[Air-L] aoir

[Hillis, Ken]

Thanks Terri, Feona and others who are raising this very important issue. I, for one, am seriously wondering, after reading the reviews from two panels I agreed to moderate, what AoIR is now about. One panel was accepted and was was rejected, yet both used the now 'discredited' and 'outmoded' format of submission used in previous years, in part because organizers strongly indicated after a flurry of concerned emails many months back that no proposal would be discriminated against if it used the old fomat. Yet this is precisely what did happen--one panel was accepted (with 2 reviews) and the other rejected (with 4 reviews, two of which were glowing and two of which picked the proposal apart on the basis of not conforming to the new format--even as one of them overtly stated her/his discomfort in doing so given the overall conference thematic of resistance/appropriation. 

I am a humanities scholar who happens to very much respect social science approaches--this is an issue that we, as a department of communication studies (I'm incoming Chair) have been grappling with now for more than two years and we're very much focused on ways that humanities and social science approaches can complement one another. I thought AoIR was about this as well, or at least it seems that it used to be organized along those lines. But, something has changed and proposals that feature 'theory' now run the risk of rejection on the basis of 'poorly conceived' methods, inadequate description of the entire project (that one is working on proposing almost a full year in advance of presenting) and so forth . . . 

Perhaps enough for now. I *almost never* post a personal type of email to this list. But I am saddened and, yes, even angered, even as I know it's an all volunteer project. Yet it really felt like it was the algorithm making the decisions this time round . . . 

Ken


Ken Hillis
Department Chair and Professor of Media and Technology Studies
Department of Communication Studies
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3285 USA