, letting presentations settle into my understanding, maybe writing a thoughtful email, blog post or Mastodon thread weeks later when ideas have had time to ferment. But slow processing, careful reflection, the work that happens in margins—none of this registers in the conventional participation calculus. The scholar who speaks immediately gets credit for being-so-involved. The one who thinks slowly gets marked absent.

Such emails usually end with gratitude for "understanding and cooperation." As if this were a collaborative agreement rather than a unilateral demand. As if my understanding somehow mitigates the violence of being told how to use my body and mind in intellectual space.

I won't go to this conference.

Even though the preliminary programme sounds inspiring, even though the conference city would satisfy my photographer's curiosity about new places and unfamiliar light.

I simply won't.

The cost of three days performing active participation, of monitoring my face for appropriate expressions of intellectually engaging-with, of manufacturing responses when what I need is time to think—it's too high.

My nervous system is worth more than "critical collegiality", whatever it is.

This feels like giving up, and maybe it is.

But sometimes refusing becomes its own kind of knowledge. Not the kind you can cite or present or add to your CV, but the kind that lives in your body—the understanding that comes from listening to what your own limits are trying to tell you.

I'll miss the conversations that might have happened in hallways. The ideas that could have shifted something in my thinking. The serendipitous connections that only emerge when minds gather in the same physical space.

But I won't miss the person I become when I'm trying too hard to be the person someone else thinks I should be. Not. at. all.

There's something to be said for knowing when to step back from the collective endeavour. For trusting that intellectual community might be larger than any single conference, more resilient than any individual participation or non-participation. The work continues whether I'm in that room or not. And maybe that's oddly comforting.

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Image: © Victoria Mummelthei rabbitingyears