ARCHIVE


SCOPE: SCIENCE OF POLITICS 2016

3rd international interdisciplinary conference of political research


27-28.05.2016, University of Bucharest

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES OF POLITICAL RESEARCH

DÉFIS CONTEMPORAINES DE LA RECHERCHE POLITIQUE

PROVOCĂRI CONTEMPORANE ALE CERCETĂRII POLITICE


With an ambitious new global plan to making the world a better place recently adopted (Sustainable Development Goals, 2015-2030), how can this new UN agenda on peace and development contribute to addressing the most challenging contemporary transnational problems such as the refugee crises, public health emergencies, the widening poverty gap or the climate change? What issues are relevant in the latest elections worldwide and how can these influence this agenda? How does political representation shape the efforts to rethink democracy and understand its pitfalls? To what extent the dynamics of contemporary democracies reflects political and social sensitivity to gender relations? Does democratic equality as currently understood really translate into equality of opportunities? How should we assess and mark the anniversaries of painful episodes of the past that raise the issue of collective guilt, and what can we learn from these for the current international social and political crises developed around fanaticism and intolerance? What is the moral and aesthetic impact of our research choices? How do we and/or should we study all these? And can studying such topics really can get us a properly paid jobs?


Aiming to explore such scholarly and policy puzzles from various conceptual, empirical and methodological perspectives, while addressing timely case-studies, SCOPE 2016 proposes the following sections as clusters for more focused debates on various contemporary challenges to social and political research:


  • Contemporary Challenges to Political Representation

  • Gender, Feminism and Political Science: At the Crossroad of Equality

  • The Public Good, Social Innovation and the New Global Political Agenda

  • Reassessing the Dark Past after 75 years: The Impact of the 1941 Pogroms on Romanian and Israeli Societies

  • Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Contemporary Political Research


The conference includes a special round table on the state of the discipline focused on the academic assessment and employment of political scientists.


This edition also marks 25 years since establishment at the University of Bucharest of the first political science department in post-communist Romania (Faculty of Political Science - FSPUB).

KEYNOTE


Michael H. BERNHARD

University of Florida


Michael H. Bernhard is the inaugural holder of the Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science at the University of Florida. His work centers on questions of democratization and development both globally and in the context of Europe. Among the issues that have figured prominently in his research agenda are the role of civil society in democratization, institutional choice in new democracies, the political economy of democratic survival, and the legacy of extreme forms of dictatorship.

Prior to coming to Florida, Bernhard was on the faculty of Penn State University for twenty years. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at Warsaw University and the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has delivered public lectures at a large number of public and private universities in the United States and Europe, and has conducted archival and field work in Poland, Germany, England, and Hungary. In his career Bernhard has held a number of important administrative responsibilities -- chair of the APSA section on European Politics and Society, chair of the Network on the Historical Study of States and Regimes of the Council on European Studies, member of the editorial board of Penn State Press, and the chair of the editorial committee of the newsletter of the comparative democratization section of the American Political Science Association. Bernhard received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and has graduate degrees from Yale (M.A. Russian and East European Studies), and Columbia (Ph.D. Political Science). He has taken short-term courses of study at the Louis Kossuth University in Debrecen (Hungary), Jagellonian University in Krakow (Poland), the Catholic University of Lublin (Poland), and Goethe Institute in Boppard am Rhein (Germany). His most recent publications include Michael Bernhard & Jan Kubik, eds. (2014) Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, Oxford University Press, and contributions to the ambitious work conducted by the Varieties of Democracy Institute (Where and When do Elections Matter? A Global Test of the the Democratization by Elections Thesis, 1900-2012, Institutional Subsystems and the Survival of Democracy: Do Political and Civil Society Matter?).

SCOPE 2016 Academic coordination team


Convenors


Laurențiu VLAD,

Vice Rector, University of Bucharest


Ionela BĂLUȚĂ,

Dean, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest


Mihai CHIOVEANU,

Director, Center for Israeli Studies (CIS), Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest


Luciana Alexandra GHICA,

Director, Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC), Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest


Camil Alexandru PÂRVU,

Director, Center Fundamenta Politica, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest



Logistics team


Coordination

Cosmin-Ștefan DOGARU

Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest


Irina MATEI

Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest