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Program Chairs: Simone Chambers, University of Toronto and Bruce Jentleson, Duke University

APSA is on the move. For the first time in its 104 years, the Annual Meeting will take place outside the United States. In its own small way this traveling across a border is symbolic of the multiplicity of ways in which politics is, and our discipline needs to be, in motion.

The 2009 APSA Annual Meeting Program Chairs Bruce Jentleson, Duke University, and Simone Chambers, University of Toronto, ask political scientists to think about the pursuit of knowledge in a context of change and complexity as both a scholarly endeavor and for bringing that knowledge to bear on the crucial challenges that shape our contemporary era.

The theme of change draws our attention to what is new, different, and unusual in politics today. How to keep up with events and phenomena while staying reflective and grounded? How to distinguish the proximate from the persistent, the time-bound from the timeless? Are we seeing genuinely new regime types? What are the emerging social groups? How to study new constitutions when they are often only in place for a few years sometimes months? Is the polarization in U.S. politics as new as often contended? How will rapid aging and other changing demographics aff ect political systems? Can deliberative democracy become a model of democratization? What are the elements of change and continuity in the international security agenda? Are we entering a new post-secular age? These are just some of the ways to recast familiar questions and issues in political science in terms of the problematic of change.

Complexity too is an ever present theme in political science. Here we wish to highlight not only the methodological and theoretical challenges posed by complexity but also the multiplicity and variation of the phenomena we study. The sheer volume, variability, and interdependence of factors in a global context that is ever more accessible has huge implications across sub-fields of the discipline. We especially encourage theme panels that ask in what ways is the world more complex and in what ways do we just see it as such. Examples of other possible topics: Can we speak of multiple modernities? Can we do political theory on a global scale by studying and engaging other traditions? Where are the boundaries, and what are the dynamics, between the international and domestic in various policy areas? Has the nature of power become more complex, and if so, how, why and with what implications? How do new technologies transform both what we study in politics and how we study it? And whatever the substantive question, what are the trade offs between dense qualitative studies that get at the details and general overview studies that get at the complexity? How large can ‘n’ get? How do we know where to stop the causal chain and avoid reductio ad infinitum?

The themes of change and complexity point to the constant motion involved in the pursuit of knowledge. As if this were not ambitious enough intellectually, we are challenged by the era in which we live to bring our knowledge to bear beyond the academy. How do we encourage greater policy relevance in ways consistent with our scholarly roles? What can departments, universities and the APSA each do in this regard? More particularly, what do we as scholars have to contribute on such broad concerns as social justice, nonviolent political change, and international peace, as well as a host of more specifi c issues at the local, national and international levels? We strongly encourage proposals that bring together scholars and practitioners.

The themes of change, complexity and practical impact are capacious and challenging. We hope they engender a wide range of panels. We encourage division heads to think through the ways that these themes speak to their subfield and invite them to collaborate with us in designing theme panels and round table discussions that take up the issues highlighted by this theme.

• Read the APSA Division and Related Group Calls