Traveling the Third Place: Conferences as Third Places

The purpose of this research study was to extend the concept of third places, as explained by Oldenburg, as being places designed as meeting places being dynamic rather than static. The primary sites for this article were conferences attended by the authors. Defining social events within the meeting spaces of conferences as third spaces pushed the traditional third place theory forward. It offered a way for rituals to be explored more deeply through the experiences they offered. This study asked the reader to pay attention to the periphery where interaction takes place and consider how we frame concepts of third places. In this piece, we explored how the space of a conference “functions as a safe, relaxed space outside the home [and] can actually lead to a deeper investment” by attendees via third-place qualities. The third-place quality offers a space within which human connections supersede a space’s designated purpose and become multipurposed, durable, and long-lived, spanning space, time, and distance. We suggest that the conference becomes transformative, altering a nonplace, a generic place, into a third place