GSA #8: On Submitting Abstracts to Conferences

I love going to conferences for three reasons: 1) visiting cool places with subsidy, 2) getting feedback on my work from an unfamiliar audience, and 3) expanding my academic (and social) network on my own terms. And since I received a question on how to go about submitting to conferences (e.g., writing up an abstract from scratch or what), I decided this would be a good time for me to articulate my own conference submission system.

As I mentioned in a post on how I appreciate conference abstracts that at least gesture toward making an argument, having a paper already written makes it easier (I think) to write a more convincing abstract. At the same time, I often use conferences as a space to explore new ideas and take a break from my dissertation project (even if things end up connecting anyway).

To that end, I (like most people) take one of two approaches to submitting abstracts to conferences:

1. Take a paper lying around and write an abstract based on that, or
2. Write an abstract for a paper I want to write, that also fits the conference field/theme—for an ongoing project, for a potential future project, or for fun

Approach #1 becomes easier the more seminar papers you accumulate each term. Presumably out of those papers there should be one or two that you'd be interested in developing in the direction of the conference field/theme. (Early in my Ph.D. career I gave conference presentations based on a paper I wrote in undergrad and even a paper I wrote in high school—shut up, it was my Extended Essay for the IB Program, and it's still a paper I'm hoping to return to and revise into an article one day. Apparently my interest in gender, modernization, and Japanese literature was already in place at the tender age of 16.)

Approach #2 is good if you can make yourself write the paper just for the conference, and even better if you can write it as a seminar paper too—because then you've just killed two birds with one stone! Plus if you can get comments from the prof before you head off to the conference, your presentation will be even more polished. And thus, your coursework and research mutually develop each other.

After you write the abstracts (and papers), you can put them in your "dissertation folder" if you think they belong there. Whether they get accepted or not, after a while you start accumulating words that help construct backgrounds, potential arguments, and threads of future exploration. 

I'm seeing all these CFPs this quarter for grad student conferences, and I get kind of wistful that I can no longer apply to them. (Grad student conferences tend to be cheap (even free), and with excellent food.) Anyway, freshly off the PAMLA boat, my next couple of posts will probably deal with 1) the actual giving of the presentation and 2) organizing panels. Probably. Maybe.

[That was the view from the gate for my flight out of Haneda Airport last Wednesday...in front of Hokkaido Kitchen. Man, did their curry smell good...]