2. Based on what you learned on the holistic approach of philosophy,
why is a panel of discussants usually invite to share their views on
a burning issue? Is it not enough to listen to just one discussant?
What is the wisdom behind panel discussion?
Answers
ur ans is here
“Yesterday I got an email asking me to be a discussant at ISA. I’ve never done this before and I want to do a good job. Do you have any tips on being a good discussant?” [ISA, for our non-IR readers, is the International Studies Association, and their annual meeting is the central annual professional conference for IR scholars.]
With the student’s permission, I am posting my reply, in hopes that it might generate some reactions or discussion.
“Indeed I do.
First of all, I’m not sure that it’s a good idea for graduate students to serve as discussants in the first place. The presenters-and-discussant(s) format lends itself to the posing of thorny questions by the discussant directed at the presenters, and this might lead to some role strain if the discussant is a graduate student and the presenters are established scholars. Far better, in my view, is an arrangement in which the presenters can run the gamut from graduate students to senior folks, and the discussant is at least a tenure-tracked professor someplace or has a comparable level of job security. I have no problem with a panel where all the presenters are the same rank, even if they are all graduate students, but I generally think that discussants should be a bit more established. So proceed at your own risk.
Second, a discussant in the traditional presenters-and-discussant(s) format has two distinct tasks: to discuss the papers, and to help to foment a discussion among the panelists and perhaps even members of the audience. Many people make a serious mistake and overemphasize the former task to the detriment of the latter. This is generally a mistake in the conference format because you cannot presume that the audience has read the papers in advance; if you could presume this, then commenting on the papers would be a good way of starting a discussion. But otherwise, comments on specific passages from the papers is likely to just confuse or bore the audience. In my view such feedback (which is in fact one of the tasks of a discussant) is better handled through e-mail or in some other more interpersonal and private setting.
The most boring discussants I’ve ever seen are those who proceed step-by-step through each of the papers on the panel, making suggestions that are generally of interest only to the author(s) of the individual papers, and then sit back as though they have completed their job. They have not. A panel is not, in my opinion, a kind of feedback session to which the audience has been invited as spectators; it’s not a “fishbowl” situation in which the audience is simply observing. Rather, a panel is — or can and should be — something of a conversation, a discussion, a clash, a debate: at any rate, something more active and participatory.
It is the second task of the discussant to jump-start that conversation. There are better and worse ways to go about doing this. Often the worst way is to try as hard as possible to find some common thread running through all of the papers, and to display that for the audience regardless of how strained and awkward it is — as though the point of a panel was for people to agree! I think this is largely silly. A panel is a public forum for disagreement, not agreement; it is contentious, not conciliatory. And it’s a lot easier for the audience to participate in a debate than it is in a long train of agreement, because in a debate speakers can take positions — even if those positions are sometimes “I agree with you about X but disagree with you about Y.” The goal here is not to divide people into camps, but to give people an opportunity to articulate stances and to have those stances challenged — and then give them an opportunity to defend them.