First info on programme and event platform!
Did you know that the StuTS has taken place every semester since 1987, with the host university and the student organising team changing every time? When we first gathered to discuss organising it (and even until the end of June), we intended the 68th StuTS to be an in-person conference taking place in Berlin, hoping the 67th StuTS would have to be the only virtual StuTS. In the end, we decided to play it safe and rule out external factors that could doom us, such as Covid-19. We decided to make our StuTS the second virtual StuTS ever, so that the 33 years of tradition can continue without an empty semester despite the recently announced lockdown imposed on Germany for the month of November.
In order to ensure the complete privacy of our participants’ data, we’ve settled on bildungs.cafe as our event platform. This conference system was created by two members of the board of the association Junge Sprachwissenschaft e. V. and enables us to service large numbers of participants while offering them a neat interface designed to help navigate between the different event tracks. It is user-friendly and helps us provide you with an opportunity to comfortably:
- present your research to a competent and interested audience you will soon get to know,
- give each other feedback on your research. The best way to thank the speakers is to listen carefully, dive into their topics and maybe ask questions which remain unanswered to you, helping them take something away from their talks themselves,
- encounter research areas you have probably never heard of and learn about them thanks to the experts presenting,
- get to know other linguists with similar interests and make friends beyond the duration of the conference.
The conference programme will soon be published. We have created a fully-fledged draft and are currently checking with all speakers whether they agree with their slots or if there are any short-term changes. More detailed info on the programme will follow soon, but for now, let’s have a sneak peek at it. We have accepted nearly 150 submissions (talks, workshops, short talks) and contacted many lecturers who we felt would provide the most interesting topics for our keynote slots. As it stands right now, the fruits of our (and your) labour are shaping up for a tremendous experience: there will be seven keynote speeches, four concurrent event tracks, countless breakout rooms and hangouts opportunities and, most importantly, several hundred fellow students participating to share their passion for linguistics.
Some of you have asked us whether it is allowed for personal friends and non-students to sign up just to listen to your talk. Our answer is yes! We as a team believe in open access to science and agree to allow it as long as the speaker does not mind. What’s more, we would like to seize this opportunity to make an appeal to you: spread the word about the 68th StuTS and let your fellow students or maybe even your professors know about it! The registration is free of charge and can be made via this form until November 16th.
In the meantime, we’ve got a challenge for you. It is incredibly important for the talks at the 68th StuTS to be easy to understand to students from any and all fields of linguistics. As such, we were very happy with all the comprehensive and well-worded abstracts we have received from our prospective speakers. But let’s go one step further now: try to describe your research in 280 characters using words even non-linguists would understand! Can you? Let us know by e-mail or Twitter!
That’s all for now. Have a great week and be prepared to see the programme on our social media by the end of it! Stay tuned, stay safe, and stay healthy!