IACM 2018 Reflections

A Reflection on IACM 2018 in Philadelphia

Philadelphia Program Chair, Laura Rees
It’s hard to believe IACM 2018 is more than two months behind us now! From the stories I heard, you all very much enjoyed sampling some of Philly’s delicious food and exploring its historical locations and artifacts.

This year’s conference program involved several new session types, including the Special Topic Sessions on race, government, and communities, and the inaugural year of our IACM Fellows and the Fellows Panel Session. We were also very happy to offer several features to help make your conference more comfortable, including the never-ending supply of coffee, tea, and snacks (who can forget the delicious chickpea puffs…), and the addition of a Family’s Room where mothers or other caregivers could have a dedicated private space for feeding and other childcare needs. On the technical side, this conference served as a test year for our new software program for all conference submissions, reviews, and other communication. The entire conference team thanks you for your patience as we navigated this new system, and for your helpful suggestions for how to make it even more user-friendly going forward. We’re excited to explore productive ways to continue to streamline our technology and communication with you. Finally, I’d like to offer a sincere thank you to all of our conference submission reviewers, graduate student registration table volunteers, and the entire conference planning team and IACM Board of Directors for all the work, dedication, and positive attitude that you invested in IACM 2018. You make this a fantastic organization. I can’t express how excited I am to see you again at IACM 2019 in Dublin!

Past-President’s Report, Deborah A. Cai
Now that we are a few months past the conference in Philadelphia, it’s a good time to reflect on what the highlights were of this past year.
I hope you enjoyed the conference this summer. As program chair, Laura Rees did a wonderful job managing submissions, setting up the schedule, and overseeing so many details of the conference.

There are so many things that I would like to recap about the past year. Beginning in July 2017, when the Board of Directors approved hiring Brandon Charpied as Executive Director of IACM, and ending in July 2018, when the membership ratified a new Constitution at this summer’s conference, it was a very busy year. The Board of Directors met seven times just between January and July to put into place some new processes and new standing committees to guide the association. And we put on a conference I’m really proud of – and one I hope you enjoyed. In all, we had 248 registrations for the Philly conference, which is a good turnout!

It seems appropriate that IACM’s new Constitution would be signed here in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution was originally signed in 1787. In addition to the Constitution, we recognized the IACM Fellows for the first time, announcing both the inaugural Fellows as well as the first two Fellows nominated and selected to join them. Dr. Dan Druckman was recognized with the 2018 Jeffrey Z. Rubin Award for Theory-to-Practice.

Now is a good time for me to express one more time a huge thank you to a lot of people for their dedication to IACM over the past year, leading up to the Philly conference.

First, a gigantic thanks to Brandon Charpied for his tremendous work to get the association back on its feet, including—but definitely not limited to—setting up systems for submissions and programming and building our new website. (I did go through quite a bit of withdrawal from our hours of conversation almost weekly throughout the past year!)

Second, huge thanks to Laura Rees for doing an outstanding job as program chair for the Philly conference and all her work throughout the year! And thank you, Cheryl Rivers, for your never ending humorous take on Philadelphia as chair of local arrangements in Philly while operating from Toronto.

Third, thanks to the Constitution committee members, who did the first rounds of revision on the Constitution: Peter Carnevale, Jessica Jameson, and Deanna Geddes.

And a very heartfelt thank you to all the members of the Board of Directors for their dedication and their endless support throughout this past year as we tackled some big issues and completed the revisions of the Constitution in time for it to be sent out to the membership in early June. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I thoroughly enjoyed working with this team of very smart and very capable people.

And now the association is now in the hands of Maurice Schweitzer as President and Zoe Barsness as President-Elect and the rest of the members (new and returning) of the board of directors. As we start our 32nd year as an association, IACM is in good shape and in good hands.
I look forward to seeing you all in Dublin next summer!