Scottish Centre for China Research

Scottish Centre for China Research Postgraduate Network meeting at 11am on Wednesday 6th December 2017

Location: Teaching Room 122, 29 Bute Gardens, University of Glasgow

Agenda

Dr Minna Torma who is a Vice-President of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), will discuss the EACS conference, which will take place in Glasgow next year.

Dr Torma will also give advice on preparing abstracts and presentations for conferences. If you are interested in submitting a paper or panel proposal for EACS, the deadline is 15 January 2018. For further details see http://eacs2018.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/conference/call-for-papers/

In addition, Rui He will lead a discussion about organising a Chinese Studies postgraduate conference in Glasgow in 2018. The idea is to hold a conference with a broad theme which can involve any postgraduate students working on subjects related to China. A few us met yesterday for an initial discussion about this. Following our discussion, Rui has prepared a note about ideas for the conference, which you can see below:

Note on holding a postgraduate Chinese Studies conference at Glasgow in 2018

1. Theme
We’re trying to go with a “brand” for our conference, since there’re also many other universities are holding similar conferences for PgR students, an attractive brand could probably be of great help. So, things like “STORIES” (Students’ Ongoing Research in Educational Studies), or “LANTERN” (Language Teacher Education Research Network) would help us to stand out from other similar activities. If anyone can figure out a title with key elements such as “PgR”, “network”, “annual conference”, and “Chinese Studies” that would be excellent.
If we can’t come up with a brand, we think a title like “Understanding China/Telling China’s Story: Past, present, and future” would also work.

2. Format
We can have our conference only with presentations, or combine presentations and having discussants (lecturers) to provide feedback on the presentations, plus training. If we can invite a  relevant person to give a training session on the day and get sufficient funding, a training session embedded with presentations would be attractive and helpful. The training session could be about academic writing, career opportunities outside the academia, building up a research network, etc.

3. Dates
One possibility is to hold our conference immediately before the EACS conference (from 29th August to 1st September, 2018) so that it would be easier to get an external speaker, as well as more PgR students.

4. Keynote speakers
Two keynote speakers (one from Glasgow/Edinburgh and one from another institution) would be sufficient. But we still need to discuss about who we should invite as the keynote speakers.

5. Cost and Funding
We can probably get the rooms in UofG for free, but need to double check this. But we’ll need to pay for keynote speakers from further afield and refreshments at registration, breaks and lunchtime.

We’d greatly appreciate it if you can share your ideas and suggestions on the theme, format, and dates, or resources, and about inviting keynote speakers/training session speakers. Please feel free to drop us an email and we can discuss it at our meeting.

We will also need to set up a small sub-committee to organise the conference, so please let us know if you would like to take part in this.

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Paul Gardner
Convenor, SCCR PGN

First published: 28 November 2017