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6th International Interdisciplinary Conference of Political Research: Values in Politics

06.03.2019 21:24 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

May 31-June 2, 2019

University of Bucharest

Deadline: March 15, 2019

Open to senior and junior scholars of political research from social sciences and humanities, as well as to scholars from trans- and interdisciplinary areas relevant for political research.

The official languages of the event are English and French. The primary working language is English and we expect most abstracts, papers, presentations and discussions to be in this language. Pre-organized panels or round tables in French may be also accepted.

A red trail of public actions fuelled by self-aggrandizing visions, often in the detriment of evidence-based arguments, seems to haunt the current political climate, especially in regions where democratic values were long-established or where during the last decades they appeared to have a chance to flourish. From emotionally-burdened and highly costly political gambles such as the Brexit, the Catalan independence or the recent referendums on the definition of family in national constitutions in Central and Eastern Europe to the seemingly never-ending Donald Trump disruptive outbursts and the barely disguised disregards of international norms by populist leaders or authoritarian governments of countries as diverse as Russia, Italy, Syria, the Philippines and Brazil, or to the open political attacks on academic freedom in Turkey and Hungary targeting particularly social sciences, value-driven narratives both echo and amplify the apparent deterioration of the quality of public discourse and of the liberal democracy institutions worldwide.

At discipline level, perhaps still limited by the sometimes insufficiently understood complexity of the concept of value-free science, we seem to have not tackled comprehensively the nexus values-politics for a long time. Not that we have neglected research on values in political research. Political theory, for instance, has a long and robust tradition of investigating the normative dimensions of political phenomena. Global, regional, national and local surveys on values, beliefs and attitudes are the bread and butter of many political researchers and provide data that, over the last decades, has generated vivid debates and a significant part of publications in comparative politics and political methodology. Research on corruption, integrity and public accountability is also present often beyond the borders of scholarly outlets. At the same time, with rapid technological advancements such as social media, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and gene editing, ethics has become an increasingly visible aspect in the study of international affairs, conflicts, international political economy and public policies. However, across the entire spectrum of political science as both discipline and profession, the dialogue on the multifaceted presence of values in politics and contemporary political research is still limited to marginal or formal issues.

Furthermore, with distrust in politicians continuing to remain pervasively high across the world and since political science still faces significant challenges in communicating its social and scientific worth to the larger public, questions on the relevance of studying political phenomena and even whether politics itself got any value are increasingly present in the public space. Under these circumstances, the topic of values in politics forces us to rethink the merits of our own work in a larger context, which addresses both the long-run survival of our discipline and the moral obligations of scholars as citizens, as well as the limits of acting as engaged spectators.

Aiming to explore such scholarly and policy puzzles from various conceptual, empirical and methodological perspectives, while addressing timely case-studies, we invite scholars across different disciplines to submit papers, panels or round table proposals, especially (but not exclusively) around the following core topics:

  • Ethics and political theory;
  • Ethics and international affairs;
  • Ethics and public policy;
  • Ethics and human rights;
  • Values, beliefs and attitudes in contemporary societies;
  • Populism, social movements and electoral behaviour in the age of social media;
  • Democracy and its critics;
  • Contemporary political ideologies;
  • Identity politics;
  • The politics of entitlement;
  • Transitional justice;
  • Comparative perspectives on civic education and global solidarity;
  • Methodological opportunities and challenges in approaching the study of values in political research;
  • Ethics of contemporary political research.

The best papers may be considered for publication within special journal issues or collective volumes with partner publishers.

More here

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