ICCAP26 – A First-Time Attendee’s Experience

This blog post is written by Kati Mäntysaari, who attended ICCAP26, the International Conference on Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy, together with Jenny Paananen at the end of February. The conference was held in Kraków, Poland, and it was my first international conference. Although I did not present at the conference, I had the opportunity to explore a wide range of interesting presentations and research projects and to learn more about how international conferences work in practice.

The conference focused on the mechanisms and processes underlying effective psychotherapy, examined through conversation analysis. A particular emphasis was placed on longitudinal research across different time spans. For a first-time attendee, ICCAP26 was pleasantly sized in terms of participant numbers. There were many presentations, but they were organized across two rooms, which made the program easy to navigate. The days were long, yet that also allowed for a deep and immersive engagement with the topic.

The presentations offered valuable literature recommendations and background research, as well as insightful observations from the data under analysis. I was especially interested in the discussions on how changes over time can be interpreted from multiple perspectives, highlighting the importance of carefully defining the research focus from the outset. It is also essential to recognize potential external factors influencing change, which may not be directly visible in the data. In addition, I learned a great deal about how conversation analysis can be applied to different types of data and what it can contribute to psychotherapeutic practice.

Attending an international conference was also an excellent opportunity to develop my academic English skills. It was encouraging to notice how the threshold for speaking English became lower as the days went on. This is particularly important, as the project’s scientific publications will be written in English, and there will certainly be many more presentations, both delivered and attended, in English in the future.

We will be writing more blog posts about the conference and our days in Kraków, so stay tuned for upcoming posts!

Kati