[Air-L] Let's talk about AoIR.

[Rhiannon Bury]

Joining in for a  kick at the can.

Like some others who have commented, I  have been around AoIR for years and have been accepted at every IR to which I made a submission, including this year. I happen to have a large research project (for one scholar) on the go with  lot of survey and interview data collected and analyzed over the past couple of years. Although it was time consuming, I was able to formulate an argument, demonstrate its merits, describe the methods and discuss the findings in 1200 words. In fact, when I finished, I realized that I had effectively written the 15-minute presentation (our panel has four presenters).   But what if these  guidelines had been in place in 2005, or 2008 or even 2012? In February of those years, I had ideas, I had an argument (sort of), I might even have had some raw data or was in the process of collecting some. There's not a chance in hell I would have been able to come up with a short paper that would pass muster. To this end I would like
 to pick up and quote from one of Terri's posts in the thread: 

Conclusions? Findings? In a paper proposed in January and delivered in
October? You don't need to be a Foucault scholar to understand how that
forecloses all sorts of projects, including ones that are activist,
performance-oriented, involve collaboration with communities in flux, and
so forth.


It seems to me that the short paper format is neither fish nor fowl. You either accept abstracts and take some chances on ideas in progress. Sure some papers will fizzle but others will soar. Or you ask for full papers and those you accept get published in an Annual Proceedings. If AoIR found that very few full papers were being submitted, then the solution is to get rid of the full paper submission. 

As for the disciplinary focus, if it has been decided that IR conferences are going to be traditional social science conferences that accept only empirical research, then say so and drop the claim to interdisciplinarity. If not, then these guidelines needs to be revisited and revised. 

best

Rhiannon 

Rhiannon Bury
Associate Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
Athabasca University
rbury at athabascau.ca