[Air-L] Let's talk about AoIR

[Sarah Florini]

Hi, all.

Let me preface this by saying I’m a pretty newly minted PhD and am not yet wise in the ways of conference organizing. So, my ideas might be logistically unfeasible or outright naïve.

I was thinking about Lori’s point that tracks might discourage interaction among people from different fields. It’s a valid point. At the same time, different disciplines and approaches have different “needs” (which have been discussed at length, so I won’t reiterate them here). Is it possible to use tracks for the submission and reviewing process, but not for assembling the program? There could be a variety of tracks that allowed for more flexible submission processes and more targeted reviewing. These could be crafted to insure space for less “straight” research, performances, activist work, etc. that we want to have a home at AoIR (and that many, including myself, feel that the most recent CFP seems to have disadvantaged). But, there could also be a track for the kind of completed, full papers Nichole is talking about. Then, when it came time to put the program together, the tracks could be jettisoned. The panels would be assembled by a non-track centric logic. So, you might have a panel about X and it might be made up of a completed quantitative study what was submitted as a full paper, a theoretical piece, an ethnographic work in progress, and someone doing activist work. (I’m just randomly naming possibilities.) That way the selection process was more targeted to meet different needs. But, then when we actually got to the conference, those disciplinary (and pragmatic needs) didn’t dictate the interactions.

Also, I would love to see more discussion on the list. I, personally, haven’t really participated much until now because that didn’t seem to be the way people were using the list. Having this or some other space for discussion would be great. I really like the idea of webinars. I would be down for some webinars.

Best,

Sarah