ABSTRACT
This chapter takes stock of an experiment with a key feature of academic conferencing: the panel session. Specifically, this experiment was organised in two timeslots of an academic conference on the theme of ‘visualising international law’ taking place in Sofia, Bulgaria. In the first section, we describe the two central activities of the experiment: (1) walking/drawing and (2) collaging. The first activity involved a walking tour through the city centre of Sofia. Participants were given the brief to collect materials that were reminiscent of law to them on this walk through making sketches, collecting paper scraps, or otherwise. In the second activity, these materials were handed over to a different group of participants, who used them to make collages. Both activities flipped the script of academic conferencing to invite participants to actively visualise international law and so to become engaged themselves in the object of study. The last section of the chapter provides a deeper reflection on the use of these techniques as part of the legal sightseeing methodology. We reflect on walking and collaging as methods of (participatory) data collection and discuss the outcomes of the experiment. Central here is how we can use seeing, visualising, and showing as a method of legal sightseeing in our academic practice, specifically to reshape the form and function of academic conferencing, and how this affects and is affected by experiments with novel methods of data collection, ways of writing, and research dissemination.
