Thank you for agreeing to serve as a discussant at the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting in Chicago. Below is additional guidance that will help you prepare for your participation.

Before the meeting

You will be able to review a list of the presenters in your session, the session chair, presenter affiliations, paper titles, and abstracts by means of the online searchable program. You should receive the drafts of the presenters’ papers electronically no later than 1 November, along with presenters’ supplementary multimedia if available.

Your job will be to engage carefully and critically with your assigned presenters’ papers before arrival in Chicago, and then to share a cogent, generative response to the panel’s work in the spirit of sparking dialogue. You will deliver one response toward the end of the session that accounts for all of the session presentations. Your commentary should be limited to 10 minutes; the ensuing Q&A will be 20 minutes.

We ask that you prepare your response with three criteria in mind. First, your response should provide a general, summative assessment of the session’s papers and their contributions to the scholarly field. Second, you will want to provide constructive, respectfully written comments that could take a number of forms and address each of the papers differently. You might elaborate on what you feel is at stake in one presenter’s argument; consider the ramifications of another paper’s methodological frame; engage with the theoretical foundations of a paper; bring the papers into an explicit conversation with each other vis-à-vis the session topic; and so forth. Third, you will want to devise a couple of open-ended questions for the presenters’ consideration and that help to launch the Q&A among the large group in attendance.

During the Session

The session chair will manage the session’s pacing, Q&A, presenter/discussant introductions, and other session logistics, including oversight of the A/V setup. Please arrive at the session room 10–15 minutes early to introduce yourself to the chair and presenters. Upon the conclusion of the presenters’ talks, the chair will pass the baton to you to deliver your response.