[Air-L] Voting Open & A Question for Candidates

[Brabham, Daren C]

Not sure if Alex meant for candidates for open seats to respond to his questions, too, or if it was just for the VP candidates...but here it goes...

I think the conferences work well as-is, really. The only parts that need improvement, perhaps, is that some panels struggle to sustain a coherent theme (i.e., a video game theory panel might have a paper or two that really are about video game theories, but the other couple of papers are about other things/theories and use an analysis of a video game to make their point). It is extremely difficult to somehow group ad hoc papers together into coherent panels, though, so I'm sure previous program planners have truly done their best. I don't have an answer for how to make this kind of thing better, except maybe to encourage whole thematic panels more...or to consider poster sessions or lightning talk formats for some of the ill-fitting ad hoc papers...or to maybe just call all of the ad hoc panels potpourri panels and just include more papers on each of them (5 or 6 per panel?).

We are all Internet scholars, and we are all able to find full papers later (SSRN, emailing presenters personally, or whatever). The value for this conference, for me, is exposure to many ideas in short formats, and then good discussion that follows.

The other value of the conference is the social hour. Informal cocktail time with colleagues is the best way to find mentors, extend scholarly conversation, and find allies in the field. I would actually oppose any more efforts to add new grad student mentoring programming to the conference. We have the doctoral colloquium, which is great. But really beyond that there need to be more mixers, more trading of business cards, more informal conversations between grad students and senior scholars. I know I would probably not want to be assigned a grad student to mentor throughout the year, but I would welcome any opportunity to have a beer with a grad student interested in the things I'm interested in. So, on the "mentoring grad students" front, I disagree with Jeremy and would like to see a less formal, more frequent social interaction across ranks than new panels and programs. That's really how the academy works, and the sooner the formal boundaries between ranks come down (and I think formal mentoring arrangements inherently keep these boundaries up), the better for grad students.

db

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Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, School of Journalism & Mass Communication
Editor, Case Studies in Strategic Communication | www.csscjournal.org
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Carroll Hall, CB 3365
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
(801) 633-4796 (mobile)
daren.brabham at unc.edu | www.darenbrabham.com