Bring on the new year

I'm not sorry to see the end of 2012. It has been a challenging year for many reasons that I won't detail in this post. Next year promises to be a very interesting one with several overseas conferences organised. Yesterday I booked my accommodation for AERA. It was a tough choice because there were so many hotels that appealed. In the end I went for this one. The hotel is on Geary Street and I have fond memories of staying in a hotel in that same street at my first AERA conference in 2006. The conference in 2012 will be my seventh AERA conference. I'm proud of that track record. A second conference I will be attending is the Pragmatics conference in New Delhi. I had blogged some months ago about putting up a proposal for a symposium. My first attempt (Early Bird) was rejected but with encouragement to rework and reapply which I did. The second time around, the proposal was accepted. Participants in the symposium will include my doctoral student, Brooke Scriven, and my friend Gillian Busch. The co-chair of the symposium is Professor Susan Danby from QUT. Susan and I are also chairing a symposium at this conference in Waterloo, Canada. There is one more conferencethat I would like to attend. The abstracts are due for this on January 9th so not perfect timing for me. I've promised myself restful days until 2 January when I will return to work. Still, I will do some thinking and will probably watch some recordings from our ARC, that will help me to select a focus and I can do the work for the abstract in a week, hopefully. The conference actually requires full papers of 15-30 pages. Now that is a big ask in a week.