2013 LSA Annual Meeting Organized Sessions
LSA members are encouraged to consider submitting proposals for an Organized Session at the 2013 Annual Meeting, which will take place in Boston, Massachusetts from January 3-6.
An organized session is an excellent opportunity to present a group of similarly-focused presentations on a wide variety of topics and in a wide variety of formats. LSA Committees and SIGs are also encouraged to submit proposals on topics falling under their purview. Program Committee Chairs are available to discuss ideas for possible organized session topics.
Organized sessions may be on any linguistic topic that would be of interest to meeting attendees (e.g. characteristics of a particular language family; trends and advances in a particular subfield of linguistics; current debates on a particular research topic). They may also address topics of interest to particular groups of attendees (e.g. students, hopeful book authors, prospective grant-writers, policy advisors). They may have a theoretical or a pragmatic focus. Graduate students and junior faculty are particularly invited to submit proposals on professional development topics. Since the Modern Language Association will be meeting in Boston at the same time as the LSA, the Program Committee is especially eager to entertain proposals for sessions with some thematic or programmatic overlap with that organization.
A session may take many forms: symposium, workshop, tutorial, or another form as appropriate. It may be either 1 hour and 39 minutes or 3 hours in length. Specific examples are given below.
Directions for Submission of Proposals
Deadline for receipt of final proposal: Tuesday, May 15, 2012. Organizers must submit final proposals by this May date. In a departure from previous years, the proposal received in May must be a final one, with all presentations and speakers accounted for. There will not be an opportunity for additional feedback from the Program Committee, nor will there be any later submission date.
Proposals submitted after the May 15th final deadline will not be considered.
Possible Session Formats
Symposium: several presentations on a single topic;
Tutorial: intensive instruction in some subfield of linguistics or a related field;
Workshop: on a specific theme or issue, with time for responses and debate/discussion planned in, perhaps with a particular goal in mind;
Datablitz: a session composed of many very short presentations (10 mins each, for example) highlighting a broad range of ongoing work on a single topic
Sessions of any other kind with a clear, specific and coherent rationale.
Requirements for Submission
The completed proposal should be submitted by the deadline via the online survey. Questions about the content of the proposal may be directed to the Program Committee Chairs: Scott Schwenter (schwenter.1@osu.edu) and Andrew Nevins (a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk). Technical questions about submission may be directed to David Robinson (drobinson@lsadc.org)
Suggestions for proposers:
Ideally organized session timetables should be aligned as much as possible with the paper schedules in the regular sessions. These are 20-minute papers, starting on the hour and half-hour, with 10 minutes of discussion following. This allows for some traffic between regular sessions and organized sessions. It is not required, however.
The committee strongly encourages organizers to consider the submission of sessions in the 1 hr 30 minute format, which allows us to accept more sessions. If three hours is the appropriate length for your session, however, do not hesitate to ask for it.
Last year, some of the shorter organized sessions were supplemented with a targeted poster session on the topic, held separately from the regular LSA poster sessions. This allowed for (close) personal interactions/exchanges and follow up debates among participants and audience. Proposers could consider whether such a targeted poster session might be appropriate for their topic.
Please also note the following:
Individual papers must not have already appeared in print, nor may they appear in print before the 2013 Annual Meeting.
Abstracts of individual papers or posters will be reviewed for quality according to the same criteria applied to abstracts of papers and posters presented outside of organized sessions. In order to maximize the chances that your organized session will be accepted, please ask participants to consult http://lsadc.org/info/meet-annual13-abguide.cfm for more information when preparing their abstracts.
Conveners responsible for proposing an organized session should ensure the quality of individual abstracts to be included. Organized sessions will be considered for acceptance not only based on the content and presentation of the covering proposal but also based on the quality of the individual papers
Each participant in the organized session must be a member of the LSA. Nonmembers may join online at http://www.lsadc.org/info/mem-index.cfm.
Proposals for organized sessions are not reviewed anonymously; please be sure to include your name and affiliation on the proposal as well as the names and affiliations for the presenters on their respective abstracts.
All meeting rooms will be equipped with microphones, an LCD projector, and a screen. An overhead projector or white board may be ordered if necessary. Internet access may or may not be available in meeting rooms.
Approximate timetable for organized session proposals, and further requirements for accepted proposals:
May 15: deadline for receipt of final proposals
Late September: notification of acceptance/non-acceptance of proposals.
For accepted session proposals only:
Early October: submit a 1-page description of the organized session and a 150-word abstract of each participant's presentation for inclusion in the Meeting Handbook.
