Idea

STaPs – Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende (‘linguistics conference for Ph.D. students’)

The STaPs conference, which originated in Germany, is a conference by Ph.D. students for Ph.D. students. In contrast to other conferences, the STaPs conference does not primarily focus on the content and (preliminary) results of Ph.D. projects, but on the Before and the In Between of methodological challenges.

Empirical projects of any area of linguistics can be presented (theoretical and descriptive linguistics as well as psycho-, neuro-, sociolinguistics and computer linguistics; synchronic or diachronic). The conference program typically further contains workshops (e.g. Praat, statistics with R), key notes and cultural activities.

In an informal setting, methodological challenges are discussed. Instead of content-related discussions, the STaPs conference is strongly problem- and methodology-oriented: Neither finished research projects nor preliminary research results should be presented. For this reason, this conference is particularly addressed to doctoral candidates in the beginning phase of their thesis.