Guidelines for contributions

9am BST to 19:15 BST, September 18 2020
Faculty of Education, University of Education
Hashtag: #PostPandemicUniversity

Organising committee: Mark Carrigan, Michele Martini, Hannah Moscovitz, Susan Robertson, Milan Stürmer

Thanks for taking part in the first Post-Pandemic University event. As you know, we’ve decided to use a flipped format for the conference and this document is an overview of what this entails in practice.

We’ve asked you to provide blog posts in advance of the conference, which will be published here on the Post-Pandemic University and made widely available through social media. These are intended as position statements rather than fully worked out pieces. Think of it as an informal conversation starter rather than a short paper. These conversations will initially focus on the conference itself, however we expect they will attract significant engagement before and after the conference as well i.e. through being shared and discussed on social media, leaving comments on the website and an invitation to write response pieces. In this sense, we’re trying to decentre the conference to an extent, making it a focal point for the intellectual exchange we’re having but facilitating a much wider network of engagement than those who attend on the day.

The Conference

The conference will take place using Zoom, as we feel this is the most stable option and one which we have institutional support for. Each panel will have 4 or 5 participants and last 1 hour (four participants) to 1 hour twenty mins (five participants) respectively. There will be a short opportunity to introduce yourself and recap your argument, in less than 5 minutes, but attendees will have been asked (repeatedly) to have read your blog posts in advance so we would like you to assume knowledge of your argument. The panel will be led by a facilitator who will have prepared some opening questions, incorporating questions from attendees in advance, in order to stimulate discussion. As the panel goes on, attendees will be able to ask questions through the Zoom chat window and we hope this will allow a multifaceted discussion to emerge as the panel goes on.

If this seems restrictive, it is in part a consequence of the challenge of fitting everything into one day. But it’s also an editorial choice because we’d rather participants come out of this keen to carry on the conversation through other means, as opposed to a longer discussion in which the topics discussed might reach some conclusion. In order to manage the fact we have relatively limited time, we’re asking that a maximum of two people per contribution take part in the panel. Many of you have submitted individual or joint contributions but there are a number of teams participating. Unless we hear otherwise from you, we’ll assume it’s the corresponding contributor (i.e. the one we’ve been primarily e-mailing) who will be participating. Please tell us if this is not the case.

You’ll also see from the schedule that we have a tightly packed day. In part this is because of the number of papers we’ve included in the day. However we’re also trying to disaggregate the conference, not least of all because we don’t want to pressure participants or attendees to spend ten hours on Zoom. Attendees will register individually for each session and they’ll receive individualised reminders of the blog posts to read in advance of the session. It’s exciting what an international group of participants we have for the conference but this also means finding time zones that work has been somewhat difficult. We hope that the schedule works for you and, if it doesn’t, please tell us as soon as possible.

Blog posts

A few people have already submitted blog posts and these are great examples of what we had in mind: here and here. Remember these are intended to be short, provocative pieces which can fuel the discussion rather than formal publications in a traditional sense. Please restrict them to 1000 words, if at all possible. We’d like you to use hyperlinks rather than references. There’s no formal style guide but please remember these are intended for a specialist audience that won’t necessarily be familiar with your field and discipline. This is another sense in which these are conversation starters within a broader research community, as opposed to formal publications within a field. Also please use quotations marks rather than inverted commas in order to ensure consistency across the texts.

We would like you to include a short third person bio statement at the end for each of the contributors. In some cases, a number of people who contributed to the work won’t be speaking at the event itself and for this reason we’d like to remind you that this bio statement is the enduring record of who collaborated on each contribution. If you have any concerns to this end, please let us know. The format we’re using is an experiment so we’re actively thinking about how best to attribute authorship for these contributions.

Please note these contributions will be published under a CC BY-NC-ND license which means others are free to download your contributions and share them with others, as long as they credit you, don’t change them or use them commercially. Obviously feel free to republish your contributions elsewhere, though we would appreciate a link back to our site as the original place of publication if that’s possible.


Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

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