What a good reply! How come more of us in the field aren't this sensible?
Thanks for the advice, Patrick. This is great stuff, especially for those of us grad students who already got themselves slated to be discussants at ISA.
This is excellent advice.
In fact, I thought ISA already had a rule to discourage grad student discussants. A couple of years ago, a then-grad student was removed as discussant from a panel that I was on (and helped arrange).
Perhaps it is somewhat at the discretion of the conference organizers?
This year, for the first time in some years, I'm not slated to be a panel discussant. I'm generally willing should anyone know of a session that has a dropout.
What Lauren said. However, I have often been disappointed, as a presenter, when my discussants have failed to give me any input whatsoever on my paper, and so while I mostly agree with you, I think your point about the discussion continuing through email or another mechanism is very important. Feedback is good, and I intend to provide it to the panel for which I am a discussant, gods help me, assuming that I get the papers more than the day before =P.
All well and good, except both ISA and APSA have a proclivity to put together panels with papers on it that have absolutely nothing to do with each other (I'll refrain now from commenting on how deeply dysfunctional ISA and APSA conferences are.).
When papers have nothing to do with each other, a discussant faces two unattractive options:
(1) Run through the papers individually, which Patrick understandably suggests is not a good idea.
or
(2) Come up with some contrived connection between the papers.
I've been a discussant on these types of panels and have always concluded that option one would be of more use to the paper authors.
One of the best lines, I've found, for being a commentator is to pull a point out of the paper(s) that deserves more development and highlight it. It is always nice to do this in a complimentary, rtaher than adversarial fashion, as in, "One point that these papers touch on that I've always thought needs further development by someone smart is x. It is interesting how all of these discussions rely on some sense of x. [brief discussion of why x could be important] I'd be interested in thoughts about the relation between these papers and x and if anyone has thoughts on the best folks to look to for this discussion."
Papers are always part of a larger conversation and it is often interesting to ask about larger context rather than critiquing the papers themselves which are works in progress.
Patrick,
There is a PS article in this post that is waiting to be written. Just make it a bit longer and add a few snappy (appalling) anecdotes. It would be a service to the field. Everybody hates a pretentious discussant or a discussant that doesn't appreciate his/her role. Something like, "How Not to Be Discussant."
On a related note from the comments, IR said, "I'll refrain now from commenting on how deeply dysfunctional ISA and APSA conferences are." I used to think that too. But that is because I assumed that the purpose of such conferences was for authors to get useful feedback on their papers or for me to learn a great deal about MY RESEARCH while attending other panels. If those are the intended functions of APSA/ISA, they are indeed highly dysfunctional. But they are quite functional for other reasons (meeting multiple co-authors over short period of time, contacting publishers, finding out what else is going on outside your little corner of the field, etc...). But if you wanted to design a conference to make papers better or to make participants smarter, it would not look like APSA or ISA. Fortunately, we have other venues for these things.
"But if you wanted to design a conference to make papers better or to make participants smarter, it would not look like APSA or ISA."
That is precisely what I meant. I agree completely that, in fact, the ONLY value of ISA or APSA is networking with co-authors or people working in your area, talking to publishers, and, well, drinking with old grad school friends.
But I would estimate that 90% of the APSA/ISA panels that I have gone to in my life have been essentially worthless for both the authors and the audience. The whole system of having authors talk for twelve minutes about a paper that none of the audience has read--followed by fifteen minutes of a discussant trying to connect the dots between often disparate papers and an audience asking questions of a paper they've never seen--is what is so deeply dysfunctional.
One piece of advice I give my graduate students is not to look for the intellectual value of a large professional conference in the scheduled panel sessions. In my experience one only rarely finds much that is intellectually important there. Instead, panel sessions are kind of ritualized opportunities to get noticed, to establish oneself as a member of the profession, to press a point or to try to introduce it into the debate.
Case in point: I spent a couple of years going to "constructivist" panels at both APSA and ISA and basically making the same comment or raising the same question: what about the social constitution of actors, as opposed to just their roles? What about constructivism as a social ontology? Yes, after a while one starts to sound like a broken record, but by doing this I did rather get a bit of a reputation -- and I got to meet people I would never have met, people who heard my comments and did what one is actually supposed to do at conferences: pulled me aside for a chat afterwards, between panels. Which is where almost all of the interesting stuff at these conferences happens -- there, and in the bar.
Perhaps we ought to have two conference flows. One set of conferences comprised of nothing but round-tables, where everyone chats about some (predetermined) interesting thing, and a second set of conferences comprised of (far fewer) panel sessions, where one gives the (rough) equivalent of a job talk and presents findings/hypotheses/etc. in depth.
Of course, Dr. Pangloss here, there'ld never be enough money, but...
I disagree that the only people likely to make challenging comments as discussants are tenure-tracked profs (or those "with a comparable level of job security"). This would exclude not only grad students but also various other categories of people based on dubious assumptions about their presumed timidity or anxiousness not to give offense.
I also know of a case back when I was in grad school of a fellow grad student who worked very aggressively to get herself to be the discussant on an ISA panel with some big mooseheads in the field. She did such a terrific job as a discussant that one of those mooseheads arranged a post-doc for her that eventually turned into a tenure-track job. There's an argument for encouraging your grad students to seek out discussant opportunities.
Yes, the post contains terrific advice. Being a good discussant is a lot more work than presenting a paper (after all, as a presenter, you already know intimately the "storyline" of your presentation). And, to be blunt, most discussants are not very good.
I have sometimes been guilty of being the "discussant" who in fact presents "the paper I wish I had written early enough to be on this panel as a presenter." My advice, like yours, is don't do it (and I shall try to follow my own advice better in the future!).
I wish more panels would follow nontraditional formats such as having a discussant go first to flag for the audience the agreements and disagreements they are about to hear. I have done that in the dual capacity as chair/discussant. My advice on that is to work it all out well in advance so that the presenters can plan accordingly. And, of course, even more than for the traditional discussant, only reasonably well established scholars need apply for such an application of the discussant's role.
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