The idea of gifting is central to Conference Creatures. Precipitating from our previous discussion of gifts in the context of Indigenous epistemologies, new materialisms, and reciprocity, we have conceptualized Conference Creatures as a practice of gift-giving that acts as a rhetorical tool that invites us to engage in relationalities in our professional lives. Through our informal conversations about Conference Creatures, we have further developed this line of thinking into the concept of "professional pebbling."
The concept of pebbling emerges from a behavior noted in some species of penguin, in which a male penguin will give his desired mate a pebble. In popular discourse, pebbling has come to refer to the act of sharing small gifts and other kind gestures to friends or partners. Our iteration of professional pebbling is tied not to romantic overtures, but rather to building welcoming, personal connections in the professional field.
By analyzing our own relational tendencies around gift-giving, we have come to think of the distribution of creatures as a nonextractive form of professional pebbling. Pebbling threaded our (Hannah and Olivia's) early professional relationship and our friendship, and it has been a consistent theme throughout the creation of Conference Creatures.
Our first "pebble" was exchanged during the first semester of our PhD program. While walking to class, Hannah found a small red maple leaf on the ground, which she gifted to Olivia. A few weeks later, Olivia gave Hannah a crochet possum. It's important to note that these two examples of gift-giving were not quid pro quo—that is, Olivia did not give Hannah the possum in exchange for the leaf, nor did Hannah give Olivia the leaf expecting anything in return. Instead, we gave each other gifts simply because we wanted to express our appreciation for each other. It is this nonextractive logic that guides professional pebbling.
In our time as friends and colleagues, we've accumulated an array of pebbles—more crochet plushes, yarn, hooks, and other crochet gear; coffees and berries; plants; pet care; memes and reels; manuscript drafts; and many, many books.
We came to think of these gestures as pebbling after Hannah and her mom, Marcia, discussed their mutual joy of giving gifts. Marcia recounted several recent scenarios in which she had seen, acquired, and gifted small items that made her think of someone. After Hannah fondly attributed her own interest in gifting to her mom's praxis, Marcia said, "I think you picked it up from me. I've always been a pebbler." Later, when Hannah and Olivia discussed Hannah's conversation with her mom in the context of Conference Creatures, we began to understand our acts of pebbling as we traced each "pebble" or strand of our friendship. Upon realizing the important role that gifting (of time, attention, care, joy, in addition to material items) plays in our interactions, it became clear how these "stitches" join together to constitute the product of our friendship.
Beyond the personal impacts of pebbling on our own friendship, we have also experienced how making visible acts of pebbling invites expansion of these practices and relationalities. Almost a year after our initial pebbling exchange (the leaf), one of our MFA colleagues professed to us that she had told her friend and written a poem about it! The ability of a gifting experience to positively impact actors outside the exchange further pushed us to think about creatures as gifts holding unknown impacts.
Thus, by conceptualizing Conference Creatures through our actions and experiences, we extend pebbling to this experiment. Each creature-gift offers a thread of possible connections within our professional world. While creatures are small, we hope their threads overlap, intertwine, knot, and loop in relation to create a larger network of care and support that is distributed across institutions, states, professional contexts, and subdisciplines.
Viewing each creature as a "pebble" allows us to envision Conference Creatures as a medium for professional pebbling, or the reciprocal (but not compulsory or obligatory) exchange of small gestures and tokens of collegiality and welcoming. Each creature creates an opening for other "pebbles" to succeed it. Over time, we hope, acts of professional pebbling can sediment into larger networks that transform our field's professional spaces. As we note in our discussion of kairotic space, small acts of kindness can have a significant impact on marginalized and junior scholars in particular (Price, 2011: Tellez-Trujillo, 2022). Through Conference Creatures, we hope to mobilize the embodied energy and affective investments we make during the conference season to sustain us throughout the rest of our lives.
