ANNUAL MEETING FOR HOMICIDE RESEARCH WORKING GROUP
Each year, members from across the globe gather for HRWG’s annual meeting. The HRWG annual meeting is not your usual academic meeting. The group has developed a number of ways to discourage didactic lectures and encourage intensive group participation and problem solving on breaking issues. There are no simultaneous sessions. Participants do not present a paper and then leave, but are asked to attend for the entire meeting, where they sit facing each other around a circle or open square.
A couple of weeks before the meeting, everyone receives a summary of each presentation; therefore, presenters can review only the main points in no more than half the allotted time, with the other half reserved for group discussion. Each session has a “moderator,” whose job is to stimulate a lively discussion (or maintain general decorum when stimulation is unnecessary), and a “recorder,” whose job is to record the discussion for publication in the Proceedings.
To ensure that current findings and breaking issues find a place on the meeting’s program, information can be presented in a variety of formats – formal presentations, works in progress, demonstrations, tutorials, and practitioner discussion groups. Sessions are of varying length, dependent on how long it takes to deal with the issue at hand. One result of these still-evolving “tribal customs” is that participant discussions build and develop over several days, with later discussions referring back to earlier presentations, and are often the most valuable part of the annual meeting.
Find out more information about HRWG’s annual meetings: