Dates: 11 to 16 April 08
Proposal Deadline: 1 December 08
Location: Rennes, France
Website: http://www.rennes2008.visionmd.co.uk/index.html

ABSTRACT :
Given the relative youth of political science as a discipline, and its tendency to draw on many tangential fields of research, there is a pressing need to encourage more methodological reflection and discussion among political scientists. This workshop aims to fill that need. To encourage this sort of discussion, we invite papers that address one of three related sources of cleavages in contemporary political science.
These three cleavages can be illustrated with a series of related
questions:

- Is the study of political science better served by methodological pluralism or Consilience (Wilson 1998)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these two positions, and how strongly are they reflected in the discipline?

- What are the methodological consequences of the increased use of methods’ triangulation (broadly defined, the use of more than one method to support an argument)? What can explain this increase? What types of triangulation strategies are developing, and what are their respective strengths and limitations?

- What are the methodological consequences of our reliance on imported methods from tangential disciplines? Given the inter-disciplinary nature of much political science research, we tend to rely heavily on the import of both methods and methodologies from tangential fields of study. How has this import affected the nature of methodological discussions in political science (if at all)?

Full infos -- including a more detailed description of the topic, the types of papers we would welcome etc. -- can be found at :
http://www.rennes2008.visionmd.co.uk/Workshop_details.asp?workshopID=10

[you can also find those pages thru the "Rennes" link on the main ECPR page : http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/ ]

NB : DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS : 1 DECEMBER 07. Please send proposals to both of us [main contact for further enquiries : Jonathon Moses]