This is a final call-for-papers for the 4th Annual Philosophers’ Cocoon Philosophy Conference (PCPC), which is provisionally scheduled to be held at University of Tampa from Saturday October 8th to Sunday October 9th, 2016. If you’re curious about what the conference has been like in past years, see here!
As in the past, this year’s conference will be unique in several respects:
- Although conference attendance will be open to all members of the profession, paper presenters must be early-career philosophers (i.e. anyone who doesn’t have tenure–grad students, post-docs, Assistant Profs, independent scholars, etc.)
- Due to travel-funding challenges that early-career philosophers often face, several sessions will be reserved for Skype presentations in which the author will be projected, and field audience questions, in real time over the internet (note: this has worked very well in past years!).
- Although commentators and audience members are encouraged to present objections to papers, the conference theme will be “constructive engagement”, i.e. helping authors to improve their work (e.g. by not only raising objections, but offering and discussing possible solutions).
- Because successfully navigating the publishing world is one of the most difficult capacities for early-career philosophers to develop, the conference welcomes submissions of a typical full-length journal article (20-30 pages double-spaced) — the aim being to help early-career philosophers develop full-length papers into publishable quality. As a rule of thumb, the longer the paper, the higher the standards for acceptance to the conference. Extremely long papers are discouraged.
- In order to defray costs of attendance (once again out of concern for the needs of early-career scholars), there will only be a small suggested (but non-mandatory) $5 registration “donation” (to help pay for snacks), and consequently no official banquet, etc. (though there will be snack!). Tampa is awesome, and there are many affordable places to meet, eat, and congregate around the university.
- Finally, please note that submission to the conference involves an agreement to serve as a commentator on another paper during the conference should your paper be accepted and you accept your invitation to attend.
To submit a paper to present at the PCPC, please email the following to me at marvan@ut.edu by May 1st, 2016:
- An anonymized paper,
- A separate title page with the author’s name, contract information, and brief paper abstract.
- A statement in your email and attached cover page concerning whether you intend to attend the conference in person or only via Skype.
Decision emails indicating whether your paper has been accepted should be sent out around July 1st (yes, papers will undergo peer-review!). Finally, please bear the following in mind: In order to ensure that the conference is well-attended, there will be relatively few Skype sessions — so the probability that your paper will be accepted is higher should you state in your submission email that you can attend in person.
I look forward to receiving some great submissions, and to another great conference!