Policy & Politics Conference 2015
The annual conference of the Policy & Politics Journal will be held in Bristol between 15-16 September 2015.
Conference theme
The 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015 provides an opportunity to reflect on both the failures and successes of democratic policy and politics in the UK and abroad. The relationship between democracy, inequality and power has been brought to the fore by recent global events, including:
- austerity politics and the disproportionate impacts on society’s most vulnerable,
- increased awareness of disparities in relation to electoral and political participation amongst a range of social groups (leading to concerns about 'a divided democracy'),
- the reshaping of the relationship between government, business and civil society,
- rising 'urbanisation' and associated concerns about the governance of place, space and territory,
- developments in information and communication technology and its impact on citizens' engagement with politics and public services,
- civic unrest linked to demands for democracy, equality and transparent government,
- human rights initiatives around gender, age, race, disability and sexuality, and
- a reconfiguration of the role of the mass media and social media in policy and politics.
Within this global context, the concepts of democracy, inequality and power and their relationship to policy and politics remain pertinent. The 2015 Policy & Politics conference will therefore be based around the theme of 'Democracy, Inequality and Power' and welcomes practitioners and scholars from any field and discipline from around the world to engage with this topic.
The conference has 18 panels, all of them are open to additional paper contributions:
- Education as public policy
- The political context of single parent families
- Doing democracy
- The democratic representation of animals
- Neoliberalism, power &resistance in post-crisis societies
- Reconfiguring democracy, inequality & power
- Addressing inequality human rights policy & practice
- Democracy & social policy in Latin America
- Democratising science & technology policy in austerity
- Redrawing the boundaries of the third sector in troubled times
- Democracy, inequality & power in discourses of radical right
- Tackling disabling practices
- Unequal democratic participation
- Depoliticization, Repoliticization & accountability
- From 50 shades to monochromatic sexual citizenship
- What do we mean by citizen engagement in politics & policy
- The policy & the politics of emergency
- Theorising public authority in the 21st century
Panel descriptions are available at the conference website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/policypolitcs/policyandpolitics2015/callforabstracts/.
Individual papers and posters
Papers and posters are invited in any area of public or social policy. In writing their proposals, authors are requested to reflect on the conference theme and/or on one of the panel themes above. Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words and authors, affiliations and contact details clearly stated.
Deadline for paper and poster proposals is 1 May 2015.
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CPS Research Fellow Pinar Donmez co-authored a paper for Panel 14: Contested and Contingent: Depoliticization, Repoliticization and Accountability with Eva Zemandi titled Capitalist state, crisis and repoliticising economic management: Cases of Hungary and Turkey.
Panel 14 description (Download)