It might get tedious but it’s news nevertheless, and good news indeed! After getting on the road again this summer after a pandemic-inflicted break, in September I was even able to go to a conference abroad again. This was my first time on the international ‘conf trail’ presenting some work on science studies, precisely a paper a colleague and myself had elaborated with regard to Academic Advisory Panels.

The conference was the 36th annual gathering of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers, which abbreviates as CHER. Nice pun, folks! This year’s conference was held in Luxembourg, a country I’ve never been before. Actually, it wasn’t held in Luxembourg Ville, the capital, but Esch-sur-Alzette, a smaller town an hour’s drive away from the big city. And, well, actually, it wasn’t in Esch either, but rather on the campus at Belval, a ten minute train ride from the small town.

This campus is a strange creature: The University of Luxembourg was founded only in 2003, and the campus is still being built on the site of an ex-steel work. Some part of the furnace has been presevered as a museum, and it’s quite impressive. Equally impressive (in a positive sense) is the university’s library, which features an interior of upscale working conditions, yet, surprisingly few books. Impressive in a mixed sense of the word was the overall arquitecture of the place: some stuff was more or less 15 years old and already showed a bit of age, whilst other stuff was just being constructed. And with stuff I mean buildings, roads, sidewalks… the whole place was a construction site mixed with people frequenting the university’s installations as well as the company highrises and the huge shopping mall next to the train station. Yes, that’s right, the area is not exclusive to the university, there are hotels (smart move, as conference attendees like myself had a less than three minute walk to the conference while staying at an IBIS), there are insurance companies, retailers, the odd restaurant (Sushi, of course!) and the mall.

Impressive with a negative tone was the area after all the shops and restaurants closed (and the mall actually did so at 8pm) as then the whole site was quite deserted. With the gigantic concrete architecture around (furnace, university, mall, highrises), one felt really miserable walking through the streets after the conference closed for the day. Luckily, most of the evenings the conference’s organisers had some leisure activities going: a walk through Luxembourg Ville or a dinner cruise down the Mosel river on a luxury yacht. That yacht and some of the participants singing karaoke after dinner are pictured below.

And the academic outcome, one might ask? Well, as usual with such gigantic conferences (eight parallel tracks of presentations, no less), it was more about meeting some people, listening to some work that has already been published or will be published soon and wondering about how some presenters still have horrible powerpoint presentations that obscure rather than further understanding. The presentation of my colleague and myself was underwhelming: Our panel chair didn’t show up, so the speakers organised timekeeping and such themselves. We were the third and last presentation and as we had twenty minutes in total, everyone only spoke ten minutes. Not a lot for eight hours of travel to and more than that fro. And the audience consisted in only the speakers plus three or four more people, ie less than ten in total. That was due to the fact that our topic didn’t chime in with any of the major panels and was thus put into the open track.

Still, I’m not disappointed as I knew what would await me and was merely interested in Luxembourg and the CHER people. And these CHER people do have a knack for karaoke, I must say…