We’re hosting a CURL conference you can attend in your PJs.
We may not be able to gather at Huron, but we can still showcase your fabulous work!
The 2021 Spring Conference will take place online from April 12-16.
Just like our regular Spring Conferences, this asynchronous event will showcase Huron students’ research from any discipline.
This year, we’re challenging the notion of what a scholarly conference “looks like.”
Can submitting be more accessible? Learning more digestible? Presenting more fun?
We’re asking students to think outside the Powerpoint.
We’ll be showcasing your work on Instagram—meaning your submission can be short, simple, and fun!
What will the Spring Conference look like?
The 2021 Spring Conference will take place on Instagram! From April 12-April 17 (or even longer if we get tons of submissions), CURL’s Instagram will consist entirely of student-submitted posts. We invite you to comment, share, and add your insights from your own accounts!
After the conference, a small selection of this work will be made available long-term on the CURL website.
How formal should my work be? Should my post read like a paper?
First answer: only somewhat. Second answer: nope!
Although we hope that presenting research through social media is exciting, we recognize that it might also seem strange if you’ve been trained to present research in a very specific, formal, detailed way. We’d like to reassure you that we know an effective social media post won’t read like a paper—and that’s okay!
Social media posts challenge you to be more concise by being extremely selective with the details you include. The most effective posts are brief, humanizing, and fun! You could introduce yourself, include some photos, incorporate slang, or crack some jokes (nothing offensive, please)—all while sharing your knowledge with a much wider potential audience than a typical conference.
Composing for social media builds different writing muscles than composing an effective essay or formal presentation, but all of these skills are valuable. We encourage you to embrace this new way of sharing your experiences without worrying you’ll appear foolish. If that gif from The Office or the expanding brain meme helps to illustrate your research process, use it!
Of course, don’t shoehorn jokes and memes in where they don’t belong: aim for language and imagery that help your audience remember points, make connections, and think critically.
We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
What should I write in my post?
CURL believes that the process of sharing research should be more about conversation and less about competition. We encourage our participants to be proud of the messy, imperfect process of their research and to challenge the notion that only meticulous, finished research is worthy of discussing.
All this means that while we certainly welcome your research results, we also invite you to share how your unfinished projects are going. What are you looking into? Why did it interest you? What problems have arisen?
Get creative! Can you draw a comic illustrating the woes of writing a proposal? Can you write a how-to guide for avoiding research procrastination? Can you develop 1-minute video summarizing your most recent essay—or even a meme?
These are not requirements—just suggestions! You may also consider writing an Instagram post in the style of CURL’s research features or posing some scholarly questions about the book you’re studying.
Want to stick to the tried-and-true conference format of sharing your research results! Awesome—we’d love to have ’em! But do resist the urge to try to cram every detail of a 10-minute talk into a 1-minute video or 3-paragraph feature. Which details are the most necessary? Which parts of your work were the most surprising, thought-provoking, satisfying, or even frustrating? See our Benefits & Tips document to learn more about sharing research on social media.
Finally, we ask that all students consider ways to make their work accessible to the disabled community and others with non-normative access needs. Guidelines can be found at our Creating Accessible Content page.
What work formats do you accept?
We accept Instagram-friendly images, videos, and written content, the specifics of which can be found in the submission guide.
Submissions are due by 11:59PM on Friday, March 19.
How do I submit?
Compile your images and text content into a single .zip file, send it to your professor (if you’re submitting as part of a class assignment), upload it to our public OneDrive, then drop us a line at curl@uwo.ca to let us know! Be sure to check out our Submission Guide for full details, including file name conventions, image resolution/word count requirements, and the OneDrive link.
Submissions are due by 11:59PM on Friday, March 19.
Social Media Conferences: Benefits and Tips
A brief primer on the whys and hows of social media conferences.
Submission Guide
Find the image resolution/word count requirements, the link to our OneDrive, and other submission info!
Submission Examples
Stumped on what to submit? Check out a few example works from the 2020 Fall Exhibition!