Attendance at large-scale events is considered a crucial element on the way to an academic career. However, many studies point out how conferences can also be experienced as exclusive or even exclusionary events, lacking diversity because of financial, physical, social as well as health-related barriers and accessibility issues. The challenges for early career researchers to perform the ideal of visibility and extraversion are increasingly pointed out in the field of Critical Event Studies (Henderson, 2015; Walters, 2018) and in recent literature on ableism in academia (Brown, 2021) which provide in-depth and embodied insights into the stress related to cognitive and sensory overload (Farahar & Foster, 2021).

This poster contribution offers an opportunity to establish dialogue around a diversity issue which some ECRs may only encounter silently: how can large-scale conferences be reimagined as opportunities to embrace rather than mask neurodiversity? Affective academic hospitalities can be nurtured to increase the presence of safe spaces. Events are then witnessed as enabling rather than overwhelming. Initiatives such as temporary conference silent rooms have gained in importance in recent years.

My suggestion is to open a shepherd's hut as a 'conference fringe', an additional space during the first two conference days (ERC) in order to reflect collectively and visibly about the needs of neurodivergent researchers and highlight the deeply relational possibilities of embracing neurodiversity in academia. This proposal comes out of my own PhD research, during which I was given the chance to find my own conferencing language as a multisensory form of public engagement. From 2019 until 2022, I was encouraged to install a mobile shepherd’s hut at Scottish conferences to invite into informal daydreaming sessions around the wood fire stove, reconnecting to Gàidhlig traditions of storytelling. This ‘conference fringe’ allowed to reduce the sensory overwhelm experienced at academic meetings, a conference fatigue that exponentially increases with the scale of the event. It allowed to concretely see the potential of outdoor hospitality hubs as a way of connecting through introvert conviviality. There is a possibility to balance the 'visibility lottery' of academia with the need to rest and to digest. More and more people expressed support for a long-term outdoor conference hide-out, an unexpected outcome of a largely improvised tour (Hanser, 2021).

I would like to propose the use of the shepherd’s hut as an opportunity for the co-creating of hospitalities, informed by the distinct relationality of neurodiversity. This means that I would release an open invitation to ECRs across Scotland to become involved, to discuss the possible location of the shepherd’s hut hospitality hub during the conference and to develop a temporal system for participatory co-hosting (e.g. ‘hut hospitality attendances’ during coffee breaks or after keynotes).This proposal can build new connections between ECRs based on the valorisation of neurodiversity and could lead to further ECR-led experimentations with other networks across Europe. Many ideas have emerged since the start of the conference fringe tour (an example in continental Europe: www.tinycampusontour.eu). Hospitality hubs can enrich potentially anonymous conference experiences by expanding the range of designs and proposed sites for networking differently between the many delegates of a large-scale gathering.

The conference fringe in a mobile shepherd's hut is an immersive, arts-based methodological approach which introduces an outdoor conference venue. This pop-up storytelling space is installed near the conference venue but also provides a calm environment to rest and sit near the wood fire stove, share stories or just read the conference programme in a different temporality.

It can be expected that new connections and encounters will be facilitated by opening the conference fringe. ERC/ECER provides a rare opportunity to invite other ECRs to co-host the conference fringe which had been logistically organised as an individual project during my PhD. It is possible to produce a report after this experimentation to provide observations for the ECER and/or SERA ECR networks. The conference fringe is a novel methodological approach which allows to connect mobilities and narrative approaches in order to sketch out research about participatory, co-constructed academic safe spaces.

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