Praising Putin
Last week was the 31st Annual Seminar of Baltic Criminologists, arguably the most important week of our internship. The conference location is rotated each year so that it is hosted in one of the three different Baltic countries, and this year it happened to be in Lithuania. While we were a little disappointed that it wasn't in Latvia or Estonia since then we would have had a work-related reason to travel, this year's conference being in Vilnius is probably the main reason we were able to present instead of simply attending, since our director was one of the main coordinators of the conference.
Almost all the conference presenters were criminologists or worked in a field related to criminology (i.e. public ministers, non-profit coordinators, etc.), and almost all of them had PhD's. Needless to say, when our director first told us we were going to be presenting at this seminar, I had a little bit of an inferiority complex. However, one of the biggest lessons we learned from our experience presenting at an academic conference is that there is a vast difference between being extremely knowledgeable about a specific topic and being able to present about said topic effectively. As lawyers-in-training, Beth and I felt confident in our ability to speak and present well, even if we were not true experts in our respective topics.
The conference was located at Vilnius University. This is Beth
walking down one of its beautiful and historic halls!
Most of the conference presenters spoke in English, but some spoke in Lithuanian, and we had to wear headphones so that we could hear the simultaneous translation. As I looked to the back of the auditorium and spotted the translator sitting in her small glass booth, I thought about all the complicated logistical details that went into coordinating a conference, and it gave me a newfound respect for all the people involved in making an international, multilingual conference run smoothly.
Initially, Beth and I were very frustrated about a few aspects of the conference. For one, we noticed that many of the presenters just shared a lot of history and statistics, but failed to actually make any substantive conclusions. As law students, we are constantly taught about the importance of making clear conclusions, so we found this aspect of the presentations to be odd, but we chalked it up to cultural differences. Also, almost all the conference speakers went fifteen to twenty minutes over their allotted speaking time, which meant that there was often not enough time for questions, or the coffee breaks had to be shortened. Algis had made it clear to us to keep our presentations under fifteen minutes, and we followed his advice to a T, but unfortunately, it did not seem the other speakers were given the same warnings. Lastly, even though Beth and I both felt that we presented really well, and had spent an extensive amount of time trying to make our presentations interesting, we were not asked any questions in the Q&A session following our group of presenters. After the conference ended, we realized that perhaps Lithuanians give a greater deference to seniority in academic culture, meaning that as the youngest presenters there, we were less likely to be seen as credible.
One of the most interesting speakers was a well-known Russian criminologist who is also a prominent voice in Russia of the opposition against Putin. The day after I presented, he came up to me and said he really enjoyed my presentation, and that he had written about deinstitutionalization in one of his books. Beth and I felt rather demoralized after we had given our presentations, so receiving compliments from someone so established was a great honor.
Another speaker that stood out to me was a Polish professor we had interviewed a few weeks ago to promote the conference. She came up to us during one of the coffee and tea breaks to ask us about our experience as legal interns in Lithuania. She is an incredibly intelligent, well-spoken radical feminist who did not hesitate to challenge many of the speakers with tough questions. I especially appreciated when she asked people to define their terms. After all, how can we discuss criminology effectively if everyone has a different conception of what the word "criminal" or "crime" means?
One of the main issues the Polish professor discussed in her presentation is how criminology can be used as a means of social control. She cited many ideas from Michel Foucault, and integrated them into her analysis of problematic aspects of Polish criminal law. As we stood and chatted with her, she voiced her frustration with the conference. She had presented at this seminar many times, and she said that in past years, the speakers invited were much more free-thinking, and were important leaders in moving the field of criminology forward in the Baltic states. She lamented this year's conference, complaining that many of the speakers were essentially sheep. She even called out one of the speakers, whom I had noticed as well, because he spent a good portion of his presentation simply praising Putin, as well as name-dropping the important ministers and officials he had known and worked with in his lifetime. While this was simply the opinion of one person, it confirmed some of my frustrations with the conference. I am still incredibly thankful that I had such a unique opportunity to present at an academic conference, but the professor's comments definitely gave me some perspective on why I did not get as much out of the presentations as I thought I would.
All in all, I still learned some important lessons from this experience. I am so, so happy I chose a topic that I was truly passionate about. After my post a few weeks ago about taking feedback from my director, I changed my presentation and decided to make it more personal. Originally, I was really frustrated that my director pushed me to integrate some examples from Taiwan into my presentation about deinstitutionalization. Just because I am Taiwanese-American does not mean that I knew enough about childcare institutions in Taiwan to present on it! Slowly but surely, however, I gathered my research and integrated some examples that I drew from my personal experience. For example, when my grandfather died, the family decided to provide baked goods at the memorial service. The baked goods came from 喜憨兒基金會 (Xǐ hān er jījīn huì), a non-profit organization that seeks to support parents with children that have disabilities. This organization has set up several bakeries in Taiwan that employ people with Down Syndrome, and also provides resources to help the parents raise their children. The Taipei City Government has also opened a store and workshop, 愛不囉嗦 (Ài bù luōsuo), which has provided employment opportunities for over 600 physically and mentally disabled people. This store was the first joint venture between the city government and the Down Syndrome Foundation in Taiwan. I used these examples to show how important these types of initiatives are, and how they can be used to fully integrate people with physical and mental disabilities into society by providing them with work opportunities, and allowing them to remain with their families instead of isolating them in institutions.
I really do think the personal is political, and I think that by speaking about my experiences teaching English in Hungarian orphanages and the time I have spent in Taiwan, I was able to touch people's hearts, and not just their minds.