2014 Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference

Hosted at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, from 27 May – 29 May 2014. For more information on the conference, click here.

Call for Participants – Roundtable, by Amélie Forget

The evolution of the international security environment and of public policies led to a convergence of the realms of security, defense and development. This shift has blurred the distinctions between professional and social categories, making our understanding of the distribution of power, roles and responsibilities of international security actors more complex than ever.

This roundtable addresses the impacts of these changes on three sets of actors – the military, humanitarians and development agents. Sharing insights from their fieldwork observations, participants will discuss the different contexts that connect these security actors together, the practices they implement in their day-to-day interactions and the social meaning they give to this undefined security environment.

Acknowledging the practical turn, the interdisciplinarity and the intersectoriality of security studies, this roundtable also explores the added value of more sociologically oriented fieldwork.  Experience has shown that in depth qualitative research with security actors enriches our understanding and provides necessary data to overcome the boundaries of theoretical frameworks, conceptual categories and disciplines. The roundtable will question whether the contributions of such researches are mainly empirical or if they also help to fill the theory/reality gap of IR theory and security studies.

This initiative brings together participants from various subfields of the discipline, and will be held in both English and French. If you would like to join the roundtable, please contact Amélie Forget –  amelie.forget.2@umontreal.ca  – before Friday November 1^st.