WESTERN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Western Political Science Association will host its 2010 annual meeting at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero Center in San Francisco from April 1 – 3, 2010. Please make plans to attend and encourage others to join us!

In May, the association will distribute a call for papers. The DEADLINE for submission of paper proposals/program participation forms will be September 18, 2009.

If you are interested in shaping the content of the program by serving as a section chair, please contact:

Christine Di Stefano
Department of Political Science
University of Washington
Box 353530
Seattle, WA 98195
distefan@u.washington.edu

The Theme for the 2010 Meeting
POLITICS IN THE MAELSTROM OF
GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS

As Marx and Engels famously observed about their own era, during periods of epic and often catastrophic change, “all that is solid melts into air.” Today we witness the collapse of the global credit economy, a crisis in global capitalism, a chastened consumer capitalism, renewed scrutiny of “the market” as an adequate and appropriate venue for the allocation of goods, services, and values, and an American recession in full regalia, replete with massive layoffs, housing foreclosures, bank failures, decimated retirement accounts, and significant projected reductions in public spending for social services, including higher education. How should political scientists proceed with research, teaching, the training of graduate students, and robust critical inquiry during this era of economic crisis? And how should the crisis itself, its causes, and its solutions, be rendered? For Marx and Engels, the meltdown they observed signaled the possibility for new articulations of possibility, even as it engendered tragic consequences for those caught up in the juggernaut of crisis-induced change. What are the opportunities, the risks, the challenges, and the temptations for political inquiry and political vision during this era of economic crisis?

These are complex, daunting, timely, and urgent questions for the contemporary discipline of political science, which has enjoyed a close, if also troubled, and troubling, relationship with economics. We invite political scientists of all methodological persuasions and sub-field affiliations to submit panel and paper proposals that relate to these broad themes and questions. The following questions are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive: How does the current economic crisis strengthen or undermine the predominance of neo-liberalism as a rhetoric and practice of political rationality? What theoretical frameworks can best account for the fiscal and economic policies enacted since the crisis began? Will economic scarcity crowd out demands for global justice or could it spur mobilizations of new actors and new politics? How have the responses (and non-responses) of policymakers informed our understanding of the relationship between domestic politics and the global economy? To what extent does the current crisis create or reduce space for the articulation of other-than-economic expressions and intimations of the political? To the extent that critical examinations of consumerism tend to figure “the consumer” as a passive, feminine figure, how might feminist scholars interrogate the critique of consumerism? What is the potential impact of economically inspired distribution-focused rhetorics and policies on environmental politics, GLBT politics, race and ethnicity politics, and feminist politics? To what extent will the economic crisis restructure international politics, empowering new actors and creating opportunities for fundamental transformations? Will increasing economic competition lead to trade wars or real wars? How will “the politics of recognition” fare in an era of economic crisis? How should we be thinking about the appropriate scope and limits of market-inflected paradigms for the study and theorization of contemporary politics? What are the alternatives? Will (or should) the economic crisis lead to a reassessment of prevailing theories and methods in political science? From the Depression of 1873 to the Great Depression to the oil crisis of 1973, economic struggle has propelled American economic development. What are the lessons of the past, and how will the current economic and financial crisis re-make the American state? As an applied matter, what does the current crisis mean for higher education, especially teaching loads, graduate admissions, and professor furloughs? What are creative solutions, and how does the current crisis invite us to reconsider our measures of professional productivity?

Note: All participants in the program are required to preregister for the meeting by early December.