2020 PPSA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

OF SCREAMS AND SILENCES: THE POLITICS OF SPACES AND VOICES

23-24 April 2020, Iloilo City, Philippines

BACKGROUND

Where politics was once exercised through civilized discourse, dialogue and purposive action, social media and the strong winds of populism have atomized claims to power and reconstituted the spaces in which such claims are made. Asymmetric power reigns amid persistent inequities in societal structures and relations. Politics converges in spaces where those in the margins can enter the mainstream at the level of discourse, but never quite challenge the privileged nor effectively contest those who wield it. Freedoms and guaranteed rights to minorities as cornerstones of political liberalism are under threat 

within these narrowed and increasingly polarized political spaces.

The 2020 Philippine Political Science Association conference invites papers that interrogate the asymmetry of power at the micro/meso/macro and global scales; describe challenges to dominant and privileged positions and discourses, and explain assertions and voicelessness of those in the margins. Papers examining the disposition of state power, civil society agency, collaborative innovations, and interest configurations in the new multipolar global order are invited.

SUB-THEMES

• Political inclusion/exclusion
• Social inequality and discrimination
• Gender as identity and basis for action
• Religion, ideology and violent extremism 
• Multiculturalism
• Indigenous people’s rights and political assertions
• Armed and (unarmed) electoral contestation
• Civil and un-civil society in the social media age
• Representation and participation by the poor and marginalised sectors
• Political activism
• Populism and its discontents
• Grassroots and community-based formations and dynamics
• Parties, partisanship and political dynasties in local politics
• Press freedom and freedom of expression
• Elite dominance
• Federalism, territorial self-governance and decentralisation
• Civil service in the peripheries
• Key service delivery (health, water and sanitation, environmental protection, education, etc) and state agency
• Public policy on a local lens
• Transparency and accountability
• The muscular state: changing roles of the police, military and state security apparatus
• Governance rebooted