The Society for Cinema and Media Studies seeks to enable broad and diverse participation in its annual conference, including faculty at all ranks as well as graduate students, and precariously employed scholars, from diverse geographic and national locations, and from within different subfields under the large umbrella of cinema and media studies, including various screen and audio cultures. At the same time, SCMS seeks excellence. In order to ensure this standard for the conference, we are offering advice to all those seeking to submit a proposal for the annual conference.

Here's how SCMS evaluates proposals for the annual conference: The Program Committee is charged with selecting the best proposals to create the annual conference program. The Program Committee has approximately two dozen reading pairs and a Program Committee Chair. At least six members of this committee are also members of the SCMS Board of Directors. Members of the Program Committee are assigned by the Board to balance the diversity and expertise represented by the Committee as a whole. The individual who serves as Program Committee Chair alternates between the SCMS president-elect and a member of the Board of Directors. The Program Committee is made up entirely of volunteers. Look out for the annual Call for Committee Volunteers in springtime!

The Program Committee Chair assigns each proposal to a team of two readers. The readers evaluate the proposal individually and then compare their respective scores. Readers look for originality, scope, relevance, and depth of research; the paper's contribution to the field; and the paper's suitability for a twenty-minute presentation. Secondarily, the readers consider whether the proposal has followed the rules for submission. A joint score is forwarded to the Program Committee Chair. The Program Committee Chair will only weigh in on the pair's joint score in the event of a radically split vote (e.g., one committee member thinks a proposal is great, the other thinks it is terrible). The Chair does not overrule the decisions of the readers.

After scores are finalized, the reading pairs make suggestions for placing open call papers together on panels. The Program Committee Chair assists the Conference Scheduler in finalizing panels, and eventually, in assigning all accepted panels, workshops, roundtables to various time slots and rooms. Time slot and room assignments are based in some measure on equipment needs, and efforts are made not to have too many panels or workshops on similar topics competing in a single time slot or bunched together on a single day. Because of the complexity of putting the program together, requests for special times or days cannot be honored.

SCMS accepts multiple kinds of proposals. Which one is best for me?

The open call is for individual papers. You submit your paper and then it is placed with three other papers to form a panel during the evaluation process, outlined in the previous section. Individual papers should be new work-not previously published, not presented previously at SCMS.

A pre-constituted panel is a panel consisting of four speakers, or three speakers and a respondent, under a common theme. The panel is assembled before the submission deadline by its members, and all papers within it are evaluated as a single panel. Each paper should be new work.

Workshops are interactive discussions led by a chair or co-chairs that facilitate the session. They may include additional speakers but should emphasize potential participation by all session attendees (such as sharing best practices, working on a text together, role-playing an interview, demonstrating a technique, or any other productive interaction). Workshops typically focus on professional development, pedagogical issues, institutional issues such as preparing dossiers for tenure cases/mentoring graduate students and/or junior faculty members, and disciplinary and administrative issues such as developing an academic program in film or media/academic freedom/departmental governance on issues of pedagogy) and so forth. There may be a workshop on a scholarly topic but it must make clear how it will involve interactivity beyond discussion.

Roundtables are discussion sessions with a chair or co-chairs and four or five speakers who speak for no more than five monutes each and then participate in a discussion facilitated by the chair or co-chairs. Roundtables typically focus on scholarly topics, but may also focus on professional/pedagogical issues; the roundtable format distinguishes it from other SCMS sessions. When proposing a roundtable, proposers should make clear what expertise each speaker brings and what aspect of the topic they will each address. Furthermore, while the purpose of the roundtable is to foster discussion amongst the speakers about the topic, the format should also allow time for comments and questions from the audience. Neither workshops nor roundtables should have people presenting papers or speaking more than 5 minutes to open a conversation.

Follow these rules to best set up your proposal for success:

1. Deadlines are firm. SCMS has on average 1500 to 2000 submissions per year. The SCMS Office cannot accommodate special requests or extensions on proposal deadlines.
2. Do not wait until the last minute to prepare your proposal or renew your SCMS membership. Remember, membership is required in order to submit a proposal!
3. Do not submit proposals in more than one category. You may either present a paper on a panel or participate in a workshop/roundtable. While you may chair the panel/workshop/roundtable you are participating in, you may not serve as chair or respondent of any other panel/workshop/roundtable.
4. Do not submit if you are not likely to attend the conference. It is impolite and unprofessional to cancel. If you submit an abstract and then decide not to go, you have diminished the panel, taken a slot that someone else could have used, and wasted lots of people's time. Try to discuss funding with your institution before you submit to make sure that you can attend. Look at other commitments (teaching load, articles, contracts) to make sure you will have time to prepare.

Consider these recommendations to determine whether Open Call or Pre-constituted panels is the best option for your work:

1. Consider the benefits of submitting a pre-constituted panel vs. an open call paper. Pre-constituted panels generally have a higher rate of acceptance than individual papers. When you submit an individual paper, you risk being placed on a panel that may not be ideally suited to your topic. Given that the program committee has to compile panels of very diverse papers, sometimes connections among papers are loose. On occasion, this creates exciting and dynamic panels that would not otherwise happen. However, sometimes panelists feel that they are speaking to the wrong audience or in the wrong conversation. While it may seem daunting to put together a panel, SCMS has mechanisms to help you find appropriate people for your topic. You can post your panel idea to the Conference Bulletin Board on the SCMS website or find panels there that you can join, or you can take advantage of your membership in a SIG or Caucus and post panel proposals through its listserv.
2. If you submit to the open call, try to articulate how your paper might relate to work others are doing. The open call is not the place for your most obscure idea, or a topic that will be hard to place alongside others. Be mindful of how you want your paper placed, articulate how your papers works in relation to currents in the field, and use keywords in your abstract (star studies, archive, history, genre) that will help make sure it finds a good home.
3. Start early. Putting together a pre-constituted panel takes time. If you are using the Conference Bulletin Board , you need time to find the right people and secure their commitment. You must find the right speaker, collect their abstracts, and write the panel abstract. Allow yourself a few weeks to prepare your panel so that you can submit on time.
4. If you decide to submit a Pre-constituted Panel, create a diverse and dynamic panel. By SCMS rule, you may not have more than two people from the same institution on a panel without offering justification for doing so. Think about getting different perspectives, different approaches to a topic. Try to avoid monolithic groups (ex. all tenured faculty, from the same kind of institution). Try to involve a range of panelists, considering academic rank, gender, race and identity positions, people from different types of institutions (2-year, 4-year, PhD granting and non-PhD granting, etc.) institutions, etc. Some excellent panels have a narrow tightly rationalized focus on a single figure, period or national cinema. However, you may wish to diversify within your topic-instead of a panel on radio, consider sound in diverse media, or consider looking at horror in diverse nations, or bring historians and theoreticians together to broaden your potential audience and to engage different approaches.

Take care with the written proposal, and follow these suggestions:

1. Compose your proposal carefully. Do not type your abstract directly into the proposal form. Type it separately so you can proofread it and then paste it into the form. Make sure you include all required materials-abstract, bio, bibliography and keywords. Proofread! Make sure your proposal is the appropriate length (maximum of 2500 characters). The proposal form will not allow you to exceed the character limit, but beware of submitting an abstract that is too short. You need more than a few sentences to make clear why your paper is interesting. If you have not presented at a conference before, consider asking a faculty mentor to review your proposal before you submit it. An extra set of eyes always helps.
2. Write an excellent abstract. Effective proposals are well written and conform to the length requirement of the proposal system. Abstracts should be appropriate to the format in which the research will be presented (individual paper, pre-constituted panel, workshop, or roundtable). On July 19, 2018, Pamela Wojcik, Miriam Petty, and Nick Davis held a Facebook Live discussion on what makes a successful SCMS conference proposal and answered members' questions. See the What makes a successful proposal? section of the General Conference Guidelines and Procedures.
3. A good Pre-constituted panel proposal must connect all the papers to a coherent theme or question. Do not rehash the paper abstracts. Members of the program committee will read individual abstracts and do not need the panel chair to summarize them. Instead, the panel chairs should make a case for the panel. Why does it matter? Who should care? What issue or question does this address? What intervention does it provide? How do the papers on the panel fit around the panel's theme?
4. Workshops and Roundtables should not be panels in disguise! A good workshop proposal makes clear how the workshop will involve participants, why the topic is best served by a workshop rather than a panel, what kind of topic or issue it addresses, and what expertise participants bring to the topic. Your proposal should make clear how attendees will be involved-is there an activity? A conversation? A demonstration? Etc. A good roundtable panel will make clear what question or topic drives the roundtable; what each speaker brings to the roundtable; how speakers will complement, challenge or counter each other's views. Roundtables should be aimed primarily at producing conversation.

Helpful Tips for using the SCMS conference proposal system:

1. Save your work! Develop and save the text of the abstract as a document in advance rather than typing it directly into the submission form. Once you begin your proposal, save your submission often to avoid lost information.
2. Proof the proposal carefully before submitting. Once a proposal is submitted, you cannot access it to make changes.
3. If you cannot access the submission portal, contact the SCMS Office for assistance. Please do not create a duplicate SCMS membership account.
4. Submit early. Please submit your proposal in a timely fashion to avoid any last minute technological issues or other unforeseen events. Late proposals will not be accepted.

Once your paper, panel or workshop is accepted:

1. Keep your commitments. Plan ahead. Book your flight and hotel room as soon as your paper or panel is accepted, or at least as soon as the first draft of the conference goes online. If you submitted a proposal, you made a commitment to attend. If you withdraw from a panel, you will disappoint many people. Being overworked is not an excuse. Every person on the panel has multiple commitments. You may not withdraw and then ask to attend via Skype or have someone else read your paper-that is not acceptable. It means you present at the conference but do not register for the conference, which cheats others. If you have a medical emergency or family death or other very, very good reason to cancel, make sure you notify the other panelists, the panel chair, and the SCMS office to see if you can be removed from the program.
2. If you have not previously presented at a conference, practice your paper, ideally with an audience (friends, fellow scholars) to time your talk and to hear what it sounds like. Is it clear? Do your clips and slides match what you are saying? Are you mumbling, speaking too low or too loud, weirdly touching your ears?
3. Stick to the time limits. Papers are generally no more than 20 minutes, possibly less if the panel has a respondent. Time your paper in advance. Include all clips when you time it. Realize that twenty minutes is only about 8-10 pages depending on your clips and images. If your paper is too long, cut it. Do not exceed the time limit. It is unfair to other speakers and to attendees who want time for questions and discussion.
   • For workshops and roundtables, you should speak no more than 5 minutes. Here, you are not delivering a paper: you are framing a topic, introducing a question, or providing a very brief summary of your issue. Make sure that the majority of time is devoted to engaging attendees in work or conversation.
4. Be proactive about potential technology issues. Try to coordinate with the panel chair ahead of time to put all presentations on one laptop and to make sure you know how you will share your presentation with that person (google drive, flash drive, via email, etc.). If you need to access clips online, test them in the room before the panel starts to be sure you can access them. Arrive at your panel room early to troubleshoot any technical issues that may arise.
5. Be attentive. Listen to your fellow panelists. Talk to them, ask questions. And talk to other panelists in other sessions, too. The conference is a place to share ideas, meet colleagues and have fun.

SCMS wishes you luck with your proposal, and we hope to see you at next year's conference! Looking for a paper topic? Visit the SCMS Conference Bulletin Board here. Ready to submit? Access the conference proposal portal here: