Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), in beautiful Krakow, Poland. I was there to present some of my PhD literature review as part of the doctoral forum. You can see my slides and a preprint of my paper on my publications page.
I will be blogging my key learning points from the conference overall on my professional blog, but here I thought I would reflect on the experience of presenting in the doctoral forum.
I had been incredibly nervous beforehand for this presentation. I have presented about my PhD work before, at LILAC 2023, however for that conference I took more of a practitioner focus on my work. For ECIL I wanted to speak more about the research decisions I was making and why, and that felt a lot more scary to me. I feel I am on firmer ground talking about my work through a practitioner lens – which makes sense, I am an experienced professional in my field, whereas I am still very much a novice researcher!
In retrospect, I needn’t have worried so much about this. The audience at ECIL was incredibly supportive and interested, and once I got into the flow of my presentation (and the questions that followed), I realised I actually found it quite easy to discuss my research approach. I don’t have much practice talking about my research verbally, which is one reason I wanted to take this opportunity to present. However I do write and think about my research a lot, and discussing my topic and answering questions in the doctoral forum helped me realise that actually, I do know what I’m talking about!
I had some really helpful suggestions from the audience attending, as well as some good questions that made me think about the decisions I am taking. In particular, one person suggested making contact with female academics at the engineering departments I am hoping to recruit students from for interviews, as they will likely have a perspective on and interest in my topic. I hadn’t actually considered targeting academics as well as students for my interviews, but that might be something to think about including.
As well as presenting my own work, I was also incredibly interested in the other presentation in the doctoral forum: Andrew Feeney, from Edinburgh Napier University, who was discussing his proposed user-led participatory research on digital literacies in older adults within Scottish public libraries. Andrew’s presentation was fascinating – I can’t wait to see the research he produces! I was delighted to see some research coming from the perspective of public libraries, an area I think is often neglected in the research literature, and his topic of digital literacies of older adults is incredibly timely and necessary. As Andrew discussed, older adults are neglected in digital literacy policy in the UK. I was also really interested to hear about his user-led approach.
Finally, aside from all the interesting presentations and useful ideas I picked up at the conference, my main takeaway really is just what an enormous privilege it is to be able to read, write and present in my native language. ECIL is an international conference, attracting delegates from around the world – not just from Europe, but from as far afield as Australia, Japan and the Middle East. Around the conference centre I could hear many languages being spoken, but all presentations were given in English. Like many British people, I am essentially monolingual, so I am endlessly awed by people who speak any other language at all – never mind being able to research and present complex ideas in their second language! Seeing so many people express themselves so brilliantly in a language that was not their mother tongue really brought it home to me how much easier I have it than my peers in non-English speaking countries.
Following my experience at ECIL, I have a few ideas for next steps on my PhD research. I am currently in the process of writing my research plan and report for my confirmation review, which will be early 2024, so this is a really good time to incorporate the insights gained at ECIL into my plan. And I am already thinking about what I might be ready to present at the next ECIL in 2025!
Woodsie Research 
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