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LSA Reinstates Biennial Summer Meetings
Summer Meeting 2006 Call for Papers
Background
The student membership of any professional society represents its future. An analysis of the student membership of the LSA over the past ten years reveals a sharp decline in student membership. This decline appears to be atypical for our peer professional societies. Moreover, the percentage of student members within the LSA is significantly lower than at peer professional societies. To ensure the healthy future of the Society, a concerted effort must be made to reach out to new student members and win back lapsed student members.
In the Spring of 2005, the LSA conducted an informal poll of graduate students and discovered that fewer than 25% of graduate students enrolled in PhD programs are members of the LSA. Many of the students surveyed are either unaware of the benefits associated with membership in the LSA or do not believe that these benefits warrant membership.
The LSA Summer Meeting Returns
To that end, the Executive Committee of the LSA has decided to reinstate the LSA summer meetings (last held in 1983) and to gear them towards graduate students. As far as we have been able to determine, the last broad-based student-oriented conference (SCIL) ceased functioning in 2000, after its last meeting. Moreover, a common criticism of the LSA Annual Meeting voiced by graduate students is that it is too broad in scope, too large, and too impersonal.
The Executive Committee felt that now is an ideal time to launch an LSA-sponsored summer meeting aimed specifically at graduate students and the issues of importance to them. The conference will be on a manageable scale that will be designed to foster networking and interaction among graduate students. A prominent feature of the summer meeting will be special “professional development” panels designed to prepare students to be career linguists. Such a meeting would also serve to keep the LSA visible and salient year-round in non-institute years.
The Specifics
The key features of such a meeting would be:
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Using the institute model, proposals to host the summer meeting would be solicited from Departments and Programs. The Executive Committee (EC) would review the proposals and evaluate them in terms of program, theme, location, accommodations, and costs. The LSA would sponsor the meeting and provide the institution with a planning grant in an amount to be determined.
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Conference arrangements would be the responsibility of the host institution, with invited and plenary speakers selected in consultation with the EC.
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Proposals could include “special sessions” or “themes” for the meeting, e.g. “endangered languages”, “semantics-pragmatics boundary”, “current developments in OT”, “constructions”, etc. to draw on the expertise and interests of the host faculty.
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The program would consist primarily of talks (20 minutes, with 10 minutes allocated for questions) and posters, along with several panels and plenaries (see below), with no parallel sessions if possible. In addition, a small number (3-6) of invited speakers at the junior level (e.g. postdocs, assistant professors, and new PhDs in non-academic, linguistically-oriented positions) The idea behind this is to reach out to the more junior members of the Society with an eye to getting them “hooked” on the LSA with the Annual Meeting serving as a natural follow-up.
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The privilege of submitting an abstract will be limited to current LSA members. Although all LSA members are eligible to submit an abstract, the meeting will focus on issues that are of interest and importance to students – the future of the discipline and the Society.
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To address the interests and needs of graduate students, special professional development panels would be organized on interviewing and negotiating skills, publishing, making the most of one’s graduate education, non-academic careers, advising and mentoring, completing the thesis, the future of the field, balancing research, academics and life, etc. The general point is that we envision the biennial meeting being a different kind of event –with things of value being offered besides the possibility of presenting papers/posters.
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Social activities would be planned by the host institution to foster interaction, networking, and fun.
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The LSA Executive Meeting would be scheduled immediately before the opening of the meeting. This would allow the members of EC to stay after the meeting for the conference and actively participate, e.g., by chairing a session, presenting a plenary, serving on a professional development panel. This would assure that prominent scholars would participate and give the students with access to leading figures in the field and the leaders of the Society at minimal additional cost to the LSA (in the form of per diem expenses).
- A proposal will be submitted to NSF request support for student travel and lodging and to defray conference-related expenses.
