Students are invited to submit proposals for posters to be presented during the 11th Annual SMA Conference, to be held April 3-4, 2018 at the Jacob E. Smart Building on Joint Base Andrews in Camp Springs, Maryland (approximately 10 miles from Washington, D.C.).
The annual SMA conference is organized by the Strategic Multilayer Assessment Office within the Department of Defense and brings together policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and academics to explore critical topics related to national security. This year’s conference is co-sponsored with the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counter Terrorism Center, and National Intelligence Council. The 2018 conference theme is, “A Utopian or Dystopian Future, or Merely Muddling Through?” The SMA conference will incorporate a graduate student poster session in order to introduce up-and-coming scholars to the SMA community and vice-versa, an addition that received very positive feedback following last year’s introduction of the poster session. Additionally, on the second day of the conference, a panel will feature a roundtable discussion on “The Millennial Generation: What Do They Think of This?”
This Conference will assess what today we rightly or wrongly perceive as historically unprecedented changes from the perspectives of politics and history, sociology, biology, information science, and technological innovation. There is a large body of scientific work that supports the notion that human societies are complex adaptive systems with emergent properties that contain core commonalities, but the actions of which cannot be predicted with certainty. Given the properties of human cognition and social behavior, the question remains: How might nations and societies best position themselves to prepare for and manage the risks associated with rapid change under conditions of fundamental uncertainty? Conference speakers and panelists will address these issues relevant to key domains and dimensions of global security.
Submission deadline is February 16, 2018. Successful applicants will be notified by March 2, 2018.
No financial support is available to subsidize conference attendance. Successful applicants will be asked to supply a short bio. Prior to the conference, presenters will be required to provide information to conference organizers to facilitate their entry to Joint Base Andrews.