Information Systems

I know that you are busily working on your extended abstracts, full papers and panel proposals for submission for the Montreal Conference. I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have already volunteered to be paper reviewers through the All Academic paper submission site. Of course, the more people who agree to be reviewers the greater the likelihood that the total number of submissions per reviewer will be low. Plus, if I have lots of reviewers it will be easier to find ones with areas of expertise that fit the requirements of each (your!) submission.

Also, please be thinking about being a moderator or discussant and look for me to ask for volunteers for those important positions through the listserv.

One final thing about the conference submission process. This year All Academic has included a way for you to communicate if you WOULD be willing to present your work in an interactive poster session. Continuing with tradition, papers will be scheduled into panels & high-density sessions with other similar work (thematically or methodologically). This approach means that high quality papers which do not match well with 4 or 5 others may have the poster session as their only outlet. Let me stress this in case you missed it...being scheduled into a poster session is not an indication of quality. Still, if you don't communicate to me via AllAcademic that you are alright presenting a poster, I'll assume you would prefer not to for some reason (i.e., maybe your institution won't reimburse travel for poster presentations). That information may be used as a tie-breaker for papers if slots become tight. So, be sure to look for the little check box when you type in your abstract...and use it!

I'm looking forward to getting your submissions in the next month.

Sincerely,

Rob Potter, Vice-Chair
rfpotter@indiana.edu

Mass Communication

Well - the time has come to recruit volunteers to serve as reviewers for conference submissions! Last year, we had 140 volunteers, and because we had so many, I was able to keep the number of papers to between 5-8 per person. I hope each of you will consider volunteering your time so this process can once again run smoothly and efficiently.

You can now sign up to be a reviewer directly through All Academic. All you need to do is log-on at http://www.icahdq.org/cfp/. Then click on the "Click to Access Conference Submission Site" link and look for the link to "Volunteer to be a Reviewer." Then you can enter your name and areas of expertise. Doctoral students who have completed coursework and are ABD are eligible to be reviewers. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

I wish you all good luck as you prepare your submissions, and remember to submit them by November 1 at 11:00 EDT!

Robin Nabi, Chair
nabi@comm.ucsb.edu

Feminist Scholarship

Fall is here and membership renewal time is coming up. In response to concerns that we are losing members, I wanted to know where our members are and if there's significant overlap with other divisions. ICA guru Sam Luna did some research on where our 220 or so members are cross-listing with, and here are the results:

FSD overlap with LGBT: 44
FSD overlap with ERIC: 54
FSD overlap with PHIL: 63

As you can see, there are many ways to read this data. One way is that there is a lot of overlap indeed. Another way is that the overlap is so dispersed that it's not that much overlap. I think these are two things to consider in making choices about joining divisions. All of the groups listed here have encouraged their members to join our division and I want to reciprocate and add PLEASE JOIN ALL OF THE ABOVE DIVISIONS. We're talking an extra $3 or so to do this, but it means more strength overall in these divisions for voting, more money, better parties, etc.

We had a pretty good showing last year. Our panel jointly sponsored with LGBT on the 25th anniversary of the Barnard Conference was flagged by editors at the Communication Review as a special topics issue. Our top student paper by Melissa Fritz (University of Toronto) also won second place for a poster prize, a nice $250 reward for great work on gender and internet use. We have seed money for an endowment from newly Emeritus Professor Yoo Jae Song (Ewha Woman's University, Seoul, Korea) in honor of her mother. Our joint party with Popular Communication, Philosophy of Communication, Ethnicity and Race Caucus, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender Group was a smash as well.

For Montreal, please note the call for both a plurality of approaches to feminist scholarship and a diversity of participants for pre-constituted panels. Please spread the word as Diana Rios is working to ensure a diverse, high-quality FSD program!

Vicki Mayer, Chair
vmayer@tulane.edu