Our Aims and Objectives
We are the UK association for all those who research, study and teach global development issues
Find Out MoreConvening a panel is a great opportunity, but also a responsibility to presenting colleagues, the conference and the field. We have tried to itemise below the various aspects of convenors’ responsibilities that we would like you to keep in mind over the conference process. Please get in touch if you have questions or need further clarification on any of this.
We would like convenors to:
The call for papers will close on 28 January 2025. The call will be widely publicised by email to all delegates of previous DSA conferences and members; it will also be posted on social media platforms, etc. However, please still circulate the call to lists you are member of, in your department, professional networks etc; you can use the wording we have sent out to you in the Call announcement, or you simply refer your colleagues to the call for papers page on the website.
If you wish to share a link specifically to your panel, then having navigated to your panel in the panel explorer and clicked to expand the text, click on the ‘Share’ button, to see a range of options (Email, LinkedIN, Facebook, X).
Ask your colleagues and students to submit paper abstracts in time, not at the last minute, as the inevitable rush on the final day of the deadline creates a lot of unnecessary stress. If you plan to have a paper yourself in your own panel, remember to submit that also before the Call closes.
All proposals must be made via the online system, and not via email. If approached by email, please direct proposers to the website. The ‘PROPOSE A PAPER‘ button beneath the instructions on the Call for papers page takes the visitor to the list of panels.
There is a ‘Propose’ button in the title section of each open panel. Alongside this is a notification of how many papers have been proposed to that panel. Panel convenors are sent an automated notification when a proposal is made.
It is possible the notification will end up in your spam box. It would be wise, if you have the facility to do so within your email, to whitelist any email from the [email protected] and the nomadit.co.uk domain. But do not worry if you can’t do this, as the best place to view the proposals is via our conference system login (see below).
Panel sessions will last 90 minutes and include a maximum of 4 participants. Usually we allow panels to have up to 2 sessions (8 papers). Roundtables may run for a maximum of one session.
Please note: we will inform convenors of regular panels how many sessions their panel may be allocated at the end of the Call For Papers. This will take into account how many proposals have been received across all panels, and the conference’s space/time constraints
To log into the conference system and the interface for managing your panels, from the DSA website, click on ‘Login’ (upper left corner of the horizontal navbar), using your email and password when prompted to enter the platform.
Once logged in (saying now ‘logged in’), you can choose “Manage account” to update/double check your details, or ‘Conferences’ to see your panels/proposals. Do not forget to click ‘update’ to save your changes.
Please do not accept any papers before the call for papers has officially closed (28 January 2025).
At this stage the ‘status’ of all proposals is ‘Pending’, and authors will be ‘unregistered’ (i.e. have not registered for the conference as registration is not yet open).
Please do not make any decisions about which proposals to accept before the Call For Papers ends (28 January 2025). Given that most colleagues work to the deadline, do not worry unduly if your complement of papers seems a little low – most proposals arrive during the final 24 hours of the Call.
You can view and edit paper proposals by clicking on the paper titles in conference system – remember to be logged in :-)! The Call For Papers is public, so you may receive proposals from people you do not know. Please treat all proposals as equally as you can, and do not only accept the proposals you have solicited directly.
You can drag and drop on the proposed papers into ‘accepted’, ‘rejected’ or ‘transfer’ windows. Once you have finished your selection, please click ‘save’ to confirm.
Withdrawn is for when authors inform you or us that they are no longer able to proceed with that proposal or attend the conference. They do not always email us with this news so if you receive such information later in the process, please remember to set their papers to ‘Withdrawn’, so that we know, too.
Transfer is for papers you would like to accept but don’t have space for, or don’t wish to accept perhaps because they aren’t on your theme, but feel should be included somewhere in the conference. We will try to rehouse the transfer papers in other panels. Please do not set anything to transfer simply because you feel bad about rejecting – if the abstract is of really poor quality, they should not be dragged through the transfer process and being rejected again twice over.
Please mark up all proposals by 18 February, do not leave any as ‘pending’. Alter the status of each paper and then click on the ‘Save’ button beneath the paper list. All accepted papers will immediately show on your public panel page on the conference website, beneath the panel abstract.
In short: please disseminate the Call For Paper widely; then after the call has ended, login to the conference system to see and process all proposals!
When you mark up a paper, the decision will show in the author’s conference system page. However, the conference system does not send an email to the author alerting them of the status change, so please do your colleagues the courtesy of sending them an email informing them of your decision.
To make this easier use the updated emailing tool in conference system to help you: click on the ‘Send an email’ button (upper part of the panel page) and you can choose which subsets of authors you write to, and which method you wish to use to generate an email.
When all the convenor decisions are made and transfers done, we will allocate your panel the appropriate number of sessions.
If you are aware of any limitations to the timetabling of your panel, you should then state those in the ‘Requested timing’ field in the conference system. We are aware of participants’ dual roles where they are convenor or presenter; however, if your discussant or chair has another role in the conference, please note that in this field.
You can also edit your contributors’ papers directly in the conference system, i.e., convenors have editorial control. We will not proof the abstracts, so please ensure that both your authors and yourselves check the short (for print) and long (online) abstracts once you’ve made your decisions.
DSA2025 does not require the prior circulation of papers. However, if you as convenors wish to do this, conference system allows you to avoid a lot of emailing to and fro: each author can upload a PDF of their paper (not of their abstract!) via conference system and this is then available for download from your panel page on the site. This is currently set so they are only available to logged-in panelists, although convenors can opt to change this to make them public. Either way it is wise to head all such documents as ‘draft’ and ‘not to be cited without permission’.