The Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC) welcomes papers, panel or round table contributions to its section The Public Good, Social Innovation and the New Global Political Agenda organized within SCOPE 2016: Science of Politics - International Interdisciplinary Conference of Political Research, 3rd edition, Bucharest 27-28 May 2016. This section aims to contribute to debates which explore how different representations of the public good, governance and social innovation shape the public space and impact the private sphere, and how such representations and their interaction construct a global social and political agenda. For this purpose and acknowledging that the distinction domestic politics / international politics has become increasingly artificial for both practical and theoretical goals, it proposes the following sub-sections that build on various traditions of political research, including bot not limited to comparative politics, political sociology, political history, international relations, international political economy, development studies, and peace studies (detailed call below):
At the invitation of IDC, the SCOPE 2016 keynote lecture will be delivered by Michael BERNHARD, Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair, University of Florida, Department of Political Science. Within SCOPE 2016, IDC also
Deadline for submitting applications: 24.04.2016 Contact us at idc@fspub.unibuc.ro Conference official website: www.scienceofpolitics.eu DETAILED CALL FOR APPLICATION Public Interest, Representation and Accountability in Contemporary Politics
Social Innovation, New Technologies and the Politics of Information The development of new technologies has had a major impact, not just on economic and social life, but on politics as well. They change how citizens act and interact with politicians and institutions in established democracy; equally important, if not more, they help people in authoritarian regimes to mobilize and challenge their leaders, as well as communicate what happens there to the outside world. But new technologies do not merely provide new objects for scholarly inquiry; they are also important in providing new tools for studying political phenomena (such as the Facebook experiment conducted in 2010 in the US, aimed to increase the turnout in elections, or the study that used aggregate data provided by Google as a proxy for measuring latent racism across US regions). Accordingly, most papers in this sub-section are expected to address one of these topics: (i) the impact of new technologies in contemporary polities (whether democracies, autocracies, or both); (ii) how social innovation benefits from or is hindered by the new technologies; iii) how to make a creative use of new technologies (or the data provided by them) to ask substantive questions relating to our discipline. Proposals on topics already classic in this field such as the relation between new technologies and contemporary social movements, e-democracy or the relation between information technology and privacy are also welcomed. The Ethics and the Aesthetics of Discourse on Public Goods and Public Policies This sub-section explores the moral and the aesthetic dimensions of the public discourses on public goods, aiming to identify the common features of such discourses and the way in which they impact the public opinion and the public policies in various spheres, and thus contribute to the construction of a global social agenda. Papers on the representation of democracy and democratic values in mass-media and popular culture, as well as on hate speech, otherness and timely topics such as the recent civil wars, popular uprisings and refugee crises in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America or global epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and more recently Ebola and Zika, are particularly welcomed. The use of less traditional sources such as artistic films, travel documentaries, cartoons or advertisement, as well as comparative approaches and diachronic perspectives are also highly encouraged. United Europe under Threat? From increasingly present xenophobic and nationalist discourses to the Brexit debates or to the militarist foreign policy of Russia towards its European neighbourhood, the ever closer union of European peoples seems to be represented today in both mass media, as well as in some policy and academic circles as a project which has become under serious threat from both domestic and external factors. How did we get here? How can the European Union reform itself so that it successfully faces such challenges? Is conditionality still a useful conceptual tool for understanding the EU leverage in its dialogue with national governments? What is the impact of EU in Ukraine, Turkey and the Balkans in a time when the focus quickly shifted toward the larger migration crisis? How does the migration policies of EU member states affect the institutional and discursive structures of the Union? This sub-section addresses such puzzles and explores the latest debates in the field of European studies. Rethinking the Global Agenda on Peace and Development
All sub-sections welcome both theoretical and empirical papers, and strongly encourage a comparative approach. |