I have had an abstract accepted for a conference abroad, but the nature of my (practice-based art) PhD research has shifted in the 8 months since I submitted it. I have rewritten the abstract, Is it acceptable to email the conference and ask if I can change to the new version? I am confident my presentation will fit into the session - I have a preliminary programme. My supervisor is reluctant to support (for funding purposes) an abstract that is not central to my research.

Hi Janer,
can you be more explicit about the change that you should do in your presentation? A shift in perspective or a slightly different design etc. may be acceptable, and you won't need to explain this to the conference committee before hand. However, if you actually submitted an abstract for a certain study/analysis and you're now going to present a completely different study/analysis or even topic, well, this is something you should clarify with the committee.
Also it may be worth knowing how the submission process worked: if the abstracts were blind reviewed it may be difficult or impossible to get a different paper accepted at this stage.
A few more info may help the people here to give a focused advice! :-)

xxx
w

Thanks for this, I can see it could be problematic, I think it was blind reviewed. I want to change from writing about a specific topic to writing about an aspect of my research. The perspective of the analysis would be very similar but I suppose the topic will be different.

Do I understand correctly, the actual analysis you would present is not the one you wrote about in your abstract? Meaning: different data and/or different analysis procedure?

If the actual data and/or analysis are not the one you proposed, I think it is necessary for you to ask the committee in advance and see what they say - but being blind reviewed I fear they won't accept the change.

It the data and analysis remain the same, but the interpretation/context is different, then you won't probably have issues with that.

I've seen speakers starting by stating that the title was not the one in the programme, since in the mean time they won a different perspective or understanding of the data at hand. This is ok. Changing data is another story.

But maybe I'm out of topic, I see your PhD is in practice-based art. Then maybe it is more a kind of theoretical paper the one you're preparing? I'm also in the arts domain (music) - but not practice-based. May I ask which conference are you aiming at? Practice-based conferences that I know, e.g. reflective conservatoire in UK, may be more flexible about a change of perspective than more scientific conferences...still you would need to contact the organizer and make sure they're ok with that.

w