The Carbon Footprint of Travelling to International Academic Conferences and Options to Minimise It

This chapter focuses on the carbon footprint of travelling to academic conferences. The cases I present are the last seven General Conferences of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), which are the biggest European conferences in political science, with up to 2000 participants. My estimations show that the travel-induced carbon footprint of a single conference can amount to more than 2000 tons of greenhouse gases—as much as approximately 270 UK citizens emit in a whole year. The average participant produces between 500 and 1500 kg of CO2-eq per conference round-trip. However, by applying three measures (more centrally located conference venues, the promotion of more land-bound travel and the introduction of online participation for attendees from distant locations), the carbon footprint could be reduced by 78–97 per cent. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a general shift towards online conferences—the ECPR switched to a virtual event as well. Estimating the carbon footprint of this online-only conference in a more detailed manner shows that the travel-induced carbon emissions—if the event had taken place in physical attendance as originally intended—would have been between 250 and 530 times higher than those from the online conference.

What Should We Do as Intellectual Activists? A Comment on the Ethico-political in Knowledge Production

This research comment makes an argument on the need to develop epistemic communities of belonging. These are spaces facilitating conversations about and enabling transformative ethico-political research. A research practice that can invoke attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity, and awareness to the field we study. Rather than answering what we should do as intellectual activists to maintain ethically integrity, the author here investigates the spaces we may develop as intellectual activists. Based on her work in the transformative collective initiative, the Asylum Commission and the reading of the Caring for Big Data book, the author proposes two concepts that are valuable for the creation of such spaces: epistemic injustice and hope.

Intersectional Representation Between Gender, Religion, and Nationality

Immigrants who came to Europe in recent decades (work immigrants and/or refugees) grapple with intersectional identities, such as religion, nationality and gender, yet current political research addresses these issues only in part. To address these omissions, I conducted a content analysis of all parliamentary questions Muslim representatives raised in their parliamentary activities in three Western countries. I also investigated whether the representatives' invisibility pertains only to their descriptive representation or whether it affects their substantive representation by analyzing five research hypotheses for differences in the content of the parliamentary questions. I found that male and female Muslim representatives ask parliamentary questions about Muslim men and women. In addition, I developed an Intersectional Representation Index to measure and demonstrate the complexities Muslim representatives face in Western countries. The index shows that such representatives have several identities, some of which have become invisible, as previous studies indicated.

II December Socio-Political Readings — “How Are You, Russia? The Russian Social State and Civil Society in 2020: The Implementation of National Projects in a Post-Pandemic Reality” (Moscow, December 10, 2020)

The paper presents the results of the II December Socio-Political Readings — “‘How Are You, Russia?’ The Russian Social State and Civil Society in 2020: The Implementation of National Projects in a Post-Pandemic Reality”. The National Research-to-Practice Conference with international participation was held by the Institute of Socio-Political Research and the Institute of Demographic Studies of the Federal Research Sociological Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Faculty of Political Science of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Sociology Department of the Russian State University for the Humanities. The event was held in December 2020 in face-to-face/remote formats at the Institute of Socio-Political Research — Branch of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Readings were attended by the leading academics and young researchers of Moscow and regional research institutes and universities, as well as foreign scientists. The papers provided the analysis of current social, socio-political, social and cultural, demographic problems within the focus of academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, and civil society. The scientific discussion provided an opportunity to address and approve the best socio-political, and demographic models and development patterns, considering the revealed COVID pandemic factors.

From the lab to the poll: The use of survey experiments in political research

The article offers an overview of the use of survey experiments in political research by relying on available examples, bibliographic data and a content analysis of experimental manuscripts published in leading academic journals over the last two decades. After a short primer to the experimental approach, we discuss the development, applications and potential problems to internal and external validity in survey experimentation. The article also provides original examples, contrasting a traditional factorial and a more innovative conjoint design, to show how survey experiments can be used to test theory on relevant political topics. The main challenges and possibilities encountered in envisaging, planning and implementing survey experiments are examined. The article outlines the merits, limits and implications of the use of the experimental method in political research.

The state of concept: A new analytical tool for political research

This paper proposes a typology of four possible states of concepts: unquestioned, contested, essentially contested, and destabilized. The typology serves as a frame of reference and as an analytical tool for IR researchers who wish to study concepts and conceptualizing processes as a way of understanding politics. It argues that, within a context, every concept is in one out of four possible states. The typology rests on the relationship between experiences, perceptions, and concepts, aiming to rectify the lacuna of minimal attention to the experiences of many IR works which mainly focus on the inter-subjective sphere and actor-structure tensions. Thus, using the example of sovereignty in Jerusalem during the Israeli-Palestinians negotiations (1993–2001), a new state of concept, the destabilized state, is introduced.

The Politics of the Anthropocene: Temporality, Ecology, and Indigeneity

The notion of the Anthropocene has become an instrumental backdrop against which post-foundational social theory and political research frame political action in a way that defies modern certainty and, somewhat paradoxically, anthropocentrism, under conditions of drastic ecological changes. But what exactly is the theoretical promise of the Anthropocene? This paper seeks to explore what the concept can offer to critical social science and, conversely, how these critical approaches define and locate the analytical and the political purchase of the Anthropocene, through the critical lens of Indigenous scholarship. The paper genealogically retraces the transition from a science-led, discontinuous-descriptive to a continuous-ontological conceptualization of the Anthropocene. It then unpacks how the notions of ecological relationality and non-human agency deployed in the latter closely parallel certain lines of argumentation in Indigenous thought and politics. Drawing on critical Indigenous studies, the paper formulates a critique of how relational perspectives enfold alternative ontologies and politics within an overarching Anthropocene ontology that is not only problematically universalizing, but also replaces the genuine engagement with differences and resistance.