Name: Maxwell Burkey
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: MBurkey@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Professional Status: Assistant Professor
Institution: Stockton University
Scheduling Preference: Friday Afternoon
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Paper Title: Civility and Resistance in American Political Discourse
Abstract:
Contemporary American political discourse is structured to a significant degree around the notions of civility and resistance. With the rise of exclusionary, right-wing nationalist movements across the western world, and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, scholars and activists have a renewed interest in combatting racially tinged popular movements and the uptick in white nationalism in America. The terms civility and resistance have gained their current currency largely as the two dominant frameworks for containing white nationalism and other iterations of right-wing populism. The first, civility, points to a tradition of what has been called “civic religion” or patriotism that combines the best of American institutional liberalism (the rule of law, civic equality, etc.) with an inclusive and progressive sense of American identity (America as a land of immigrants, etc.). The second, resistance, is more amorphous, but it places emphasis on an extra institutional response to populism and locates itself in a tradition of disruptive social movements. In this paper, I examine the imbrication of these two strands of political discourse and suggest that contemporary resistance discourse participates, to a significant extent, in the civility framework, limiting its critical potential and eschewing its more radical historical antecedents.

Name: Abby Dobson
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: Adobson@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: The Graduate Center - CUNY
Scheduling Preference: Friday Afternoon
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Paper Title:  The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class in Homelessness Discourse: What’s Black Feminist Political Thought Got To Do With It?
Abstract:
This paper will explore and interrogate the Intersection of race, class, gender and homelessness policy and discourse. It will examine the invisibility of Black Women in the definition of the crisis of homelessness and development of political interventions for this intersectional crisis of public policy and the social-political implications of this invisibility. The examination will draw on Intersectionality Theory and Black Feminist Political Thought. The examination will call for a politics of dignity in intervention and policy prescriptions.

Name: Taylor Doherty
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: taylordohert@umass.edu
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
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Paper Title:  Queer Theory and Discourses on Normality in Trumpian Times: Towards a Queer Epistemic Disobedience
Abstract:
“This is not normal.” Actually, it is. My contention is that this is indeed normal. Anti-blackness, white supremacy, and patriarchy are inextricably embedded into our society. Trump is simply an emboldened iteration of the foundations of capitalist modernity. Discourses of normalcy offer a rather thin conceptualization of the realities of our Trumpian times and fail to acknowledge the structural issues at hand. To argue that this is not normal is to commit an act of epistemic violence and erasure and practice a specifically American form of hubris and exceptionalism. This paper draws on queer theory, decolonial theory, and Marxist feminist frameworks to explore the normalcy of the racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, misogynistic, patriarchal, and homophobic underpinnings of the Trump administration. The paper transcends theoretical abstracts to explore how concepts of queerness can help us envision and create a space of resistance. A multifaceted approach, an explicitly queer and decolonial approach, to dismantling structures of power is necessary – we must decolonize, deheterosexualize, and subsequently destruct the status quo. In short, we need a queer epistemic disobedience and a resistance to regimes of the normal (Warner 1993).

Name: Claudia Favarato
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: cfavarato@iscsp.ulisboa.pt
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: University of Lisbon
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
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Paper Title:  The origin of the state, the origin of the tribe. Navigating endogenous ideas on the political system
Abstract:
Keeping in mind the interplay between political science and studies on Africa, I aim to address the approaches herein adopted to analyse the concept of the political, taking into account configurations beyond the mere state. To do so, I firstly recall the canons of political science, underpinned in eminently western epistemology, and then look at the contribution of African and Africanist scholars on the same topic. The explanatory epistemological approach guides my critique, grounded in analytical analysis of the available literature, corroborated by fieldwork data gathered through non-participant observation and interviews with local informants. According to the canons of political science as a discipline, as well as for the international order, the state is assumed as the normative model. It shapes daily politics, and how studies and analysis are structured. Beyond the surge to universality in theoretical and practical terms, in the African continent the state is not the outcome of native political structures’ development, but it is a foreign importation or the inheritance of colonial occupation. Scholarship of the latest 20th century pinpointed the character of alienness of the state and the inappropriateness of the related models of analysis. The problem thus lays not on the veracity of the canons’ underlying assumptions, but on their comprehensiveness. African and Africanist scholars counter-responded the canons with the elaboration of normative models of forms of organization for the sovereign power, articulated within the theoretical frame of communitarianism, African socialism and moral-oriented Ubuntu. Although, critics extensively pointed that such theorizations rely on anachronistic and nostalgic ideas of traditional societies that long ago existed, thus intertwining logical analysis with imagined notions of a cherished past. Moreover, the African socialism experiments of the national leaders going “back to the roots” too often served the aims of one-party, authoritarian regimes in their run for power. During fieldwork, I researched on the state and indigenous polities in Guinea-Bissau. The former is a formal and institutionalized configuration of power, largely modelled upon the western majoritarian democracy model (although it is a weak entity and overall dysfunctional in its implementation). Contrary-wise, the local-traditional power is an unrecognized system laying in the twilight of informality yet strongly legitimated by the people. it deeply differs from the state, since foundations of endogenous power provide for a relational model that discards the assumptions of western individualism. They conceive the relationship between individual and community/state onto peculiar - pluralistic and semi-physical - patterns instead. To unriddle these foundations is an essential step to understand configuration of power in Guinea-Bissau, as in other African realities. In light of the exposed, I intend to discuss the production of political science knowledge and research on the Africa continent. Departing from the case of the state and indigenous power in Guinea-Bissau, I will unfold my argument avoiding, on the one hand, culturally dependent western-centric premises and, on the other hand, an analysis grounded on cherished societies devoid of underpinnings in my considerations.

Name: Michael Gamkrelidze
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: gam1938@gmail.com
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Institution: Independent researcher
Scheduling Preference: Saturday Afternoon
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Paper Title: On the Science of Social Boundaries or on Social Ammoriology 
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This paper is a continuation of “Democracy as a State of Social Boundaries”, presented at last year's NYSPSA 73-rd Annual Conference. The idea then was to consider social systems of various sizes and types, from a family of two members to the world community, as dynamic steady state systems, seeing the advantage of this approach in the possibility of describing social systems in non-anthropomorphic terms, free of value judgment and common to physical and biological systems. We proceeded from the fact that the state (condition, order) of the system is a mathematical concept, as well as the boundary, also common to physical and biological systems. We hope that it will gradually relieve us of the need to operate with such controversial and ambiguous terms as capitalism, socialism, democracy, exploitation, and many others. In this article an attempt has been made to outline the taxonomy of social boundaries, their nature, their interdependence, their significance, their variability, their impact on the stability of social systems, on their development, survival in competition, etc. Keywords are: sovereignty, discrete and continuous states of the social system, social boundary.

Name: Flavia Lucenti
Section: International Relations and American Foreign Policy
Professional Email: flavia.lucenti@uniroma3.it
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: Roma Tre University
Scheduling Preference: Friday Morning
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Paper Title: Explaining Dissatisfaction. China’s participation in the international society during the 2000s
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The topic of this paper concerns the narrative elaborated by the Chinese Communist Party, regarding the China’s participation in the international society. It discusses the period between the beginning of the 2000s and the present day, which is crucial for observing how China sought to partake in global governance but the West hindered its efforts in fear of losing a leading role in world affairs. This encouraged the disappointment of China which, conversely, selectively undermined current international institutions and practices, stimulating a diverging interpretation of these that put at stake the stability of global order.The theoretical framework intertwines Constructivism with the English School’s approach. From the Constructivism, it focuses on states’ self-representation; when it exploits the English School’s design, this allows for unpacking the definition of great power and giving to it the meaning of full-fledged member of international society. Narrative indeed, represents the way through which I analize leaders’ frustrations regarding the failed expectations on China’s participation, which led them to contest the Western universal assumption of what constitutes an international "good" governance. Hence, when a sense of no-belonging with the rest of the international society has developed out, China chose to no longer sympathise with the promotion of liberal values, denouncing their use as a pretext for the West of expanding its influence in domestic business of states of strategic relevance. This idea corroborated Chinese leaders’ narrative with post-Western stances,  which are nowadays preventing international cooperation.

Name: david ricci
Section: History and Politics
Professional Email: msricci@mscc.huji.ac.il
Professional Status: Full Professor
Institution: hebrewuniversity
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
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Paper Title: Political Science for the Age of Trump 
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NYSPSA Abstract “Political Science for the Age of Populism” by David Ricci Donald Trump epitomizes recent changes in the way Americans communicate and work together. That being so, some political scientists should investigate and teach about the ecology of capitalism -- that is, creative destruction -- which (1) produced this president and which (2) is straining democratic principles and practices, individuals and communities. Economists promote economic (a) creativity, presuming that it leads to growth which generates social welfare. However, no academic discipline focuses on economic (b) destruction. Yet such destruction imposes great costs on individuals and society, from government by social media to downsizing and outsourcing, from environmental deterioration to climate change, from personal anxiety to international trade wars. Consequently, some political scientists (but not all) should adopt a special mission of highlighting instances of damage as they arise and publicizing what we learn so as to help government officials and citizens mitigate the damage caused by creative destruction in our times. Unmitigated, those damages cause (i) resentment, which fuels (ii) populism, and therefore endangers (iii) democracy. Using terms fashioned by Judith Shklar (opposing tyranny) and Ian Shapiro (favoring problem-oriented research), such a project should especially target neoliberalism, which since the Reagan presidency has promoted and fostered indiscriminate economic growth and its consequences. Additional arguments along these lines will appear in David Ricci, A Political Manifesto for the Age of Populism: Challenging Growth, Markets, Inequality, and Resentment (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Name: Andrea Antonino Silipigni
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: silipigni.a@gmail.com
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: University of Lisbon
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
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Paper Title:  The EU’s Neoliberal Political and Legal Framework and the Enforcement of Monetary and Financial Measures: Critical Perspective over a Long Story of (Un)Successes Before the 2009 Eurozone Crisis
Abstract:
For the most part, critical political and legal accounts agree that supranational organisations have mostly relied on neoliberal international treaties, regulations, and directives to enforce first, and to bind later nation states to specific criteria. More specifically, they argue that the European Union – via the Maastricht Treaty, as well as the Stability and Growth Pact – has been able to ensure compliance of its member states with both the debt-to-GDP ratio (not exceeding the 60%), as well as the deficit-to-GDP one (not exceeding the 3%). This paper proposes a rather different understanding of the European Union’s neoliberal political and legal framework and its monetary and financial outcomes. More specifically, it hypothesises that the Maastricht Treaty, and the Stability and Growth Pact have failed in binding most of EU member states until the major reform process that took place between 2011-2013. To this purpose, this paper analyses the weaknesses of the complex neoliberal political and legal framework before the just mentioned reform. In addition to this, it analyses its macroeconomic monetary and financial outcomes within the same period of time. In order to address the above-mentioned hypotheses, this study draws upon several political, legal, and economic sources, among many others: the Maastricht Treaty, the Stability and Growth Pact, and the Eurostat’s reports. The analysis shows that for almost twenty years the EU has failed in binding most of its member states in meeting monetary and financial criteria stemming from the Maastricht Treaty, as well as the Stability and Growth Pact. For this reason, it suggests that the EU has decided to resort to national neoliberal political and legal structures to address its weak enforcement, as well as binding mechanisms in the aftermath of the 2009 Eurozone crisis.

Name: Michael Villanova
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: mvillanova@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: The Graduate Center, CUNY
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Paper Title:  The Lumpen: Understanding the Concept in Marx’s Works and its Relevance for Contemporary Political Struggle
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The role of class struggle in historical materialism and Marx’s works is central in explaining political, economic, and historical phenomena. While the two main classes, the proletariat and bourgeoisie drive the progress of capitalist society, Marx also includes references to other classes such as the lumpen that are historically relevant in class struggle. For the early Marx, his conception of the lumpen has often been noted as lacking a serious material analysis of the class’s position in capitalist history as he often resorts to pejoratives, such as “social scum” in The Communist Manifesto, to determine their political viability. The prevailing literature concludes that Marx’s writings on the lumpen are either reflections of moral ideologies about the underclass during the time he was writing, useless for contemporary class struggle, or lacking serious class analysis all together. This presentation will put forward that Marx’s understanding of the lumpen continually changes throughout his works and is integral, not just peripheral, to class struggle and that Marx can offer a material explanation for the lumpen’s role and function in a capitalist society. By tracking how Marx changes his understanding of the lumpen throughout his works, I argue that Marx’s “mature” economic works break from his earlier indictments of the lumpen as counterrevolutionary when he concludes in Capital that the lumpen are an exploited class due to their relation to productive labor as constructed by industrial capitalism. This approach to understanding the lumpen in Marx’s works leads me to argue that the lumpen can be a possible revolutionary force in class struggle. Connecting Marx’s works to contemporary times, I will show that traditional lumpen ways of production and life are becoming more ubiquitous, due to recent political and economic trends, and therefore more important to incorporate into political movements. I will contend that current political discourse has worked to discount the political actions of the lumpen in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, while at the same time the lumpen class has considerably grown in such countries. I conclude that the political left must incorporate an understanding of the lumpen and how the lumpen function in capitalism into its struggles if it is serious to create a radical class based politics in the near future.

Name: Robert Patrick Whelan
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: rwhelan1@binghamton.edu
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: SUNY Binghamton
Scheduling Preference: Friday Afternoon
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Paper Title: Policy Design and Incommensurability: A Contractualist Response to ‘Sacred Values’.
Abstract:
Political commentators such as Cass Sunstein argue that policies are optimal when constrained by the regulatory principle first enshrined in Reagan’s Executive Order 12291. Appealing to a form of welfare consequentialism, this principle claims that economically significant regulations are justified only if they secure an expected net-benefit. However, the justificatory role afforded to cost-benefit analysis can be criticized for its failure to adequately address the claims of society’s most vulnerable members. Ex ante contractualism offers an appealing alternative as it affords the aggregation of costs and benefits no role in justifying governmental policies. On this view, principles of action and the policies they licence can be justified only if no individual could reasonably reject them in favour of any alternative. Often, justifying social and economic practices requires redistributing expected costs and benefits so that no individual can reject the associated principle as overly burdensome. However, in detailing how the redistribution of benefits can mitigate individual objections, contractualism appears implicitly ‘monist’ in its understanding of value; all accounts suggest that individual complaints and the benefits provided to offset them are reducible to, and measurable in terms of, a singular value, typically individual welfare. Critics argue that presupposing incommensurability precludes the rational comparison and substitution of values required to mitigate ex ante objections. Drawing on contemporary research in social and moral psychology I argue that rational comparisons and substitutions between incommensurable values is possible. However, this empirical literature raises distinct challenges which suggest further modifications to the contractualist account. Importantly, the psychological commitment to ‘sacred values’ suggests that certain trade-offs are morally forbidden. As such, the contours of permissible substitutions must be delineated with respect to the ‘taboo’ and ‘tragic’ trade-offs generated by ‘sacred values’. The import of this analysis is that regulatory bodies must contend with the possibility that even non-aggregative trade-offs necessarily involve moral wrongdoing.