As 2019 gets underway, I invite you to consider a few SAMR-related activities. The most pressing and, perhaps, the most central to our organization is the upcoming Society for Ethnomusicology conference in Bloomington, Indiana. That event will be held from November 7th to 10th, 2019.

The deadline for paper and panel submissions for this year’s SEM is February 15th, just over one month away. The call for proposals is available here. As usual, SAMR can sponsor panels, roundtables, and films. I have seen some fantastic panels sponsored by SAMR in the past and hope to continue drawing attention to the work that our membership is doing.

Sponsorship works in two ways:

  1. We will accept individual abstracts for those who would like to be considered for a thematic panel. Based on the quality and number of submissions and the types of connections that exist between them, we can help members to build cohesive panels.
  2. If you have an organized panel and would like the SAMR name attached, let me know. We can review it and make a decision about sponsorship. The SAMR email list and Facebook group are great places to share ideas to create a panel or roundtable.

Single Papers

Please email your paper title and abstract to societyforarabmusicresearch@gmail.com by Monday, February 4th to be considered for a panel. These do not have to be your final draft, but should be far enough along that we can find connections to other papers.

Organized Panels, Roundtables, etc.

If you would like sponsorship for your organized panel, please share all the completed materials as required by the SEM call for proposals by Monday, February 11th. As long as everyone is responsive, this should give time for review and submission by the SEM deadline on February 15th.

I want to thank Beau Bothwell for compiling a list of panels, roundtables, workshops, and film sessions that SAMR has sponsored since 2008. I have posted these to the organization’s About page and suggest looking them as examples of the thematic and geographic diversity that our group covers. They may also help generate some new ideas.

Benefits

For more information on group sponsorship at SEM, see the policy statement here. Let me point specifically to a statistic that in 2016, 65% of organized sessions were accepted while only 34% of individual papers were. (This surprised me, and I’m not sure of more recent trends.) 70% of those organized sessions were sponsored. I can say from experience that the discussions that go into creating a panel are useful and help to produce a stronger proposal.

As a side note, MESA’s meeting is the following weekend (November 14th-17th) in New Orleans. Their deadline is the same, February 15th. While we cannot sponsor MESA panels, we can certainly help to organize submissions.

I look forward to hearing some ideas!

Chris