2017 ECPR General Conference – Political Theory Section

We are pleased to announce that the application for a Political Theory section at the next ECPR General Conference in Oslo (6-9 September 2017) has been approved. The Section is entitled Political Theory: Forms of Injustice.

We have been provisionally allocated room for 6 panels. 5 panels have already been  included in the Section proposal (see below). If you are interested in proposing a panel, please feel free to contact the Section Chairs Maria Paola Ferretti (ferrettimariapaola@gmail.com) and Adina Preda (Adina.Preda@ul.ie). If you wish to propose a paper that fits one of the existing panels, please contact the panel convenor in the first instance (details below). To propose a panel or a free-standing paper, please apply through the ECPR website:

https://ecpr.eu/Events/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=96

The deadline for panel applications is 15 February 2017.

Here is a brief description of the section:

Political Theory: Forms of Injustice

The injustices that we observe in different areas of our social and political life and the willingness to rectify them are the motivation for the work of many political theorists.

However, more recently, injustice has been for many a privileged theoretical perspective in order to shed light on particular features of the interactions between individuals, social groups and/or states. To give but some examples, contemporary critical theory has adopted the language of justice and injustice in undertaking social critique, and increasingly analytical approaches have focused on understanding manifest injustices and the failure to give others their due. Postcolonial theorists draw attention to the ethical and political issues emerging from the history of past injustices between colonizing and colonized people. International political theory is addressing the unequal distribution of wealth across countries and the uneven effects of anthropogenic climate change in terms of global injustice. Meanwhile, some gender scholars see ‘injustice’ rather than ‘woman’ as the organizing concept of ‘humanist feminism’, pointing to the need to address unfairness and oppression for all human beings.

This section, supported by the ECPR Standing Group on Political Theory, invites proposals  from all subfields of political theory, including work on normative, conceptual, applied, methodological and historical topics, construed broadly and from all traditions, including analytical, formal, feminist, critical and post-structural approaches. Relevant themes include, but are not limited to: unfairness, oppression, domination, maldistribution, misrecognition, dehumanization, marginalization, exploitation and alienation.

We aim to facilitate engagement across sub-disciplinary boundaries and to support cutting edge research within particular traditions or on particular problems. To promote engagement across different traditions, we welcome panel proposals that address problems, themes and concepts from multiple perspectives. To promote specialised work on particular topics, we welcome panel proposals that either address the complexities and diversity of particular traditions in political theory, or focus on particular problems or issues from within the confines of one particular tradition, such as the analytical tradition.

So far, members of the ECPR Political Theory Specialist Group have proposed to convene panels on the following topics:

Convenor: Emanuela Ceva (University of Pavia): ceva@unipv.it
Topic: The injustice of political corruption.

Convenor: Maria Paola Ferretti (Goethe University Frankfurt): ferrettimariapaola@gmail.com
Topic: Risk and injustice

Convenor: Felix Gerlsbeck (TU Munchen): felix.gerlsbeck@tum.de
Topic: Addressing injustice in democratic politics: Institutional and non-ideal perspectives

Convenor: Nikolas Kirby (University of Oxford): nikolas.kirby@bsg.ox.ac.uk
Topic: Historical injustice, rebuilding trust and moral repair

Convenor: Antoinette Scherz (Goethe University Frankfurt): scherz@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Topic: Structural Domination and Exploitation

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload the CAPTCHA.