Getting Ready for Conference Season

Aims

This workshop is intended for participants who wish to prepare a submission and craft a presentation for academic conferences in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is an ideal “bootcamp” space for doctoral researchers who might be planning to attend their first conference and would like to prepare themselves for the experience from scratch. It could also be useful for those who have attended a conference before and would like the space and resources to prepare for an upcoming event.

After this workshop, you will know how to identify what conferences are relevant to your research disciplines, and how to find trusted meetings and valuable conference opportunities. You will be able to respond to calls for submission and craft tailored application materials (i.e., abstracts, proposals). You will also be able to communicate effectively and represent yourself and your work in various networking settings. Overall, this workshop will help you prepare both mentally as well as practically for upcoming academic meetings.

Content

This is a hands-on workshop and is intended as a practical roadmap. It works best for participants who are interested in preparing for an academic conference. There are 2 in-person sessions of 4h each, each of which focus on a different theme. Some preparation (up to 2h) is expected between in-person sessions.

The sessions will focus on searching for and identifying calls for submissions from various academic communication portals and crafting effective application materials (abstracts, proposals, introductory communications) for meetings of interest. We will close with a short discussion on what makes a good conference experience how to logistically prepare oneself for it.

Methods

There are two sessions - the first is more instructional, and the second involves interaction, peer review, and discussion. Some research and writing is required as preparation for sessions.

Target Group

All Doctoral candidates of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Theology

About the Trainer

Dr. Sahana Srinivasan (she/her) lectures in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basel. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Ghent University (Belgium) and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame (USA).

Workload

Total 12h (course attendance 8h, preparation up to 4h)

Feature

This course is reserved for doctoral candidates of the Faculy of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Theology.

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.