The Case for the Q&A Format for Research Seminar
Yesterday we had the first session of the “Grand-Est webinar of economics and philosophy” that I co-organize with my colleagues Herrade Igersheim (Strasbourg University) and Samuel Ferey (University of Lorraine). The webinar was a frank success with more than 25 participants. This new webinar aims to gather scholars from the French universities of the Grand-Est region who are interested in topics at the intersection of economics and philosophy. Some of the sessions, like yesterday’s, are closed but others will be open to everyone, with presentations from colleagues from elsewhere, including abroad.
For this first webinar – and in principle for all the “closed” webinars that will follow, we have chosen a particular format consisting of a very short presentation by the authors of the text under discussion (no more than five minutes), with the rest of the session dedicated to Q&A. Overall, the webinar lasted for approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. I have found the result pretty satisfactory, with dynamic and sharp discussions. But some colleagues have expressed to me their skepticism about this format. Not all participants were indeed specialists of the topic under discussion (the concept of public reason in Rawls’s political philosophy), nor even particularly used to philosophy and economics discussions. It is also highly probable that a significant number of participants couldn’t seriously read the text. For them, the discussions must have been hard to follow.
I must say that I’m in general highly dissatisfied with the way scientific work is discussed in the academia, in seminars as well as in conferences. For many reasons, academics don’t have and/or don’t take the time to consider the work of others seriously, except when it falls in their (generally very narrow) domain of interest. I’m not blaming my academic colleagues for that, and I’ve been myself guilty more than once of laziness/sloppiness/complacency, or just didn’t have materially the time to read seriously a paper. But the result is that discussions in research seminars are often very superficial and frustrating. Presentations are long (and not all academics are good at this exercise!) but can never reach the level of detail and precision that can be attained in the paper. Participants tend to react to the presentation, and the exchanges are naturally converging on secondary points that sometimes only emerge because the presentation was not sufficiently precise. Or questions mostly consist in demands of clarification because, well, as people have not read the paper, of course many things remain unclear. Overall, the exchanges tend to be confused and confusing because the participants are not discussing specific and precise points of the paper.
It is true that the Q&A format is very demanding and may have the negative side-effect of discouraging people to participate. On the other hand, it permits to make seminars significantly shorter and so at least part of the time allocated to reading the paper is compensated by the shorter length of the seminar itself. Moreover, I think the Q&A format is even more relevant for webinar. It is just very hard to stay focused behind a screen for 45 or 60 minutes while listening to someone else. We are not cognitively equipped for that, especially with all the distractions that are eating up our cognitive resources. So my prediction is that the pandemic, by encouraging more online forms of seminars and conferences, will also push for the generalization of the Q&A format.