I was not in Mexico to get overwhelmed by the celebrations of the dead, to visit temples or even to learn how to cook a proper mole colorado. I was there to attend a scientific conference. The second conference of the Programme of Ecosystem Change and Society, or PECSII for short.
PECS is a research program connecting projects across the world that aims to integrate research on the stewardship of social–ecological systems, the services they generate, and the relationships among natural capital, human wellbeing, livelihoods, inequality and poverty. The program director of PECS is Albert, one of my co-supervisors, and many of my colleagues are involved in the network. I think we were about twenty people in attendance affiliated with Stockholm Resilience Centre. But there were other people too, of course. About 350 in total. I spoke with researchers from all over the world, from Mexico, Chile and the US to Spain, Germany, South Africa and Australia.
It was my second real conference – but since my first was Resilience 2017, which I and the rest of my colleagues were part of organizing, I think it is safe to call this my first real taste of the kind of concentrated self-promoting and networking science event that conferences are. It overwhelmed me. I went to so many interesting and inspiring sessions, attended so many mingles overflowing with mezcal and Oaxaca-style tapas, spoke with so many intelligent people doing interesting research, and even went out for food and dancing one night with a group of Mexican, Spanish, Belgian and Finnish researchers of whom none were friends of mine before the conference. And the conference party, eating and drinking and laughing, dancing salsa barefoot in the grass under a starry sky. It was a hurricane, a force of nature, and I could only let myself be swept away in the torrent.
Albert, being my co-supervisor, had recruited me to write for the official PECSII blog, to record the sessions of the three-day conference. So in-between all the inspiring session-attending and mezcal-mingling, I also had to find the time to jot down my impressions in an understandable way, to be posted on the blog the next day. I barely had time to breathe.
But I did write three posts for the blog. I will repost them here, for you to see how much sense I managed to make out of things during those whirlwind days of conferencing.
Katja Malmborg 