Friday, November 9, 2012

It's that time of year again! (AMIW, day 5)

Time for the invitations to the Hawaii University International Conferences* to go out! I got mine this week; did you? If not, I'll share mine with you, so you can apply.

There are categories for Math, Engineering, and "Education," this last "including, but not limited to":

  • Academic Advising and Counseling
  • Art Education
  • Adult Education
  • Business Education
  • Counselor Education
  • Curriculum, Research and Development
  • Distance Education
  • Early Childhood Education/Elementary Education
  • Human Resource Development
  • Indigenous Education
  • Kinesiology & Leisure Science
  • Language Education
  • Music Education
  • Reading Education
  • Rural Education
  • Science Education
  • Secondary Education
  • Social Studies Education
  • Special Education
  • Student Affairs
  • Educational Administration
  • Educational Foundations
  • Educational Measurement and Evaluation
  • Educational Psychology
  • Education Technology
  • Education Policy and Leadership
  • ESL/TESL
  • Health Education
  • Higher Education
  • Teacher Education
  • Second Language Studies
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Speech/Communication and Translation
  • Theatre
  • Urban and Regional Planning
  • Visual Arts
  • Women's Studies
  • Inter-disciplinary and other areas of Arts and Humanities

Rarely have I seen a conference so refreshingly broad in its interests (And we should note that this ecumenical approach isn't just for humanities/social science types; math and engineering conferences are each almost as broad themselves).

Conference papers are peer-reviewed, and  "reviewers are selected among the academic members of the institute and are not related to institute academics and researchers." I'm a little fuzzy on what that means, but the word "academic" appears twice, so I assume that it's a good thing.

Also, there is a publication opportunity, open to papers accepted. You can download the papers included in last year's publication here, or buy your own CD-ROM. Last year's publication includes such diverse offerings as: an abstract/outline for a Ph.D. dissertation, a conference paper (its 11 pages uncluttered by footnotes), an article-length manuscript, complete with notes and bibliography, and a three-page paper proposal (or perhaps an introduction). There is, in other words, something for everyone.

Best of all: the registration fee is only $350!**

Admittedly, today was yet another day where I managed to get my 90 minutes in, but at the expense of everything else. Yet, if I keep working, maybe I'll have enough for a proposal. Deadline is December 1st!


*Warning: link to conference website comes complete with soundtrack of ocean waves and Hawaiian music; site contains no option to turn the sound off.

**Registration fee does not include airfare, conference hotel, food, or recreation.

4 comments:

Contingent Cassandra said...

I got mine at least a week or two ago. I must be on the "A" list. If so, that means that the organizers haven't noticed that my state has been cracking down on "conference" travel to, as one member of my department terms it, "very nice places outside the continental U.S." This is, of course, frustrating to those who have genuine reasons to attend genuine conferences in very nice places outside the continental U.S..

After years of teaching students what terms like "peer-reviewed" mean, I fear some of them (or someone else's similarly-taught students) have understood all too well the valorization of such terms in the academy, and have set out to monetize them. The real kicker is that every once in a while I run across articles from a volume of the sort advertised in the emails we receive in one of the supposedly carefully-vetted proprietary databases for which our library has paid (probably far too much). Aargh.

While open access has its challenges (somebody has to pay somehow for editing and indexing and server space and the like), I'd very much like to cut the middlemen who are making money off the unpaid labor of academics out of the equation. My students in the sciences, interestingly, feel even more strongly about this, though some of them have somewhat naive understandings of the behind-the-scenes work necessary to produce a scholarly article and keep it available and easily findable over the long term -- e.g. beyond its author's/s' lifetime(s). Having individual professors post their peer-reviewed work on their personal or professional websites isn't really the solution, but neither is the status quo.

Comrade Physioprof said...

I receive multiple spam e-mails every fucken day inviting me to cockamamie bullshitte "conferences" all over the godddamn world or to serve on the editorial boards of "open access journals" or whatthefuckeever.

I am surprised that the actual University of Hawaii hasn't cracked down on their fucken asses for calling themselves "Hawaii University International Conferences". And there is no such institution as "Hawaii University".

Funny about Money said...

Hm. $350. That's over a third of my adjunct paycheck. And I wonder what it would cost to fly to Hawaii...

Over eighty percent of university and community college faculty are adjunct now. Who is left to attend these conferences? Or is it that all these hobbyist professors (you'd have to be doing it for a hobby, because you sure can't live on adjunct pay) are independently wealthy?

BTW, your Captcha thing is virtually unreadable.

DS said...

Captcha reading is an art form