Courses

About the Mini-Conference

Training scholars lies at the core of the Ostrom Workshop’s educational mission. The culmination of each seminar (POLS Y673/SPEA P710) is a mini-conference.

Students and visiting scholars write papers to be presented before their colleagues. Instructors assign a WAF member to discuss—that is, summarize, praise, and criticize—each paper. Students then can take up to 5 minutes to respond. Finally, we open the floor to questions from the general audience.

A Workshop tradition, the mini-conference continues to be a productive event for instructors, discussants, audience—but especially for our students.​

Past Mini-Conference agendas

You can find past Mini-Conference papers in the Digital Library of the Commons.

Elinor Ostrom

Scientific knowledge is as much an understanding of the diversity of situations for which a theory or its models are relevant as an understanding of its limits.

Elinor Ostrom