ABSTRACT
This autoethnographic account from the Welcome Hut’s UK conference tour introduces an emerging research methodology. The ‘conference fringe’ offers arts-based storytelling around a mobile tiny house to facilitate introvert conviviality among delegates. The research design explores the existential dimension of well-being at events: belongingness, alienation and the move towards participatory conference cultures. The informal storytelling venue invites to perceive conference interactions and event flows from the perspective of the outdoor margins, not from within the venue’s indoor walls. Psychosocial as well as socio-political struggles are frequently silenced and hidden from a conference’s centre stage. The transient fringe perspective raises awareness of the spatial dimension of inclusivity as a crucial factor for enabling or disabling connectivity during events. Attention to ‘safe space’ is crucial to welcome the diversity of delegate experiences.
So-called inclusive formats of conferencing are then expected to move beyond schemes that allow individuals to develop resilience in the face of challenging circumstances. Marginalisation research could stretch this individualistic focus to wider structural dysfunctions and apply more participatory shifts for event accessibility. The status quo of exclusionary event set-ups can be challenged through fluid and relational research designs that expand well-being research beyond observable data sets. Disruptive conferencing can hold open spaces for existential struggles. As an alternative to data collection, the tiny house campus tour did not extract data from events, but instead crafted alternative standpoints in conferencing as a way of being in the academic world beyond the frequently imposed norm of ableist academic networking.
