If I may interject on this graduate submission issue for a second here, because it is a valid concern: I've seen this at IAMCR and am involved in it in a minor capacity in terms of reviewing abstracts... As a part of this organization, seasoned students have created Emerging Scholars Network. This group has their own separate track. Graduate students could send their submissions in to this track and, from what I have seen, the submissions here have a slightly more flexible acceptance standards. That way, they learn the ropes, get to present their research if it is any good, and meet people when they come in. The organization also provides mentorship, matches profs with grad students etc... So, I hear Jeremy's concern and the need to maintain some kind of a quality in submissions, but we could consider building something like this within the AoIR organization. And by "we," I mean encouraging senior grad students to take the initiative to do so. It is for their best interest anyway, the organizers can put this in their CV under service. Students who participate in it would meet like minded people build their networks, get the support they need, train on how to write their abstracts and present them in conferences etc... My very long-winded two cents :) BsB On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhunsinger@wlu.ca>wrote:
So, with some of the context set, I'll try to address the concerns:
1. The length of submission is too long.
I suppose one way we could address this is to remove the lower bound on the word count. It seems in some sense notional but it seems strange to change things right ahead of the deadline. Would this put one's 600 word abstract at a disadvantage to someone who has submitted 1,100 words. I suspect it would.
If I am reading correctly, I think that Jeremy is suggesting that the increase in the number of words will systematically exclude graduate students. I can't imagine that graduate students are any less capable of producing 400 more words. I personally am probably less capable of that now than when I was a grad student. We could, I suppose, ask Sheizaf Rafaeli whether the 1,000 word cap for IR5.0 resulted in a reduced number of graduate submissions. If it did, I don't think I noticed it.
I did not mean imply that, but what I did imply is that the number of student acceptances has seemed to diminish over the year. However, here i return to the professionalization question. People who are more competent at producing abstracts for conferences tend to get into more conferences. That is a skill set that is learned, so newer people to the profession tend to have less access than older people. The more words that we require them to write opens up more possibilities for someone to write something that will get them rejected. Are we accepting or rejecting more of any one category of people, surely those statistics exist and are things that are discussed by the executive.
The question in the end is what are we, organizationally, supporting by requiring more and more, combined with stricter modes of production? I understand the arguments you put forth, but I want to suggest that there are other implications to the system being put forth than you suggest too. I argue that the new system ads additional disciplinarity and requires additional professionalization. Those things are, i think going to be antagonistic to interdisciplinarity, grad student participation, and international participation in the short and long run. But i could be wrong, but I would be remiss to not point out that possibility and warn against it. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@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
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