For anyone planning to submit proposals for the 2017 Chicago Annual Meeting, we offer the following notes to ease the proposal submission process.

As you explore our website, you’ll realize—a lot has changed since the Denver meeting.

At the start of 2017, we launched a new website that offers two specific improvements, among others: 1) through “single sign-on,” members now need only one username and password for all ASA matters, and 2) membership renewal will be updated in real-time with your user account.

These changes will impact the proposal submission process for the 2017 Annual Meeting.

In the past members created a new username and password each year at the online conference submission site, All Academic. Now, members will continue to access All Academic, but they will log-in with the username they have historically used for membership renewal via Johns Hopkins University Press, as ASA member information has been integrated with both our website and All Academic.

Secondly, membership renewal or current member standing is also synced with the conference submission site. In the past, member standing wasn’t actively authenticated at the point of proposal submission. Now, because member information is connected in real-time with All Academic, anyone submitting a proposal must renew their membership (or have a lifetime membership) in order to submit a proposal. Additionally, ASA business rules now require that all participants on a panel be current members. The one exception to this rule is scholars who are members of an international affiliate.*

To prepare for the February 1 proposal submission deadline, we recommend that you:

1. Test logging into the new site ASAP.

Some members may have difficulty logging in the ASA website. You may not recall your username, you may have had an old email when you last renewed your membership, or using a different email in the past may have created a duplicate account that doesn’t recognize your paid membership. If you encounter problems, you can: 1) reset your password or retrieve your username, 2) consult member account FAQs to further troubleshoot, or 3) contact our customer representative at ASASupport@jh.edu or 1.800.548.1784.

2. Renew your membership.

If you are organizing a panel or submitting an individual proposal, plan to renew your membership in advance of logging into All Academic. While we will prompt for renewal in the case of expired members who log-in at All Academic, and renewing at the new website will connect in real-time with All Academic, it will ease the entire process if you plan ahead.

3. Confirm your participants have similarly renewed their membership.

While the All Academic site will allow you to select both current and expired members as panel participants (or to enter the name of someone who may not have been an ASA member), the ASA requires all presenters at the annual meeting to be active members of the association. It will be your responsibility, as the session organizer, to ensure that all participants of your panel renew their membership by the Feb 1 deadline.*

4. Lastly, test logging into All Academic.

Save yourself the stress of last-minute log-in problems. Log into the ASA website and select the call-to-action to “submit a proposal.” You’ll see a button to the 2017 ASA All Academic site, where you will enter the same ASA log-in username. Uploading a proposal to the submission site involves many steps. Beginning the process early ensures you won’t have problems hitting up against the 11:59PM (Pacific) deadline on February 1.

*Exceptions: The one exception to the ASA’s rule of active membership is any international scholar who is a member of an international affiliate. If you are a member of an international affiliate, you should email the ASA Office by Jan 27th (at the latest) to receive a guest membership that you can use to submit your proposal.

We’re looking forward to Chicago—and we hope you will join us.

We have a great section on the new website devoted to the Annual Meeting. You can read guidelines for the annual meeting or consult our FAQs to make sure your proposal meets with the requirements. We also invite you to submit a topic for collaboration—where colleagues, scholars, and friends can connect and brainstorm panels related to the 2017 theme “Pedagogies of Dissent.”

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at annualmeeting@theasa.net.