[Air-L] SPIR and IR and internet research and submission policies (was Re: AoIR 14 Announcement. Extended Deadline and More)

[David J. Phillips]

On 25 Feb 2013, at    13:2600, Alexander Halavais wrote:
> 
> I do want to note there is nothing here that says you need to have
> "findings" or a "lit review" as David Phillips suggests above. You do
> need to have a title, and some text, but that has not changed from the
> past. There is a section for references, but if you don't have any,
> don't use it... I think we can remain interdisciplinary and still ask
> that people use text and have titles.



This is the part I was referring to, from the call:
"Papers should include:

- Description/summary of the work's intellectual merit with respect to its findings, its relation to extant research and its broader impacts.
- A description of the methodological approach or the theoretical underpinnings informing the research inquiry.
- Conclusions or discussion of findings."

So there is a requirement that findings be found, presented, justified, and discussed.  

I DO NOT WANT TO DISPARAGE THIS FORM OF INQUIRY.  It is a tried and true, effective way of producing credible stuff.  

But I have been invited by the conference organizers to consider resistance. Resistance goes against my grain, as all who know me will attest, but I try to be accommodating.

I resist the term "findings."  Is what I'm coming up with a creation or a discovery? Was something just lying out there waiting for me to wield the right tool to find it? I'm not so sure. 

I resist the "literature, RQ, method, finding, discussion" (LRMFD) paradigm of presentation. What if I have a method that produces ephemeral truths? What if you have to witness the process for it to be credible? What if I believe it would be more honest, productive, and fun to explore and elaborate the messiness and confusion and circularity and panic of what I really do in my job, envying those who seem to have a more steady, predictable, and manageable time of it? 

We have also been asked to consider appropriation. OK, I'm game.

I have been professionalized well enough that I can appropriate, with relative ease, the LRMFD paradigm of presentation that the cfp asks us to adopt. So the restrictions in the cfp are not really burdens to me. And maybe that skill in appropriation is something we should be disciplining our younger member to achieve. Maybe.

I will repeat that I'm all for mechanisms to encourage the presentation (or enactment) of interesting, substantial, novel, germaine research at IR 14. And now that I understand the usefulness of the SPIR .doc template, I'm OK with that. I just think that requiring submissions cleave to the LRMFD paradigm is a bit straitening.  

And that's more than enough out of me.

djp






David J. Phillips, Associate Professor 
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University of Toronto

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