The Transformation Of The AALS Annual Meeting

For years there have been two (related) trenchant critiques of the AALS annual meeting.  First, it has featured suprisingly slim pickings in terms of scholarly presentations.  Unlike national conferences in other fields, it has been relatively rare for scholars to bring A-game presentations to the AALS.   Second, and related, the annual meeting has tilted heavily towards insiders.  People with good networking skills garnered a large chunk of the presentations.

The times are a changin', however.    One big shift is that the conference is now featuring poster presentations.  This opens the door to many more participants - and makes the conference look more similar to annual meetings in other disciplines.  And now we see the rise of the "call for papers."  I've gone through the brochure for this year's meeting in San Francisco and it appears that 34 - that's right, 34 - panels feature a call for papers.  (For those of you searching the brochure, seek out the "+" symbol.) 

To be clear, the mere existence of a call doesn't mean that the full panel will be populated in this fashion.  For example, some sections are looking for a single additional scholar to flesh out the slate.  And many of these calls may not be reviewed anonymously.  Nonetheless, I suspect that individuals selected in this fashion - and particularly the juniors - will bring their A-game.  And opening the doors of the academy a bit can only be good news for both young scholars and all the rest of us who benefit from a higher level of discourse.

Kudos to the folks at the AALS!  

H/T: Orin Kerr

Comments

[anonyprof]

Color me dubious. What will take place at those panels? Will there be genuine interaction and debate among the panelists over the paper(s) that are presented? Will many members of the audience have read the paper, or profit from hearing it in a way that adds value beyond reading the paper when it eventually appears in print?

The cynical view is that the call for papers and for poster presentations is a way for AALS to attract junior scholars willing to spend their schools' money, at the exorbitant rate the conference demands, in order to secure CV entries. Not incidentally, cost and waste are a third trenchant critique of AALS.

[Anon]

Adding an additional panelist will change little in the composition of the panels. AALS panels will continue to be composed of well-connected people who have friends in high places. It will continue to favor people from big name schools because that tends to draw larger audiences. The same people appear on multiple panels year after year, even if they haven't published any particularly groundbreaking work that year. The only way around this is to make the whole event based on blind review; and in a discipline where we are too lazy to even have completely blind review for journal articles we surely won't move to it at the annual meeting.