You know that feeling, right? It’s two days before your big conference presentation and you’re lying in bed at 3am, staring at the ceiling wondering if anyone will turn up. And if they do, whether you will be able to say what you want to say. Your heart’s racing, your brain won’t stop, and you’re pretty sure you’ve forgotten how to form coherent sentences. Welcome to what feminist scholar Yasmin Gunaratnam calls “presentation fever”. (And perhaps it’s about time someone gave this particular academic phenomenon a name.)

I came across Yasmin Gunaratnam’s paper “Presentation fever and podium affects” as I was sorting my unread PDFs. Ah, I knew I had this paper somewhere! It felt like she’d been eavesdropping on a recent conversation I’d had with a doctoral researcher about to give a presentation. “We all feel nervous”, I said. “Yes truly. Even people like me who’ve been doing it for a long time.”  Gunaratnam, a senior professor, also knows the anxiety-inducing world of academic presenting, where we’re all supposed to be cool, collected professional intellectuals, but behind the scenes we’re held together by caffeine and sheer willpower.

Podium vertigo

Gunaratnam writes from personal experience with labyrinthitis – a condition that affects your inner ear and leaves you feeling like the world is constantly tilting. I have this too so I really related to her description. But here’s the thing: she realised that even when her condition improved, the podium still felt like it was swaying. That “lonely vertigo of the podium” isn’t just about having an actual medical condition, it’s about the fundamental weirdness of standing up in front of a room full of people and trying to sound together and smart.

Think about it: we take these incredibly complex ideas that we’ve been wrestling with for months or years, compress them into 15 or 20-minute presentations, and then stand there hoping we don’t completely embarrass ourselves. No wonder we feel dizzy.

Gunaratnam says we’ve all learned to become “disciplined cognators” – basically, academic performing machines. We’re expected to think clearly, speak eloquently, handle questions with grace, and never, ever show that we might be struggling or uncertain about anything. But here’s the rub: all that apparent effortlessness? It’s completely manufactured. That professor who seems to effortlessly field complex questions? They’ve probably given variations of this talk dozens of times. That keynote speaker who sounds so polished? They’ve spent years learning the academic equivalent of stage chatter. The problem is, we seem to rarely talk about this. We pretend that intellectual mastery just happens naturally, when actually it’s the result of countless hours of practice, failure, and yes, anxiety-inducing preparation sessions that keep you up all night.

Gunaratnam talks about being under “super-surveillance”, how some bodies are watched more closely, judged more harshly, expected to prove their competence in ways that others aren’t. It’s exhausting to have to be “on” all the time, to never be allowed to just be human and imperfect.

One of the most important points Gunaratnam makes is about how this pressure affects people differently. If you’re already marginalised in academic spaces because of your race, gender, disability status, or class background, the stakes feel even higher. Every stumble becomes evidence that you “don’t belong.” Every moment of uncertainty gets magnified. Academic conferences are often disasters for anyone who doesn’t fit the neurotypical, able-bodied middle class norm. Standing at a podium for 20 minutes, handling bright lights and loud sounds, processing questions on the spot assumes a very particular kind of body and brain.

Academic conferences have become part of the academic attention economy. We’re not just sharing ideas anymore; we’re building our “brand,” accumulating social media followers, and trying to rack up speaking invitations that look good on our CVs. Gunaratnam points out that this turns presentations into commodities. The number of talks you give becomes a metric of success. Getting invited to give a keynote becomes a marker of intellectual status. Meanwhile, all the behind-the-scenes labour that makes conferences possible – students managing registration, the admin staff coordinating logistics – becomes invisible.

Gunaratnam argues that we’ve taken something that should be about collective knowledge-building and turned it into a competitive performance where some people get to be stars while others do the grunt work. I agree.

What if we did this differently?

Gunaratnam doesn’t just diagnose the problem; she asks what it might look like to present “beyond mastery.” What if we didn’t have to pretend to have all the answers? What if we could be vulnerable, uncertain, still figuring things out? Imagine conferences where it is explicitly OK to admit you don’t know everything. Where the goal isn’t to sound impressive but to think together. Where we make space for different ways of knowing and being, instead of privileging one very narrow model of academic performance.

This isn’t just wishful thinking of course. There are people experimenting with different formats such as unconferences, collaborative presentations, events that prioritise accessibility and inclusion. But we need more of this, and we need to stop treating traditional academic presentations as the gold standard.

Maybe the most radical thing in Gunaratnam’s paper is her suggestion that we should actually listen to our presentation anxiety instead of trying to suppress it. Those racing hearts, sleepless nights, and sweaty palms might be trying to tell us something important about the systems we’re operating in. What if presentation fever isn’t a personal failing but a reasonable response to unreasonable expectations? What if our bodies are registering something our minds haven’t fully processed, that the whole academic conference performance presentation thing is a bit daft? Performative. Exploitative. Perhaps overdue for a rethink …

Now I’m not saying we should all become paralysed by anxiety (although if you are struggling, please talk to someone). But maybe we could stop treating nervousness as something to overcome and start seeing it as information. What is this feeling trying to tell us about how we do knowledge, how we treat each other, how we could do better, how our ways of doing academia need to change?

Next time you’re lying awake before a big presentation, remember Gunaratnam’s message: you’re not broken, and you’re definitely not alone. Anxiety might actually be a sign that you care deeply about your work and want to do right by the people you’re researching with and for.

And maybe, just maybe, we can start having more honest conversations about what it’s really like to be a thinking, feeling human being in academic spaces. Because we could all use a lot less metrics, a little less mastery and a lot more humanity.