Conference Presentations

Submitting a Paper to a Conference

You have got a paper that you would like to present at a conference. Where do you start?

Get advice. Speak to your faculty mentors and advisors, as well as your fellow students. Determine which conferences you should be applying to and when. For political theory graduate students, you might consider the conferences hosted by the Association for Political Theory, the Western Political Science Association, the Midwestern Political Science Association, and the American Political Science Association.

Pay attention. All of these conferences have different deadlines for proposal submission. Familiarize yourself with them in advance so that you are ready to apply when the time comes.

Several graduate programs (e.g. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford) also host graduate student conferences. These conferences generally issue calls for papers and circulate these to other graduate programs and on social media. Keep an eye out!

Submit a proposal. There are two main types of proposals for conferences. First, there are paper proposals. For these, you are generally asked to submit a title and an abstract. Abstract lengths vary widely. Writing a compelling abstract is a skill. Give yourself time to do it properly and consider getting someone else to read it before submitting.

Second, there are panel proposals. For these, you invite other scholars working in your area to present on a panel with you. This involves a lot of organization—securing panelists, collecting their titles and abstracts, and submitting everything together through the conference submission system. The payoff for this extra work is that, if accepted, the panel is a great chance for you to engage with the work of other people in your area and build intellectual connections.

Presenting a Paper at a Conference

Your paper or panel has been accepted. Congratulations! How do you proceed from here?

Determine the format.  Is it a presentation on a panel where each person gets 10-15 minutes?  Is it a presentation where the entire session is devoted to your paper and you present for 30-45 minutes? The former is common in political science; the latter is common in philosophy.

Determine the norms.  Do people tend to read the papers in advance?  If not, then your presentation will be an advertisement for your paper (10-15 minutes) or a working through of the highlights and some of the details of your paper’s argument (30-45 minutes).

Determine the audience.  Does the audience tend to be people from your subfield or from the discipline more broadly?  If the audience tends to be people from your subfield, does it tend to be mostly specialists in the theme(s) of the panel or a mix of people?

The norm in political theory is that students present at graduate student political theory conferences, the Association of Political Theory Conference, regional conferences (e.g. the Western Political Science Association, the Midwestern Political Science Association), and the conference of the American Political Science Association.  In all of those cases, you get 10-15 minutes and people in the audience will not have read your paper.  Generally, the audience will be mostly political theorists, though not necessarily specialists in the theme(s) of the panel.  

The presentation as advertisement.  This means that your presentation will be an advertisement of sorts for your paper.  You’re trying to get people, some of whom are not specialists, interested in reading it and in talking to you about your work.  So, you want to do two things.

  1. Give them a sense of the argument.

  2. Highlight the most interesting bits of the argument.  

For me, this often means adopting the “zoom in” strategy.  Open with a hook, very broadly characterize the literature (no need to get into fine-grained disputes) and the paper’s puzzle/question, summarize the argument and its key moves, situate the bit of the argument you’re going to zoom in on, deliver an adapted version of that section of the argument, conclude by reminding the audience of the core argument and why they should care about it.  Throughout, you should frame your paper to be accessible to people with knowledge of political theory but who may not know much about your topic.  

Writing the presentation.  If you adopt the “zoom in” strategy, you can use the paper’s introduction as a basis for the first part of the presentation (assuming your introduction has a hook, a general characterization of the literature, presentation of the problem, and a statement of the argument/roadmap).  Then, you can use whatever section you’re going to zoom in on as the basis for the rest of the presentation.

You will have to cut.  10 minutes is about 5 double-spaced pages.  15 minutes is about 7.5 double-spaced pages.  This means that you will often not be able to just deliver your introduction and a section of your paper as is.  You will have to cut. When deciding what to cut, you might consider the following:

  1. making sentences crisper (e.g. taking out clauses, hedges, etc.);

  2. taking out engagements with the literature;

  3. taking out examples (maybe keep the best and most illustrative one);

  4. taking out quotations, especially if they are long (again, maybe just keep one especially good long quote). 

This advice also works well for longer conference presentations.

Serving as a Discussant at a Conference

You have agreed to serve as a discussant for a paper or panel at a conference. How do you proceed?

Determine the format, norms, and audience.  You need to know how much time you have and whether everyone will have read the paper.

At most political theory conferences, discussants have 10-15 minutes and no one in the audience will have read the paper.  Generally, the audience will be mostly political theorists, though not necessarily specialists in the theme(s) of the panel.   

The presentation as a conversation-starter. This means that you have a chance to play a role as a conversation-starter.  If you can, connect the papers.  How do they speak to one another? How do they speak to the theme of the panel?  If they’re not connected, there’s no need to pretend that they are.  

I like to give a brief summary of the argument of each of the papers (in a short presentation, I keep this to a sentence or two) before raising a few questions about each.  If the papers are deeply connected, I try to point out questions that one paper might raise for another and/or to ask a question to everyone on the panel.  

Types of question. This great advice is from my colleague, Emilee Chapman. You might consider three types of questions. (These are not exhaustive).

  1. Clarifying or editorial questions: these questions invite the author to talk about the choices they made in making their argument and in writing and structuring the paper.

  2. Internal criticisms: These questions take the overall project and at least some of the core premises of the paper as given and ask whether it delivers on the aims it sets for itself and/or holds together logically.

  3. Invitations: These questions invite the author to say more about some issue or question raised in the paper.

Many of the best discussant comments offer a mix of these kinds of questions. All of these types of questions are underpinned by a spirit of generosity. This is the spirit with which the best discussants undertake your work. Being generous does not mean you cannot raise objections. It merely means that you ought to do so in a way that is constructive and with the goal of helping the author(s) of the paper(s) to make progress.