How to prepare and present a conference presentation

October 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

Two of my last three weekends were dedicated to that time-honored grad-student rite of passage, the academic conference. Reflecting on my own performances as well as those of my colleagues, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the conference presentation. I hope that my fellow cacophoners might share and amend these guidelines I humbly offer. In the spirit of the efficiency celebrated by conference presentations themselves, I will organize these ideas in outlined bulleted form. I work within the social sciences, but I believe much of what I share here may be of use to you  budding humanists and natural scientists, too. Here goes:

Find a suitable conference

  • Sign up for email listservs for subfields and organizations you are interested in. Throughout the year you will get call-for-paper announcements (CFP) offering panel discussions to be a part of. Pay attention to the deadline and guidelines for CFPs. Read their panel description closely. Often they will have a certain rubric within which they are working, with a theoretical approach either tacitly or explicitly signalled.
  • There are many regional and graduate-student conferences organized for people still early in their careers. If you are at the dissertation proposal stage or still formulating your project, these kinds of events are a good idea. The grad student conference I attended in Boulder, Colorado, included very helpful workshop sessions on writing and theoretical approaches to the conference theme (“states of belonging”).
  • Many conferences also accept individual papers. You submit your abstract and they will place you with other “orphan” presenters. You run a greater risk of not getting your paper accepted or getting stuck in a hodpodge potpourri panel (like I was last weekend) if you opt for this approach.

Write a strong abstract

  • Most conferences want you to participate (and want your conference fees payment), but they do have limits and criteria for accepting papers. A compelling abstract is critical. Often this is an awkward exercise because  you have not written the paper for which you must make a synopsis.
  • You usually have 200-300 words to work with (the conference I attended last weekend confined me to only 100!), so you don’t have space to elaborate sophisticated concepts, nor to tell everything about your project. Use keywords that signal a certain literature that, after studying the CFP, you know the organizers will be attuned to.
  • Allude to a piece of research you have conducted or a fieldsite/event/documentary source that will serve as the material your paper examines.
  • HAVE A POINT your paper will advance. Even if you don’t yet know what that point is, make a concise and intelligible claim. Emphasize the innovative. The abstract doesn’t have to break new ground; it need only suggest your paper might do so.

Write the paper

  • The organizers will often want you to submit the paper for a discussant to read before the conference and prepare comments. Do NOT send a whole dissertation chapter draft or anything over 20 pages. At worst, the discussant will bear some contempt for this burden; at best, you are diluting her ability to give you concise feedback on your work. A presentation is typically limited to 15 minutes. It takes roughly 2 minutes to read a double-spaced page of text. So anything more than 7 or 8 pages is more than you can say in the presentation.
  • Write a ‘data-driven’ essay. If you are an anthropologist, load it up with ethnographic material. If you are a historian or literature scholar, delve into the primary texts. This will give your discussant a better chance at assessing your analytical points. If you saturate your argument in theoretical goop, it will be frustrating for an outsider with a different perspective. (There are moments when strategic obfuscation is advisable, of course.)
  • Most importantly, you only have time in a presentation to develop ONE maybe two points. In any case, no one will remember more than two points, so keep it tight. It is always more effective to go in depth into one particular aspect of your research than try to sketch together myriad pieces in one whirlwind showcase.
  • Signal early on what your intentions with the paper are. ‘Map out’ the argument so your audience can get a sense of what is to come.

Prepare the presentation

  • The text you submitted to the discussant and what you will say in the presentation should not be the same. There are different opinions on this, but I believe priority #1 is to keep people’s attention for the time you are talking. People generally stay more tuned in when they sense that someone is speaking to them, not reading to them. Some reduce their presentation to a series of points they talk through. This has the advantage of being “live,” but it also runs the risk of rambling. You might run out of time without a prepared text. One of my panel co-presenters last weekend ran well past his 15 minutes without ever coming to anything resembling a conclusion; he had to be unceremoniously cut off at 20 minutes with a curt “thank you” from the time-keeper. Ouch. Remember that by going overtime you are antagonizing your audience and colleagues on the panel. Be courteous.
  • If you are going to read your paper, go to the trouble of making it ‘sound’ better to listeners’ ears. Good general rule: Edit your text so that almost every sentence does not exceed one line in length. Cut down compound and complex sentences into simple declarative ones.
  • Remove all but the most essential references in the spoken version.
  • Practice reading your paper aloud for flow, emphasis, and timing. Replace unnecessary jargon or technical terms with more colloquial speech. You want to be familiar enough with the writing that you can pick your head up and speak to people.
  • Rules of PowerPoint: your PPT slides should absolutely NOT replace your paper; i.e. you should not simply read a bunch of bullet points and text excerpts off the screen to your audience. Yawn.
  • Your PPT show should complement your discourse. Show an image to illustrate a point you are making. Consider inserting a blank slide for portions of the presentation when you want the audience’s attention on you, not on the screen.

At the event

  • If you are using audio-visual equipment, get to the panel session room early to test it out.
  • Listen to your co-presenters’ talks and take notes.
  • Graciously thank the organizers and/or sponsors before you get into your paper.
  • Towards the end of your presentation, a time-keeper will usually hold up signs signaling your remaining time. Just acknowledge these with a nod and adjust your speech as needed. No need to interrupt your own talk with an exasperated “whoa! only 2 minutes left?”
  • If there is Q&A or discussion time, try to make an effort to identify connections between your paper and your colleagues’. If the discussant or an audience member says something misinformed about your research, keep a poker face or just politely nod.

There must be more to add to this, so all ye commenters please fire away…

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Higher Education, Jobs, Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Style

Does the University Labor System Undermine Faculty Development Initiatives?

October 7, 2010 By 10 Comments

During my first conversation with a faculty member I’m supporting this semester, I was served a heavy dose of honesty. I asked, “What topics would you be interested in seeing addressed at faculty roundtables or professional development meetings?”

“Honestly, none,” he responded. “I’m an adjunct here. I’ll think you’ll find this is true of nearly everyone who teaches this course: we’re all part-timers, we’re all stretched very thin, and few of us have extra time to do anything outside of class time. Sorry.”

At first I was flabbergasted—I hadn’t even pitched a single idea yet, but there I was being rejected outright! But I quickly realized that the instructor was simply being frank about the difficult situation into which we put adjunct faculty members when we ask them to spend any extra time on a job for which they’re already underpaid. I remembered my years as an adjunct. Because I was teaching at two campuses on top of full-time doctoral work, my commute times alone prevented me from being as active as I would have liked outside the classroom.

The barriers that prevent contingent faculty from becoming truly involved in the university community and investing time in pedagogical development certainly represent one of the many intangible disadvantages of the two-tiered faculty labor system.

While the ultimate solution to this problem can only be to overhaul or at least improve the system, we humble WAC/CAC facilitators must work within the system—and I insist that we can. Here’s how to get even the most overworked part-timers involved in faculty development:

1)   Pragmatism: Emphasize the genuine usefulness of a professional development initiative. Presume that faculty don’t want to come to meetings, and give them reasons to change their minds. Compare the attractiveness of these two titles for the same professional development meeting: “Grading Rubric Basics” and “Cut Grading Time in Half and Double Student Satisfaction.” I was actually invited to the first meeting when I taught at a non-CUNY school. I did not attend.

2)   Resume-building: Involve faculty in planning the meetings. The team supporting Great Works does an excellent job with this: Ask the faculty, ideally a mix of full- and part-time, not only to suggest topics for the meetings, but also to prepare the meetings’ content. This is more than mere ego-stroking; faculty can use this experience for the service section of their CVs. I, personally, would do much more than a 10-minute presentation at a faculty meeting in exchange for a line on my CV. Other faculty will be more likely to attend too, since someone they know will be speaking.

3)   Bribery: Of course budgets are more or less out of our hands, but part-time faculty should, clearly, be paid for the extra time they spend on their jobs. If you can get someone to pay contingent faculty for their time, do it. If not… spring for donuts? If you do the latter, you may see me sneak into your faculty meetings.

Miniature Food - Crazy Donuts Set B
Creative Commons License photo credit: PetitPlat by sk_

Filed Under: Baruch College, Faculty Development

Parkour Poetics

October 6, 2010 By 6 Comments

For the past couple months my bedtime reading has consisted of passages from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his recently published journals from the three wild, setback-ridden years it took to make the film Fitzcarraldo (1982) (the one that involved actually dragging a steamship over a small mountain, etc.).  Herzog’s writing is marked by an observational and detail-obsessed intensity one might associate with either a scrupulous scientist or a naturalist mystic.  It’s fascinating stuff, and I’ve marked-up and dog-eared hundreds of discrete moments that have stood out along the way.  Several weeks ago, though, one particular paragraph elicited a more uncommon response: startled recognition.

Earlier on in a given day, Herzog and several members of the Campa tribe in Peru must hurry along a rugged trail from one part of the jungle to another.  He later reflects on the experience:

“I have often paid close attention to the way [the Campas] move; it is a bit like a slalom, in which they have already spotted the next obstacle—a protruding root, a dangling liana, a thorny branch—and circumvent it with a graceful turn of the entire body that starts two paces in advance and merges with the rapid trot, never interrupting the overall movement, whereas Europeans stop, advance in fits and starts, stumble, hesitate.  Once an obstacle has been smoothly skirted, the next one has already been registered, and the steps toward it all contribute to a flowing, economical circumvention.  Their torso bends, and their feet, I noticed, tend to go up onto rather than over an obstacle, provided it is stable.  It is better to step onto a loop formed by a vine than to get one’s foot caught in it, and meanwhile the eye remains fixed on the objects one can grab onto in steep, slippery places without being stuck by a dozen thorns.” (164)

My audible outburst upon reading this: “parkour! he’s inadvertently describing parkour!”  Does everyone know about parkour?  (Also called “free-running”.) Originating, as a defined thing, in France some 13 years ago, it’s a self-described “discipline” involving lots of risky-looking running, leaping, vaulting, and climbing through (usually) urban spaces.  AmericanParkour.com offers this core definition—“Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment”—and then elaborates, explaining, for instance, that parkour requires, “consistent, disciplined training with an emphasis on functional strength, physical conditioning, balance, creativity, fluidity, control, precision, spatial awareness, and looking beyond the traditional use of objects.”  The central idea is to learn to move more smoothly and aesthetically through physical space, drawing on your body’s innate creaturely capacities and appropriating would-be obstacles into your course instead of avoiding them.  An initiate into this discipline becomes a “traceur” or “traceuse,” someone who traces out new, more efficient, more interesting paths.

Though rarely with any identifying tag attached, it’s made its way into movies and commercials, for obvious reasons of spectacle.  Parkour’s most glorious moment in the pop culture sun, which many of you will remember, was probably the epic “pas-de-dude” foot-chase sequence at the beginning of Casino Royale (the chase features one of parkour’s legendary founders and traceurs, Sébastien Foucan, who you may also recall seeing some years back in Nike’s “Angry Chicken” commercial).

At a glance, the whole thing is easy enough to dismiss as a pseudo-sport or a fad or another instance of boys showing off.  Parkour is kind of awesome and also, somehow, kind of dorky and embarrassing, since its adherents will always look like clamoring, artificial poseurs (more French!) next to the Peruvian Campas, for whom fluid, efficient movement is more expedient, more authentically bound up with a whole way of life.  Yet I don’t think the phenomenon should be dismissed.  It is, after all, a legitimate—if poignant and/or futile—effort to revitalize the human animal through new habits of thinking and action, ways of doing things that fuse the practical with the pleasurable. (Read an extensive New Yorker piece for a consideration of parkour in these and other respects.)

These ideas about movement—the descriptions and the posited philosophy—felt eerily familiar.  Isn’t much of this the very language we use to describe good writing?  In fact, what most excited me about the Herzog passage, I realize now, was not the initial jolt of the parkour association but the meta-thought that followed much later: Herzog’s sentences about the Campas’ movement were enacting the very same sort of obstacle-negotiating fluidity under consideration (or at least the translator’s renditions in English did as much).

I want to put forth, very provisionally, a hypothesis about parkour’s affinity with writing, “affinity” because I think the comparison goes well beyond mere metaphor.  Each is a human activity—inextricably an art and a skill both—that requires habituation and aims for the elaboration of continuous, compelling, and effective sequences.   Parkour and writing seem to be correlated in a very tight analogy, down to the moment-by-moment anticipations, shifts, and circumventions, and I wonder if thorough and lively reference to actual human movement—rather than only to abstract principles and lateral examples of “good-writing-to-emulate”—might not usefully inform writing pedagogy.

We call a successful speaker of a language “fluent,” invoking, I suppose, the fact that she possesses open channels whereby thought can flow out directly as speech; the person doesn’t have to mechanically translate parsed bits by parsed bit, but rather holds forth in a stream of words.  And conversely, when evaluating student writing (or looking at our own writing) we know too well the catch-all sense that something is “awkward,” meaning, of course, that it doesn’t flow as forcefully, as gracefully, or as effectively as it could.  To move with and in language is always a matter of negotiating fairly complex terrain—a jungle, whether Amazonian or urban, is precisely the most apt conceit (a writer could never really be said to “sprint in a line across a salt flat”)—thus, perhaps if we presented and discussed more examples of people physically negotiating complex terrain, students would begin to better grasp the analogous movements and adaptations and effects of writing.

PS- Here’s one more clip, for kicks.

Filed Under: To Ponder, Writing Instruction Tagged With:

Can (cyber)bullying be prevented by teaching about (cyber)bullying?

October 5, 2010 By 3 Comments

At least four youths have taken their lives nationwide this month following incidents of anti-gay bullying and harassment. A New Jersey college student jumped to his death from a bridge last week after two classmates broadcast a videotape of him having sex with another man in his dorm room. The students had recorded Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounter without his knowledge. The eighteen-year-old Clementi had just started his freshman year at Rutgers University. In California, thirteen-year-old Sean Walsh died on Tuesday, nine days after a suicide attempt left him on life support. In Texas, thirteen-year-old Asher Brown died last week following months of alleged bullying. Brown’s family says he revealed he was gay shortly before taking his own life. And in Indiana, fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas hung himself earlier this month after also being bullied by classmates.
- Headlines news from Democracy Now!, September 30, 2010

I was petrified to learn about the recent cases of suicide by teenagers that were results of intensive bullying. The thought of children as young as thirteen committing suicide is beyond tragic. All cases included cyberbullying, the most obviously in the last case of Tyler Clementi.

There have been several articles about the case in The New York Times. Most of these articles provide a description of the events that led to the tragedy, the debate about responsibility of involved students in recording and posting an incriminated video online, and the response of Rutgers university officials before and after the tragic death of the student. The New York Times also hosts an online discussion about whether “[…] the death of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers student, argue[s] for tougher laws against malicious acts online.”

The contributors are predominantly lawyers, but also psychologists and a “researcher in cyberbullying.” Their responses include quite a variety of opinions. For instance, some put forth a strong opposition to treat this case as a criminal case, while others talk about difficulties in coming up with well defined laws on cyberbullying. One of the contributors, John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School, believes that the issue is not only to have adequate laws but the tools to enforce it and sees solutions ‘beyond the law’. He proposes the “blended approach of outreach, education, and enforcement of the law.” Specifically, Robert Treston from Anti-Defamation League suggests that “schools must develop strategies to teach children about cyberbullying and its impact, mechanisms for prevention and response need to be established, and everyone in our schools must be trained. All of this needs to be in place before an incident occurs.”

Importantly, several of the contributors pointed out the power and perseverance of cyberbullying as the victim can be attacked continuously 24/7, via several media (e.g. email, text message, social networks, chat rooms, etc) without the necessity of direct physical contact. Furthermore, the humiliation of the victim can be witnessed by endless number of individuals online almost instantly. It seems that it is the inescapable, relentless power of cyberbullying that overwhelmed these four teenagers in the last month to the point of total desperation that felt that could only be escaped by taking their young lives.

I tend to agree and support the calls for education for students, teachers and school administrators about bullying, and cyberbullying in particular. However, I am not sure how exactly one goes about it. How can bullying be prevented? How do we instruct youth in how to protect themselves from bullies? And how do we make them effectively follow those instructions? I believe that bullying can only be approached within its context, that there is no such thing as “bullying” per se. Bullying always occurs in the social context of the relationship between a bully and his or her victim, and there are several ingredients to bullying.  First, there are reasons why a bully wants and has the need to exercise his or her power against the potential victim. Second, a victim of bullying is perceived as “having” the “weak” or “bullyiable” characteristics on which bullying is developed. Third, the social context that enables and can even facilitate or intensify bullying.

In the cases of these children and young man the bullying was based on anti-gay prejudices and the victims’ “weakness” happened to be their homosexuality to the extent that they themselves were made to believe it to be a reason they deserve to die for.

So although I support education on bullying, I am thinking about its meaning and effectiveness without addressing what seems even more fundamental and burning issue; its context and the reasons and conditions for bullying. If we do not question and educate ourselves in how society (and its communities) create beliefs, practices and prejudices that enable to see e.g. same-sex attraction and relationships as punishable, undesirable or worth of ridicule, we cannot effectively fight anti-gay bullying.

Filed Under: Politics, Technology, To Ponder

Same show, different audience

October 4, 2010 By 1 Comment

After teaching a summer intensive course in public speaking this year, I thought I’d finally figured out how to be a good teacher. My class was engaged, thoughtful, collaborative and often lively. I knew, though, that part of the charm came from the summer itself—my students weren’t taking five other classes, and we met for longer periods of time, three times a week. It was just more focused and sustained. Towards the end of the semester, I spoke with a few other teachers who agreed when I asked them, “Aren’t summer classes great?” They agreed more heartily than, honestly, I wanted them to, indicating that  my own great class wasn’t just caused by my  better work, but by the qualities of summer intensive, and maybe also the kind of orientation towards school that students who take summer classes are likely to have.

Twice in the past week, a teacher has told me that they are teaching two classes of one section, and that the two classes respond completely differently to the same material. Shown the same video, one class is inspired and engaged, leading to animated class discussion. The other class is bored. This situation is a good litmus test for a teacher—you know the lack of response from your students isn’t a direct reflection on your work. But, what are you to do? Is it our job as teachers to inspire and engage? Of course, it is a two-way street, students have to come ready to extend their imaginations, not simply be catered to.

My questions is–how to account for this disparity in student response? Should we change our tactics from one class to another? Is it, as other teachers I’ve spoken with have guessed, group dynamics? And how do you change the dynamics of a group, when you’re only one in 24?

Filed Under: Audience, Pedagogy, Uncategorized

Guilty Pleasures

October 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

I think Cacophony now generates telepathy in the characteristically uncanny way. Thinking about a possible subject for my post, I was fixated on the idea of sharing a few random photos I got at a London book fair a couple of weeks ago. I sat down to read recent posts, hoping to be swayed away from my non-academic topic, and of course saw that Zohra has recently explored so gracefully the experience of (re)discovering archival treasures. Now I feel a bit less guilty to talk about my discovery.

The Bloomsbury Book Fair took place at a hotel where a large hall was transformed, probably overnight or in the course of early morning hours, into a very natural habitat for a great number of book dealers and their collectibles: books, photographs, maps, manuscripts and the like. As its numerous virtual counterparts dealing with found photos and paintings, this physical place exuded the air of an orphanage, urging you to adopt abandoned beings. Once you did, however, you immediately felt unimaginable pangs of shame and discomfort one feels when intruding upon someone’s privacy, claiming possessions of another, and depriving something of its independent existence, albeit in a box. I wonder if the physicality of both the place and its ‘orphans’ can evoke these feelings more powerfully than ‘orphan’ websites can.

However, the book fair also had a regal aura, proudly hosting a procession of respectable relics: first editions; dusty, yellow-paged books, cleverly and warmly inscribed; glowing surviving maps of the Chinese Empire, etc. It was my first time at such a strangely honorable gathering, so I had to be slowly introduced to the protocol. Those who frequent such book fairs explained that I could put aside the things I liked and come back to them. I also learned, to my embarrassment, that a person “manning photography” would not direct me to American letters, as this was not a store where books were classified neatly on the shelves.

All I could do was quickly embrace the exuberant promise of accidental finds!

I was drawn to a box brimming with photographs. And, here are some of my black and white picks: a 1929 photo of “sea nymphs at play on the rocks at Dinard, before taking a swim,” as the inscription reads; an undated wedding photo of two people who look alike before even starting to live together; a copyright protected photo (oops) of charming chimps, the property of the Gibraltar Tourist Office; the image of a solitary gentleman who in his solemn elegance doesn’t seem to know what to do with the boundless, breathtaking landscape behind him (except to make a picture perhaps and  meditate later on the meaning of life).

Virginia Woolf would call these “moments of being”; Milan Kundera may see occasions for character creation (as he famously reflected on the birth of his charactes, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. …[C]haracters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about”);  Joseph Cornell would be tempted to construct a new existential context for them in a shadow box.

I’m also thinking of Baudelaire, in particular his prose poem “Windows,” in which the speaker is more passionate about looking into a closed window than out of an open one:

A man looking out of an open window never sees as much as the same man looking directly at a closed window. There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming….

To me, looking at an unknown photo epitomizes the same kind of promise as looking through a closed window does to Baudelaire: it is a promise of simultaneously discovering and creating a life (if you’re thinking this is my way of redeeming my fetishism, you’re probably right ), and, if we are lucky with the visual or written cues, a life in history.

Filed Under: Art, To Ponder
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