Report on the 2nd Conference on Emerging Adulthood

The 2nd Conference on Emerging Adulthood was held February 18-19, 2005 in Miami, Florida. There was a great deal of energy and enthusiasm at the conference. Nearly 200 people attended, with scholars from all over the world, including Argentina, Israel, Austria, Poland, Finland, Italy, India, and Australia. Papers and posters were presented on a wide variety of topics, from sexuality to work experiences to conceptions of adulthood, among many other topics.

A special highlight was the debate between James Cote and Jeffrey Arnett on “Emerging Adulthood: A Time of Thriving or Floundering? For Whom and Why?” Cote generally favored the floundering view and Arnett generally favored the thriving view, and this difference produced a lively hour of exchanges. The popularity of this session has encouraged us to think of other ways to add interactive sessions to future EA conferences. We welcome your suggestions.

For this conference we partnered with the Society for Research on Identity Formation (SRIF), and the partnership worked well. They held their conference on February 17-18, overlapping with us on the 18th, and there were several papers and posters that day on the topic of identity in emerging adulthood. We extend our thanks to Marilyn Montgomery and Bill Kurtines of Florida International University and their students, who did a lot of the work essential to setting up and running both conferences.

If you would like to see the conference program and the list of papers and posters presented at the conference, see www.bu.edu/prc/eac. We will soon post a list of conference attendees and their e-mail addresses to make it easy for you to contact people to request a copy of their presentations.

We are already thinking about the next conference, tentatively scheduled for February, 2007. The Miami location was well-received, so we are considering a warm-weather site for the next conference as well. If you would like to be kept informed of plans for the next conference, become a member of the Emerging Adulthood Special Interest Group by clicking on the link in the right-hand column of this page, and you will receive regular updates as planning proceeds.

Thanks to all the planners, student volunteers, and conference participants who made the 2nd Conference on Emerging Adulthood such as success. Hope to see you all in 2007!

Jennifer Tanner and Jeffrey Arnett, Conference Organizers, EA 2005

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