It was on the final day of the RSVP conference – Saturday 15th June – in Stirling that I noticed this magnificent collection of thistles. It seemed an appropriate visual image for a place so associated with William Wallace – spiky, hardy, standing proudly independent of the surrounding vegetation.
I’m happy to say that there was very little that was spiky about the conference; it’s a real strength of the society that it is a genuinely collegiate community of scholars sharing ideas and developing arguments in a respectful and supportive way. (A real contrast to the way politics is often conducted at the present time.) It takes an egalitarian approach to panels, putting PhD researchers and eminent professors on the same panels, with the same amount of time to present. This can be a bit daunting for the former (take it from me) but it works well because everyone buys into it.
My own paper – now available on the Research page of this site – was well-received and generated some encouraging interest. It’s a nice aspect to being a champion of short-lived newspapers that many of them are unfamiliar to periodicals scholars, which gives me the opportunity to introduce the occasional hidden gem such as the Illustrated News of the World.
Highlights include the karaoke in a pub in Stirling centre (I didn’t inflict my singing on anyone!); co-chairing a panel for postgraduate students to hear from scholars working outside of formal academia about alternative career paths – an increasingly necessary consideration, given the shrinking of Humanities departments across England; and sampling some of Scotland’s fine whiskies in their natural home! I also got to meet lots of my academic heroes. All in all, a worthwhile experience.
Indeed, the only time a conversation approached more than courteous disagreement was when a Scottish delegate asked an English presenter whether he considered The Scotsman to be a national, or provincial newspaper (which of course can be read as code for whether Scotland is considered a province or a nation). The answer was a masterpiece of diplomacy – ‘it depends where you’re standing’. Potential trap avoided! I should say that, in my experience, both people have great generosity of spirit, so it was a moment of minor dissonance that, like the thistle in this picture, was soon passed.