How to present

Darin Barney in a park with a megaphone microphone in a sit in protest surrounded by people

1. Be mindful of time limits – this is a courtesy to your hosts, panel moderators, fellow panelists and audience.

2. Prepare with time limits in mind. This will save you stress during the presentation. Beware of extemporizing sinkholes (impromptu departures from your prepared material make precious minutes disappear).  

3. Prepare in a way that allows you to present your work even if your presentation technology fails (e.g., laptop/projection/audio failure).

4. Don’t waste precious minutes talking about what the paper is not (e.g., “This is work in progress…”; “This is part of a larger project…”; “Unfortunately, I won’t have time to…”). These qualifications can be saved for the question period.

5. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” (Tom Petty). Minimize unnecessary prefatory material and/or scaffolding. This typically means radically minimizing (or eliminating) the following: literature review; theory; methodology (exceptions: situating yourself relative to the research object, site or material; cases where theory is the object of analysis; cases where methodology is central to the contribution).

6. Let images do their work. Sometimes, an image needs to contextualized, described or explained (i.e., when the image or what it depicts is the object of analysis). Other times, an image can communicate without additional explanation (e.g., if your study is set in Nova Scotia, and you display a clearly labelled map of Nova Scotia, you don’t need to say, “This is a map of Nova Scotia”). Allowing images to speak (and elaborating upon them in response to questions) is a good way to save time!

7. The simple template:

  • describe and situate/contextualize the research object (a site, a text, a phenomenon, an event, a relationship, etc.) (25%)

  • set out your questions about and/or framing of and/or approach to the research object (here, you can sneak-in a bit of conceptual, theoretical or methodological signalling – but keep it lean!) (25%)

  • present your “findings” – your answers to the questions; your major lines/points of analysis, insights and conclusions (50%)

8. Use the question period to discuss details you could not elaborate on during the presentation.