North American Society for the Sociology of Sport :: Société nord-americaine de sociologie du sport :: La Sociedad Norteamericana para la Sociología del Deporte
** November 5-8, 2008 ** Denver, CO, USA
Greetings NASSS graduate student members!
We hope that you have all had productive school years. Your graduate student representatives for 2007-2008 are Janelle Joseph (University of Toronto) and William Bridel (Queen’s University). It is our responsibility to keep you informed of all that is happening with NASSS (especially those issues that concern graduate students), and to represent graduate student concerns to the executive board (as voting members). Please feel free to contact us any time if you have questions or suggestions; we can be reached at our e-mail address: grads[at]nasss.org.
The primary activity in our year is the 2008 NASSS Conference, to be held this November. Please visit the conference home page for full details. The following information is meant to provide a snapshot of the activities more specifically focused towards graduate students attending the conference.
This year's conference will be held in Denver, Colorado. There are several ways in which you can be involved at the conference, thus maximizing your experience!
If you plan on presenting a paper, you must be registered as a NASSS member, and to take advantage of the early conference registration discount ($5), you need to register by 15 September. Please consider the journal option (a good way to increase your sociology of sport library) and be sure that you are getting listserv messages. All registration information is available through the NASSS website http://nasss.org/2008/registration.html. A call for abstracts is forthcoming.
This year's Take a Student to Lunch event will take place on Friday, 7 November. Take a student to lunch is an annual event and involves faculty members taking graduate students out for lunch (and picking up the tab). We will send an e-mail to NASSS faculty members prior to the conference asking them to volunteer for this year's lunch, and we would like you to start thinking about who you would like to have lunch with. We will do our best to match you with somebody who shares your (general) interests, but even when this is not possible, you have the opportunity to meet somebody new, and to have a free lunch! Please e-mail us with your faculty requests as the conference nears in September/October. In the meantime, put some thought into who in NASSS is doing work in which you are interested and/or that fits in with your own research agenda.
Never underestimate the importance of networking with other graduate students – these will be your future colleagues! An important event for grad networking is the graduate student breakfast, which is held on Friday morning. This is your chance to have a say in your organisation, and if you are interested in contributing ideas/suggestions/ comments of particular interest to NASSS grad student members (or if you would like to be the new graduate student representative), it is in your best interest to attend. As an added incentive, NASSS pays for a hot breakfast! Start thinking now about what you think NASSS should be doing, and the role that grad students have to play. The new grad rep (who brings a graduate student perspective to the executive board) is nominated and elected at the meeting. If you are interested in being the new grad rep, contact your grad reps for a draft copy of the job description (this information will soon be available on the website).
Our aim here is to include information that is useful for all graduate students attending NASSS annual meetings, but particularly for those graduate students attending their first NASSS conference. These ideas and ‘tips’ (generated with the assistance of former graduate student representatives), and we encourage you to contribute your own ideas, either through the bulletin board on this site, or by e-mailing us. We would love to learn from your conference experiences! As more information becomes available the site will be updated with specifics for the Denver conference.
Two different student-specific awards are given in conjunction with the NASSS conference.
We hope that your summer treats you well. We also hope that many of you will be able to join us in Denver this year. Please contact us with your questions for the graduate student workshop and with any other questions or comments you might have about this year's conference or about NASSS more generally.
Janelle Joseph (2006-2008)
William Bridel (2007-2009)
grads[at]nasss.org
