Order Cheap Ativan Online - Discount Online Pharmacy

In a comment on a recent post, Rania asked about conferences. Where should you send your precious paper once you've written it? Travel budgets are limited so you want to get proper bang for your buck. And these days, it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry are organizing their own conference. So how to choose? Well, the first thing to realize is that you don't go to conferences primarily to get feedback on your work, though it is nice when that happens (and some conferences are actually better than others, feedback-wise - keep on reading). You go to conferences to network, to see and be seen. Are there others doing work in your area? What are they saying? What can you learn from their work? And can you hit them up for a joint-authored article to be submitted somewhere? Or get into some nice international research network that looks good on your CV but doesn't requite you to do anything (hint: most international research networks are of this variety)? It's an old adage that the most important parts of all conferences are the spaces between the paper/panel sessions. There are basically two choices when picking conferences: go big, or go small. Either you pick one of the really big conferences (lots of people increases chances of networking and coming across research that is of interest to you), or you pick a smaller conference that is really focused on/relevant for your current research topic (increases the chances of networking with the right people and getting feedback from people who actually know your field). Feedback-wise, smaller conferences are generally better, as your time slot at a big conference is likely to be very small - I have 15 mins to strut my stuff at the ICA. Some get only 10. Better have a snazzy PowerPoint. Or a loud voice and a good joke to make people remember you. I suck at PowerPoint, but I have a loud voice. Jokes? I dunno. Why did the journalism scholar cross the road? If you want to go big, these are your choices:

ICA (no link, I've linked plenty to ICA in previous posts). ICA, the International Communications Association, is the monster truck of media & communications conferences. Bigger and badder than everyone else and with an engine that just keeps running (ICA conference venues are planned years beforehand - the 2012 conference is in Phoenix, Arizona, in case you're wondering). As I've said before, the ICA is a predominantly US association and as such its conferences follow the US pattern: very competitive, prizes given out for best paper, best book, etc, poster sessions, massively big, and held at a Sheraton/Hilton/Grand Hotel conference venue (no dinky European-style campus conferences here!). On the plus side, it's great for networking, and the sheer size means lots of diversity in terms of subject areas covered - you are almost bound to find several interesting sessions, many quite surprising if you expect only old US-style quantitative research (I fondly remember a session on "The zombie in popular culture" at the 2005 ICA conference in New York). Also note that dissing the ICA is a favourite pastime of European academics and those who do not get their papers accepted. The ICA has actually changed a lot in recent years and is far less "US-led" than it once was, and they have introduced open feedback to increase transparency - something few other conferences do.

IAMCR This year held in scenic Stockholm. IAMCR stands for International Media and Communications Research Association and was founded in the seventies as an explicit reaction against the US dominance of the ICA. The years of enmity between IAMCR and ICA are long gone and the two organizations frequently cooperate. Sad, as I've heard a lot of old-timers reminisce wistfully about actual punch-ups taking place in the past. Still, IAMCR explicitly aims to be global and usually attracts more scholars from Asia, South America and sub-Saharan Africa than does the ICA. So the IAMCR is also good for networking, especially if you want to get to know what people outside the US and Europe are doing. IAMCR is slightly smaller than the ICA but still big, and the diversity is still great, so what I said about the ICA goes for the IAMCR as well. IAMCR is also generally better at catering for young and early-career academics - there are opportunities to get published through the IAMCR's publication series and journals, if you talk to the right people (and have a good paper!).

I would say something about ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) as well, but I've never been (I may go to Barcelona despite not getting my paper accepted - so there!), so I don't really know what they are like. Judging from their web page, they're a more US-style conference, and I would suspect ECREA is trying to set themselves up as a serious competitor to both the ICA and IAMCR. They're doing OK so far, their first conference was a success according to people I know who were there, and the second one this year looks set to be big as well. As for smaller conferences, it's impossible to list them all. Many are not annual but one-off events, you'll just have to use your own judgment whether you think it's worth going or not. If you are unsure, why not email the conference organizers beforehand to get an idea about number of participants, if they have ideas about publishing a proceedings volume etc? Good conference listings can be found at the ICA and at Nordicom. I wish I could have gone to this conference, but somehow I think my current grant wouldn't cover it.