Responding at CHESS

Instructions for Responding at CHESS

Many thanks for agreeing to serve as a respondent at the CHESS Workshop. Below please find guidelines for your comment at the Workshop. 

CHESS is a broadly cross-disciplinary group and, for this reason, we ask you to frame your response with the broadest possible audience in mind.  

Your first responsibility is to set out as clearly and succinctly as possible the central questions that motivate the paper, the fundamental steps of the argument, and the paper’s conclusions. In your summary, you should also touch on the methods deployed in coming to those conclusions. Finally, you should explain why the argument matters: why should someone outside the specialist subfield and ideally outside of the academy care about this?

After discussing the paper’s argument and significance, you should ask questions of the paper-giver(s) aimed to stimulate the broadest possible discussion. Ideally your questions will get to the heart of the methodological and interpretative assumptions that undergird the piece in question. You should avoid any disciplinary-specific terminology or passing references to scholarly literature that will be unknown to a non-specialist audience.

The ideal response should last about 5-7 minutes.  In no case should you exceed 10 minutes. In the past we have discovered that respondents do best who attend a CHESS session prior to the one for which they are a respondent so that they can gain a flavor of the intellectual range and diversity of our community.

We look forward to your response.