CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The COVID-19 pandemic experience made many of us realize that our societies and systems of governance are more vulnerable than we usually assume. Our safety nets also differ significantly. From (un)fair access to vaccination to the capacity to uphold fair electoral rules under unusual political circumstances, we live iniquituous times, even within communities that are usually qualified as democracies. At the same time, scientific expertise has been unfairly challenged, misinterpreted or simply ignored for political purposes, exposing thus all of us to further difficulties in tackling the current vulnerabilities and even creating new ones.

As political researchers, we may of course find the study of "THE VULNERABLE" IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS highly relevant. How can we understand, assess and provide solutions to the inequalities that may arise from contexts of vulnerability? Are the traditional debates on vulnerability and inequality still relevant or do we need new conceptual and theoretical paradigms? Which are the scientific and policy implications of our representations and methodological choices? And to what extent, as humans, as citizens of imperfect societies and as scholars of imperfect science, our own vulnerabilities affect us, impact political research and diminish our discipline's capacity to deliver solutions and contribute to maintaining and strenghtening democracy in times of uncertainty or crisis?

As scholars of politics, we are also VULNERABLE IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS. 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, we should also rethink the merits and the vulnerabilities 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:

• The construction of the "vulnerable" as a political concept;

• Political approaches to crisis management, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic;

• Public communication on COVID-19;

• The dynamic of international politics during the COVID-19 pandemic;

• International cooperation in crisis management and sustainable development;

• Welfare and public policies;

• Ethics and human rights;

• Values, beliefs and attitudes, with a focus on the study of crises;

• Populism, social movements and electoral behaviour during crises and periods of social unrest;

• Democracy and its critics during crises and periods of social unrest;

• Identity politics;

• Social movements;

• Religion and politics;

• The politics of entitlement;

• Transitional justice;

• Anti-corruption;

• Comparative perspectives on civic education and global solidarity;

• Methodological opportunities and challenges in approaching the study of the vulnerable in political research;

• Ethics of contemporary political research;

• Political research and teaching challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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

The international peer-review open acess journal Annals of the University of Bucharest. Political Science series currently accepts manuscripts for the special issue 2/2021 dedicated to this topic (DL 15 October 2021 for SCOPE 2021 participants).