Conference in Kerala: Not Summer Camp but a Learning Experience

It will be difficult to describe the Mid-Year Conference… my very first conference ever. First, basic information. Kerala is a state on the southwest coast of India, south of Goa. The tourist headline is “God’s Own Country,” and apparently Kerala has a 100% literacy rate. All of the South Asian Fulbright programs came to this conference, though since it was post-tsunami the Fulbrighters in Sri Lanka did not attend. It was quite moving to hear the delegates from Pakistan describe how this was their first visit to India. It was held in a newly built (renovated?) management college campus, which was very nice and gave excellent views of the palm tree hills spreading out in all directions.

I’d say on the whole I had a positive experience, but that they worked us all a bit to hard with the inflexible scheduling. 7am to 7pm almost non-stop, on a hill campus 40 minutes away from the hotels (no reasonable escape route), made for some exhaustion. I would have preferred a more summer camp motif, but they seemed pretty set on fitting a week schedule into four days. On this front, I actually had an advantage over most of the people there – being a recent graduate from college rather than a professor or grad student, I am not quite acquainted with the idea of being free to do whatever I want, and don’t mind being herded around like a sheep. Or, maybe it’s a personality thing, who knows. Baaa. We were given these conference program manuals at the beginning, showing what to do at what time. It also has a photo and info about everyone attending (again getting me hoping for more of a summer camp), though they didn’t receive all of my information so I looked like a loser with two lines of info. And I am, comparatively, really inexperienced academically, anyways. I’m hyper-aware of this and purposefully did not sign up to do a presentation of my research there, because I imagined that everyone else there would be an expert on my topic. Why would anyone sign up to present their own first try at field research in front of a room full of experts? This turned out to be an exaggeration of my imagination, however. (the word for imagination in nepali is ‘kalpana,’ isn’t that pretty?) There were a couple hundred people at the conference, but there was a wide range of disciplines represented. It turns out I was the only one studying my research topic (duh!!). So I came away from it feeling good in that I know I wouldn’t be as afraid to do a presentation of my research if the opportunity arose again, because I would be able to tell people about a topic I find very interesting. (Note; as afraid. I would still be fairly mortified to have to make any sort of formal speech in front of people I don’t know at all. Or people I do know.)

There were many, many presentations, each ten minutes long. They were mostly powerpoint, of which, I decided during the conference, I’m not a fan. I enjoyed almost all of the research topics, and found a few of them very inspiring, but sitting in the dark for two hours at a time can make anyone get sleepy. My favorite part about the conference was getting a chance to talk to some people doing research in some way related to mine. The number-one best person was/is Katie, who is doing public health research on breastfeeding in Bangladesh. Go to her blog, http://imkt.blogspot.com , it is awesome and she is who inspired me to make mine. She has already written and turned in her Master’s thesis, and is married and has a son. Way ahead of me in Life. I gave her some references about breastfeeding and also about birth in Bangladesh, and she is sending me part of a book. Excellent! (yes, this may be a slight wayne's world reference, sorry.)

Something that also struck me while I was at the conference was that not all Fulbrighters are doing fieldwork in their country. They may have not ever been to their country before, and during their grant period are going through their first culture shock and beginning to learn the language. Depending on their research topic, some students may not even need to interact with traditional culture at all, being located at a university in a city. Fulbright is funding a really wide range of proposals. Some examples since you all are wondering: Old Age Homes in India, Mammalian Dispersal Behavior, Transportation Investment, Impact of Modernity on Bengali Artisan Caste, Women Textile Workers in Bombay and Lancashire, Folktales from the Himalayas, Muslim College Women’s Perspectives on Muslim Personal Law, Indian Classical Songs, Spiritual Tourism in India, IT Call Centers in India, Political Ecology of Groundwater, Interventions to Reduce Trafficking in Girls and Women… the list goes on.