It’s like Newton said: a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force. At the close of each annual IASPM-Canada conference, we return home faced with the challenge of maintaining the excitement and perpetuating the scholarly inertia it generates. We return to the busy schedules we placed on hold, while our recent discussions tend to recede from view. Our IASPM website can and should be used to guard against such a dissipation of energy, to retain for posterity the germ of ideas exchanged casually, and to expand the organization’s historical record. If anything serves to counteract IASPM’s conference inertia, it will be our own inaction.

Taken from some conversations in Regina, then, here are two ways we might employ the website in the coming year. First, online discussions centered upon a common piece of literature. Whether a book, chapter, or article, if there’s something you’ve read recently or plan to read, let us know so we can join you. You might choose a text, and explain what there is to recommend it, or play devil’s advocate and point to the text’s problems of method, scope, or conclusions. Let’s use the website to discuss literature.

Second, online discussions centered upon a theme (the bulletin-board model). Someone opens a thread, then others contribute their piece on the stated theme. The IASPM list-serv already hosts this sort of activity (if only occasionally), but it might be nice to reduce traffic there and reserve it for general announcements. One theme colleagues and I discussed this weekend is the language of our papers. On a continuum between jargon-free and jargon-rich writing, where do you aim, and how does your topic influence that decision? Is plain English desirable or even possible, especially when our literary sources are filled with rich and complex concepts and neologisms? And so on.

These two proposals are a start; how else could we utilize IASPM.ca?

Online discussions will extend the ways we’re already developing a sense of community at our home institutions, of course. I hope the website can be a storehouse in this respect. Since IASPM members hail from all corners of campus, the potential for cross pollination abounds year-round, and it would be instructive to hear reports of the ways these areas communicate away from conferences. Are there popular music reading groups or workshops? Cross-department mixers? And so on.

Finally, the website can promote the work of independent scholars, whose work also generates discussion and who may value an IASPM conference most for the ways in which it reduces alienation. Conference inertia needn’t benefit only those with posts or student positions in tightly-knit university departments. More generally, the category of independent scholar is probably something for IASPM to steward or keep an eye on at the moment, since the job market has declined – threatening to make independents of many graduates – and shows no clear signs of changing course. It’s like Newton said: a body in motion tends to stay in motion.