Call for Papers:
Undergraduate Conference on Voting Rights and Democratic Participation
Allegheny College (Meadville, PA) will host a two-day undergraduate conference on April 10-11, 2015 on voting rights and democratic participation. This event will bring five nationally recognized scholars and activists together with students to explore themes of social justice, democratic engagement, and liberal learning.
Fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this conference and the five keynote speakers will consider these landmark Acts specifically, and democratic participation generally, engaging contemporary domestic and international events, and political, economic, and social conditions, as well as recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal courts, and state courts. Our five keynote addresses will anchor the undergraduate conference of papers, posters, and panel sessions in which these keynote speakers will also be intimately engaged.
Themes:
We invite papers, posters, or panels that examine voting rights and democratic participation from multiple disciplinary, inter- and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Work that explores these themes from philosophical, political, religious, historical, economic, or cultural perspectives is welcomed, but so are mathematical perspectives; for example, the drawing of compact districts or the design of voting schemes. Environmental justice, criminal justice, or public administration manuscripts are appropriate as well as neuro-scientific approaches to ideology, or the role of genetics in individual political preferences. Conceiving of these themes broadly, we are open to a wide range of papers on voting rights and democratic participation in domestic or international arenas.
Papers must be written by undergraduate students, who will be present to share their work at the conference. Complete papers (20-minute presentations) are required for consideration.
Poster presentations should be standard, conference-format complete projects (or project designs if results are not available). We are particularly interested in student proposals for posters that are in the early stages of development. While completed projects are welcomed, we encourage students to submit proposals that are research designs rather than finished products. Our hope is to have good conversations about research design, research questions, theoretical frames, and so on as a way of moving student projects forward.
Panels can include a combination of undergraduate and/or graduate student participants as well as faculty. Panel proposals should include a title, a one-page description of the topic, and a list of participants.
SUBMITTING PAPERS, POSTERS, AND PANELS: All submissions should include the contact person’s name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address. Papers, posters, and panels should be submitted here by February 10th, 2015.
REGISTRATION: All presenters and attendees must register for the conference. There is no fee for Allegheny College participants. A $25.00 fee will be accepted upon arrival at Allegheny College via check or cash for all Non-Allegheny College participants.
MEALS AND ACCOMMODATIONS: Lunch and dinner both days will be provided to all registered presenters and attendees. Everyone in attendance is welcome to join participants and keynote speakers at receptions and coffee breaks between and following plenary and conference sessions.
Accommodations are available at the following hotels/bed and breakfasts:
Holiday Inn Express
18240 Conneaut Lake Rd.
Meadville, PA 16335
(814) 724-6012
Hampton Inn
11446 Dawn Dr.
Meadville, PA 16335
(814) 807-1446
Bethaven Inn Bed & Breakfast
386 Hamilton Ave.
Meadville, PA 16335
(814) 336-4223
Mayor Lord’s House Bed & Breakfast
654 Park Ave.
Meadville, PA 16335
(814) 720-8907
FOR MORE INFORMATION AND DETAILS visit:
or contact the Conference Coordinator: Brian M. Harward, Allegheny College (bharward@allegheny.edu), Director, Center for Political Participation (CPP); and Associate Professor of Political Science
or Shannon McConnell, CPP Program Coordinator, at (814) 332-6202 or smcconnell@allegheny.edu.
Funded by the Bywater Fund for Social Justice Programming, the Demmler Fund, the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Economics, and the Center for Political Participation.
Keynote Speakers:
John Aldrich
Duke University
A member of the Allegheny College Class of 1969, Aldrich is the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University. At Duke he has been department chair and was the founding director and then co-director (with professor Wendy Wood) of Duke’s Social Science Research Institute. At Duke, he also received the inaugural Graduate Mentoring Award. Aldrich’s research has been centered mostly in American politics, but more recently his work has become more comparative. His first book, Before the Convention, assessed presidential nomination campaigns in the post-McGovern-Fraser era of primary-centered campaigning. His book Why Parties? won the Gladys Kammerer award in 1996. Since 1980, he has co-authored the Change and Continuity series on American elections, with Paul Abramson and David Rohde, and now being joined by Brad Gomez.
Anne Boxberger-Flaherty
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Dr. Boxberger-Flaherty is assistant professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Flaherty has done research in many areas of Native American Studies but focuses on the modern dynamics of land claims and the varied effects of gaming. Her article “American Indian Land Rights, Rich Indian Racism, and Newspaper Coverage in New York State 1988-2008″ appeared in the December 2013 issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She has also recently published a chapter on indigenous peoples’ use of hip hop as a tool of social and cultural empowerment for an edited book.
Joy James
Williams College
Dr. James is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Humanities at Williams College. She is the author of Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics; Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals; and Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture. Her edited books include: Warfare in the American Homeland; The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings; Imprisoned Intellectuals; States of Confinement; The Black Feminist Reader (co-edited with TD Sharpley-Whiting); and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. James is completing a book on the prosecution of 20th-century interracial rape cases, tentatively titled “Memory, Shame & Rage.” James is a senior research fellow at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is co-curator of digital repositories for the Warfield Center and the Harriet Tubman Literary Circle, an educational nonprofit organization.
Gabriel Sanchez
University of New Mexico
Dr. Sanchez is associate professor of political science and executive director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico. He is also director of research for Latino Decisions, the leading survey firm focused on the Latino population, and the director of the American Economic Association Summer Training Program. His research explores the relationship between racial/ethnic identity and political engagement, Latino health policy, and minority legislative behavior. His work has been published in a wide range of academic journals and he is also a co-author of Hispanics and the U.S. Political System. Sanchez has been the principal or co-principal investigator on several large-scale surveys, including the Latino Decisions National Poll on Health Care Reform (2009) and the Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Study (2008).
Carol Geary Schneider
Association of American Colleges and Universities
Dr. Schneider is president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the leading national organization devoted to advancing and strengthening undergraduate liberal education. Under her leadership, AAC&U launched Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to engage students and the public with what really matters in a college education for the twenty-first century. Additionally, under her leadership, AAC&U has become widely recognized as both a voice and force for strengthening the quality of student learning in college for all students and especially those historically underserved in U.S. higher education. AAC&U is working with hundreds of colleges and universities and numerous state systems to expand the benefits of liberal education across the entire curriculum, through new integration between the core outlines of liberal education and student learning in their major fields.