[Air-L] aoir

[Burcu Bakioglu]

Hi all,
I can't speak to the change in culture of AoIR myself, and I am sure this
is extremely important too, but what concerns me here is the lack of
consistency in the review process. How does one panel/proposal gets
reviewed by two reviewers, the other by four? Why are we rejecting some
panels based on formatting and others get accepted? I understand that this
was the first year that we implemented this, but if mixed signals were
given for the submission process (which I'm not sure because I'm not privy
to the back-end conversations that may have happened, I just followed the
e-mail exchanges and used the new template), then really, it undermines the
trust in the whole system.

My only 2 cents on the topic,

BsB



On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Hillis, Ken <khillis at email.unc.edu> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>



-- 
Thanks,

Burcu S. Bakioglu, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow in New Media
Lawrence University

http://www.palefirer.com

-- Come to the dark side, we have cookies!