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I find myself writing this October column as our university’s two-day Fall Break looms at the end of this week. The break always serves me as a prelude for upcoming BEA deadlines—most notably the 17th Annual Festival of Media Arts and the numerous deadlines for research scholarship, including the 9th Annual Research Symposium. I’ll discuss the festival in next month’s column. Today, I wish to focus on the many opportunities for presenting research scholarship at BEA2018.

During a quick review of the BEA2017 convention program, I tallied fifty sessions dedicated to research scholarship. A quick scan of titles from those sessions revealed a diversity of topics far beyond broadcasting, and much more reflective of the broader academic media organization that BEA has become.

While some research is presented as part of an invited panel session, the vast majority of research papers and abstracts are selected through various research calls.  Nearly all of BEA’s 18 Interest Divisions—including the new Religion & Media Division—conduct paper competitions (December 1st deadline) in Debut—for those who have never presented a paper at a BEA convention before—and Open categories. Winners of the debut category in each division receive a small cash award to help offset expenses related to convention attendance.

In addition to the Interest Division paper competitions, there are paper calls for the Research Symposium (December 1st deadline), Research-in-Progress (December 15th deadline), Kenneth Harwood Outstanding Dissertation Award (January 11th deadline) and the Grand Plans and Great Expectations thesis and dissertation in-progress competition (February 20th deadline).

This year’s Research Symposium on the Golden Age of Big Data and Media Analytics is chaired by Don Grady from Elon University.  In its ninth year, the symposium has become a focal point of BEA’s research initiatives.

Through the New Faculty Research Grant (NFRG), BEA seeks to promote and encourage the scholarship of untenured media faculty by awarding a $1,000 cash grant for research projects (January 16th deadline). The BEA Board of Directors is committed to creating more grant and award opportunities like the NFRG which encourage and reward research scholarship among our members. I hope to announce new initiatives in this area before my term as President expires.

You can use this link to find all the details about research scholarship at BEA2018. I encourage each of our members to forward this link to colleagues and graduate students with a personal invitation to submit a paper or abstract.  With that, let the final edits begin.

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