#plenary

The impact that a plenary can have is to fire people up:

inspire people to work or collaborate on that area

encourage people to pay attention to work in that area or be able to tell people about work in that area

give people who are already working on an area renewed energy on why it's important

The plenaries I've really liked are generally framed around "why". Why do this work? Why have I spent decades of my life on this?

Which leads into more detailed findings about a few specific things, to get people up to speed if they're unfamiliar or contextualize work into a bigger picture for people who are relatively familiar.

And then back out to why and hopes for future directions.

I say that a plenary is about an area or topic rather than a subfield because highlighting an approach or methodology or value system or something is also a great way of doing a plenary (and a whole subfield is possibly too broad anyway). Some examples:

Why is it important to look at this particular language, variety, or family?

Why is it interesting to do research at the intersection of these two areas, how can they cross-pollinate each other?

Why approach language using (a particular approach) as baseline?

This "why" structure of a plenary often fits nicely with a bit of personal reflection on how you got interested in the topic in the first place and how you situate yourself in the history of the field, especially as plenaries are often given by people relatively senior to a field who were there for (and indeed created) some of the history that more junior people might not know about.

However, this is not to be confused with a common historicizing template for plenaries that ALMOST works: "this is what I've done". Better to fit that retrospective into "this is why I've done it and what I hope other people can do as a result". You've been doing this for decades, surely there was a reason why! (If you've forgotten what this is because you've been too close to the nitty-gritty details for too long, sometimes asking a few friends or colleagues can help.)

People also have challenges with figuring out what level a plenary should be pitched at:

How much background information should the speaker assume the audience has, when they can vary from students to senior professors?

In my opinion, the level of assumed background knowledge of a plenary talk at a general linguistics conference should be pitched around first year grad student, for two reasons:

There are students in the audience!

Profs who don't specialize in the topic probably last touched it in grad school (which might have been 30 years ago)

You can scale this level of assumed background knowledge up or down depending on how niche the conference is. For example, a plenary at a phonetics conference can assume more specific phonetics knowledge, and at a general scicomm conference, it needs to assume much less shared background knowledge (people probably know about academic journals and statistical significance but not concepts specific to a field).

But in any case, it is a great idea to include a slide or two getting everyone on the same page about what some key concepts are. Even if you think half the room knows it already, people don't mind seeing familiar info as much as you think they do (in fact, if they're super experienced then they probably also have to explain it to unfamiliar people sometimes, so it's helpful for their own explanations to see a nice summary definition!)

In my opinion, the ideal state to leave an audience member in after a plenary address is somewhere on the spectrum of "now I'm all fired up to keep doing this work" to "I never thought about doing work in this area before but now I sorta want to do so?"

Summary: A plenary is a chance to think about the unifying threads animating why you've been doing what you do and where you hope it leads. In other words, what's the positive subtweet that you wish you could give the field? Sometimes people grumble to a few friends "I wish people would care about x". Well, here's a chance to reframe that into: "here's what it could look like when we care about x".