Professional Conferences
From SocStudentForumWiki
Contents |
The Basics
Session Types
Roundtables are literally round tables set up in a large space. Usually each table has a number to identify it. Roundtables are organized around themes, and at each table there are typically 3-5 presenters, a presider, and possibly some other interested people who want to talk about the topics. Sometimes one of the presenters acts as the presider. Several roundtables will be going on simultaneously during each scheduled time slot. Attendance varies widely, from only one or two people (eg astrosociology) to 15 people crowding around a 10-person table (eg when the presider is a bigshot in the field). As you might expect, student roundtables have student presenters. Otherwise it ranges from grad students to senior professors. Roundtables are fairly intimate and often provoke discussion among the roundtable attendees. Try to exchange papers with the other table presenters ahead of time for a more productive discussion. They won't always respond, but it's worth a try.
Regular Sessions are panel sessions, where 4 or 5 presenters sit at a table and take turns speaking, often using audiovisual support. Most regular sessions have a designated presider and a designated discussant, neither of whom are presenting. After the presenters make their speeches, the discussant speaks for a while about the presented work, followed by an open Q&A moderated by the presider. There is typically very little discussion beyond the narrow Q&A format.
Invited Sessions are regular sessions where the presenters were invited to present by the organizer, and did not have to submit a paper or proposal for review. The presentations tend to be opinion rather than empirical work, but the speakers tend to be famous, well-respected, or sometimes both. A variation on this for some conferences is the Thematic Session where panelists are invited but must organize their presentations or papers around some aspect of the conference theme.
Poster Sessions usually have several dozen freestanding bulletin boards to which presenters attach their posters (approx. 3 x 5 feet, but conferences specify unique size limits), which are usually created based on a series of PowerPoint slides and professionally printed. Presenters stand by their posters for the entire session, and may be asked to provide a summary of their research or asked questions about it by conference participants who walk around the posters to view the research.
Student Sessions and Student Roundtables operate like Regular Sessions and Roundtables, except that participation through organizing, presiding, and presenting is usually restricted to students (sometimes specifically to graduate or undergraduate).
Author meets Critics sessions are set up as a professional confrontation between the author of a recently-published book and scholars who have criticisms to offer. Since lots of scholars have criticisms to offer, and authors are sure to defend their work, these sessions tend to be the most animated and, at times, theatrical.
Business Meetings are typically where section or SIG (special interest group) business gets done. This includes announcing (and sometimes presenting) awards, assigning tasks (such as recruiting new members or organizing next year's conference sessions), reviewing finances, and providing an opportunity for section/SIG members to raise and vote on issues of concern.
Section Receptions are opportunities to network with others in the section. They usually consist of a bunch of people milling around some refreshments which tend to run out quickly. The refreshments are quite meager, e.g. cannot count for dinner. It's a little hard to meet people in this context cold turkey. It helps a lot if there is a familiar face who can introduce you to her/his buddies. A good strategy might be to grab some refreshments, take a stroll around and see if you run into anyone you know.
Conference Types
The American Sociological Association Annual Meeting is the big one - a multi-site conference lasting at least 4 full days. The ASA is the largest professional organization for sociologists, and the annual meeting will be the largest collection of sociologists you'll ever see in one place. In addition to many regular sessions, ASA sections put on sessions based on a membership allotment, so larger sections may put on 5 or more sessions across multiple days, and will have their own section roundtables in addition to the open refereed roundtables and student roundtables open for general submission. The ASA meetings are usually big enough to span multiple hotels. There is also a large exhibitor section where you can score cheap and free books (see tips for Attending, below) from eager publishers. If a sociologist is famous, they're probably going to be at ASA, so ASA is often as much (if not more) about networking as it is about listening to sociologists present their work.
Regional conferences are meetings of regional sociological societies. In other words, they are general-interest meetings with a range of topics, but they draw most of their attendees from the local geographic region. The Pacific Sociological Association meeting is fairly well-attended, particularly by scholars from master's degree and four-year institutions. Less well attended are state-wide conferences, such as the California Sociological Association conference. To find your closest regional meetings, see The National Council of State Sociological Associations for a links to regional and state sociological associations.
Specialist, subfield, or topical conferences are meetings of scholars focused on a particular topic or area of study, such as science or Latin America (or even science in Latin America). Sometimes these so-called specialist conferences are themselves as large as the general-interest regional conferences. These might be regular meetings of a professional society, for example the annual meeting of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. They might also be regular conferences held by a particular institution on a theme, for example the UCSD Culture Conference or the Stony Brook Graduate Student Ethnography Conference.
Attending
Prepare by downloading the preliminary program. Some recommend scheduling out the first day and then waiting until you get there to figure out the rest, while others recommend scheduling the entire conference in advance. The best method for you will depend partly on how large the conference is (the greater the number of concurrent sessions, the harder it is to choose one) and whether or not you will have time at night to plan the next day's schedule (vs. attending late-night events or seeing the town). At the very least, you might want to search for presentations by faculty and students from your own institution, as your show of support by attending may be expected.
Submitting
If you're currently working on a paper, determine which conferences will be accepting submissions around the time you can have a submission ready. See this page for a list of conferences related to sociology (particularly family/sexuality) sorted by approximate submission date; this page has current calls for papers, for conferences and journals. You can also find conference information on association web pages, and will often receive reminder e-mails from associations you've joined about their annual meetings.
Read the call for submissions carefully. Conferences vary widely in what exactly they want to receive for a submission: some only want a brief abstract, others want completed papers, and many conferences will fall somewhere in between. Pay attention to any requirements (e.g. page limits for papers or word limits for abstracts). Note that, while conferences that require only abstracts can make it tempting to send in submissions for projects still in their early phases, this is not recommended. You should at least do enough preliminary work to make sure you do not have data problems that will make the analysis impossible, and ideally make sure you actually have interesting results to present.
You will probably have a choice of session type, regular session vs. poster or roundtable. For many conferences, rejected submissions to regular sessions will be passed to the poster/roundtable sessions for consideration. You will probably also have to submit your paper to a particular session or section -- if you need help choosing a session, ask your advisor or other faculty working in your area.
If you are working with others (particularly faculty) on the paper you plan to submit, make sure you discuss authorship order before submitting. Generally, it's expected that the person listed as the first author will be the one to actually present the work at the conference.
Presenting
A set of links related to giving professional presentations is located here
