ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focuses on the ways in which conference spaces contribute to the knowledge production that plays out within them. While conferences are often conceptualised as containing knowledge production, this chapter explores the ways in which spaces and material conditions of conferences shape the bodies and activities that are involved in the conference. The first part of the chapter draws on a variety of different ways in which conferences are regulated by their own citationality, which sets familiar expectations for how attendees will move and behave. This part of the chapter also addresses the ways in which structural inequality enters into material analyses of conference spaces, by identifying how conferences make it apparent to some delegates that they do not belong. The second part of the chapter focuses on the practice of chairing or moderating, where the role of chair is analysed as a material construction, but the role is also seen as requiring citationality to function. The discussion of chairing is structured around a particular session at the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (FWSA) conference in the UK, where the chair was faced with difficult decisions during the question and answer section of a controversial paper on the sexualisation of women in the media.
