By Juan Corredor-Garcia, PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
One format that students and faculty alike should consider at MPSA is organizing a mini-conference. This format offers a unique opportunity for creating panels on very specific (and new) topics and networking with a large community working on similar themes. In this blog entry, I interview Martin Castillo Quintana, Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at The University of Chicago, for getting insights about creating and organizing such mini-conferences. When he was still a graduate student, he decided to work with more graduate students with the idea of creating a specialized discussion on Organized Crime and Politics. This idea, which then become a successful mini-conference, is a great example of how to take advantage of several opportunities that MPSA offers.
Juan Corredor-Garcia (JCG): Hi Professor Castillo Quintana, thanks for joining us. I would like to start by asking to share a little bit about you and then to tell us how you originally envisioned the mini-conference on Quantitative Studies of Organized Crime and Politics.
Martin Castillo Quintana (MCQ): Hi Juan. First of all, thank you very much for reaching out to have this interview. Just to give you a broad context, I’m an Assistant Professor in Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. I did my PhD in the Department of Politics at New York City, and I got deeply engaged in the criminal politics literature, which is a subfield of political science, particular located somewhere in between comparative politics and political economy. I think it was, and it is still, a very recent subfield in our discipline. And as a junior scholar, I realized that it was very hard to get feedback that was very narrowed. The subfield of criminal politics has a lot of nuances from conventional comparative politics, behavioral, and institutional approaches to political science. And my impression was that, if you wanted to get really good feedback, it was very important to have people who were already deeply interested in this subfield. This is how we came up with other graduate students about the idea of organizing a mini conference on organized crime aiming to gather people who are interested in the same topic, but who also understand the nuances of other subfields, so the feedback will be much more productive. And you know, since MPSA was one of these conferences that I was looking forward to present every year, we planned in advance to draft a proposal. It is important to note that at this point we were not sure whether we were going to be accepted or not, whether more senior scholars were going to be available and interested in participating. However, we already know that criminal politics was a subfield with lot of demand for more spaces in conferences like this. And we wanted to centralize a place to put together several panels on organized crime, broadly understood. So originally, with the help of other colleagues like José Ramón Enríquez and Maria Ramirez, we ended up creating not only one but a couple of mini-conferences on this issue. It has been quite successful in terms in of the turn out, involvement of both faculty and PhD students. I have to say that graduate students are actually taking the task of organizing this mini-conference every year.
JCG: Let’s discuss what are the steps that any political scientist should follow to craft from scratch a mini-conference at MPSA?
MCQ: The first step was reaching out to other PhD students who were interested in the same topic, who were doing research on organized crime, and then we gathered contact information from them. Second, once we gathered enough mass of PhD students, we started contacting them. We thought that it was a good idea to also start sending emails to Faculty who were working on this topic. We also circled these invitations from our own schools. But some of us were very isolated because we lack these connections, so we again relied on as many students as we could. We tried to reach out to many professionals as we could, but we still missed more people. Then we decided that this was the point of depart for our mini-conference. When we organized the first meeting, people showed up, talked and contributed to increase our network. This is how this community has been growing. There are certainly practical steps for applying for any conference that you should be familiar with. You may need to get enough senior people to accompany the panels. But I will say that the organizing team at MPSA has also been extremely helpful when it comes to facilitate the organization of these mini-conferences. You can contact them to see more information and they will be very happy to assist.
JCG: Wonderful. And how many conferences you have done so far? How is the turn out?
MCQ: You know? In 2023 we organized like six panels, each panel being comprised by three or four presenters. That’s something like 24 presentations. And in 2024, if I’m not wrong, there were five panels with four or five papers. It is normal to see sometimes a room with like 30 or 40 people, which is a lot considering that this is a very specialized kind of research within the discipline. We also encourage people to present polished papers but also works-in-progress. We also accept papers using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches.
JCG: That sounds very good. And what about the what sort of advice do you have for other PhD students or Junior Scholars interested in creating a mini conference at MPSA? Do you have any special advice for creating these forums?
MCQ: My suggestion would be to first partner up with other PhD students, from your school or from other institutions, which is even better. It all starts as a small network, but you know what? These students are likely to become longtime colleagues. Even though there might be uncertainty about the proper procedures to creating a mini-conference, it is very important to have a lot of initiative to pushing forward. In one word: being proactive. Send emails, reach out to organizations, do things in advance, contact professors that would like to attend your mini-conference. And sometimes, you know, you don’t even get email responses. But as long as you have four or five responses, that’s enough to build a very successful conference.
JCG: You also need to apply for a spot in advance, like in October or early November…
MCQ: Oh yeah, you need to have a conference proposal at least a week or two before the deadline for submitting papers. Because you need to tell the conference organizers about your conference, you need to give them enough time to process that you’re doing this. You may also want to think that this is especially critical for junior people so they have these chances to come to Chicago and present their work.
JCG: Thank you so much for sharing these recommendations with us!
MCQ: Thank you very much. I really love this interview. Bye!
About the Author
Juan Corredor-Garcia is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is currently a Fulbright/Minciencias scholar. He studies the intersection between rebel and criminal governance in Latin America from a civilian resistance perspective, as well as the politics of green militarization in South America.
Find him on twitter at @thuandavid10