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Please join us for the Department of Political Studies 2025 Honours Thesis Colloquium!

Friday, April 4, 2025

10:00am - 3:20pm

Staff Learning Room at Stauffer Library

Light lunch served

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AGENDA

Opening Remarks – Rachel Laforest, Undergraduate Chair | 10 AM

Panel 1 | 10:05-11:05 AM

• Sydney Robinson: Stakeholder Influence and Policy Outcomes of Climate Legislation: A Case Study of Bill C-12

• Santiago Palacios: NATO’s Burden Sharing Dilemma: What Can Canada Learn from a Latvian Defence Doctrine

• Hugo Savoeda:  New Chains, Same Hands: The reshaping of the world system and South – South relations of dependence

Panel 2 | 11:05-12:05 PM

• Lauren Hood:  Sex: An Object of Desire and Mankind’s Greatest Weapon

• Julian King:  The Chicken or the Egg?: Strategic Culture under Authoritarianism Examined Through the Lens of Vladimir Putin and the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

• Cordelia Jamieson:  Roadblocks for Civic Involvement: Gender-Based Geographic Barriers to State-Level Political Candidacy in the Contiguous United States

12:05-12:30 Lunch Break (light lunch will be served)

Panel 3 | 12:30-1:30 PM

• Rachel Starkman:  The evolution of political debates in the United States

• Cara Mackenzie: Democratic Backsliding in India

• Ariana Wilson-Mcdermid: The Influence of Indigenous Cultural Practices on Marine Biodiversity Conservation: A Comparison Between Canada and New Zealand

• Rachel McNeil: HIV/AIDS and Climate Crisis in Africa: Disparities in Governmental Response Between the Global North and the Global South

Panel 4 | 1:30-2:30 PM

• Roan Szucs: A Debate Between Democracy and Her Alternatives

• Janica Arevalo: Combatting Violence Against Women in Canadian Politics

• Cameron Christie: Balancing Act: Canada’s Arctic Strategy and Responding to Great Power Competition

• Gaoxiang Fan: The discourse on Canadian skills: the process of middle-class nation-building and the social and political consequences of rapid immigration policies

Panel 5 | 2:30-3:15 PM

• Yamna Asim:  The Treatment of Hijras Before and After British Colonialization

• Pauli Jacobs: Evolution, Disparities and Service Delivery in Youth Mental Health: A Comparative Case Study of Urban and Rural Ontario

• Lizzie Liteplo: Canada’s Involvement in Overseas Conflict: Navigating International Engagement

3:15-3:20 - Closing remarks – Rachel Laforest

The Department of Political Studies Department Student Council (DSC) presents:

The Kim Richard Nossal Undergraduate Teaching Award Second Annual Awards Ceremony and Reception

Tuesday, April 1, 2025 

2:30-4:00 PM

Robert Sutherland Hall | Room 202

Light refreshments served

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The Kim Richard Nossal Teaching Award

The Kim Richard Nossal Teaching Award is in recognition of  and his legacy of commitment to higher education and teaching in Political Studies at Queen’s University.

This student-led award recognizes and celebrates teaching excellence at the undergraduate level in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. In particular, it rewards undergraduate instructors in the department who are at the beginning of their teaching careers, who have made an exceptional contribution to the study and education of Political Studies through their teaching at this university. The award is presented to either one or two nominees annually each spring.

More about the award

 

The Department of Political Studies Corry Colloquium Speaker Series presents:

The Year of Elections: 2024 in Comparative Review (a panel discussion)

Friday, March 28, 2025 

12:00-1:30 PM

Robert Sutherland Hall | Room 448

Light lunch served

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The Year of Elections: 2024 in Comparative Review

More than 60 countries that are collectively home to about half of the world’s population held state-wide ‘national’ elections in 2024, making it the biggest year of elections in history—even without taking into account the year’s many other sub-state and supra-state (the European Union) elections. The results are noteworthy in their own right, with about 80% of incumbents in genuinely democratic states losing seats or vote share from the last election, and some of these elections were exceptionally consequential, with the effects of their results already reshaping world politics in fundamental ways.

The purpose of this panel is to assess the year of elections and its significance from a global and comparative perspective, provided by three highly-regarded experts:

• , Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal and Scientific Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montréal, who will speak on 2024 European elections, with a special emphasis on the United Kingdom and France;
• , Executive Director of The Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), who will speak on 2024 African elections, with a special emphasis on South Africa; and
• , Associate Professor of Politics and Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, who will speak on 2024 South Asian elections, with a special emphasis on India.

The panel will be moderated by Dr. Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Professor of Political Studies here at Queen’s University and one of our own experts on electoral politics. Each panelist will speak for up to 15 minutes, followed by in-depth discussion between the panelists and attendees. We hope that you can join us!

Panelists

Laurie Beaudonnet

Laurie Beaudonnet is Associate Professor of European Politics at the University of Montreal (Department of Political Science) and Director of the Jean Monnet Center Montreal. She held the Jean Monnet EuroScope Chair from 2015 to 2019 and was co-director of RESTEP, an academic network on politicization in the European Union (EU), from 2017 to 2021. Her research focuses on political attitudes, elections and political parties in the European Union, using quantitative and qualitative methods. She is currently working on the dynamics of politicisation of the European issue among citizens and in political parties. Her work on attitudes towards European integration, politicisation, radical left and right has been published in European Union Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European politics, and Party Politics.

Sithembile Mbete

Dr Sithembile Mbete is a political scientist with 15 years of experience working in academia, civil society, and government. She is the Executive Director of the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), a research institute focused on building democratic and effective state institutions in South Africa. Sithembile has a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Pretoria (UP) where she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences.

Sithembile’s research interests include global governance (with a focus on the United Nations), global populism, and electoral systems. From 2020 to 2023, she was a research associate of the African Leadership Centre (ALC) at King’s College London. In 2021, she served as a member of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on the Electoral System.

Prior to UP, she was a researcher in the secretariat of the National Planning Com����ֱ��  contributing to the drafting of the National Development Plan in the areas of public service reform, anti-corruption policy and community safety. Sithembile comments  frequently on a range of political issues in South African and international media including the Financial Times, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, CNN, SABC, NewzroomAfrika, Voice of America, and others.

Sanjay Ruparelia

Sanjay Ruparelia is an Associate Professor of Politics at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he holds the , and a Senior Fellow of the . His main publications include ; (editor), and (co-editor).

Sanjay serves as a co-chair of , an international network that studies democratic innovations, and on the editorial boards of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Politics, and . He co-hosts , a monthly podcast and lecture series, and regularly contributes to the media in Asia and North America. 

Sanjay previously served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (NYC), United Nations Research Institute on Social Development (Geneva) and the Asia Foundation (Kabul), and taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His research has been supported by the Commonwealth Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and Social Science and Humanities Research Council as well as Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Princeton, Stellenbosch and Yale. Sanjay earned a B.A. in Political Science from McGill, and a M.Phil in Sociology and Politics of Development and Ph.D. in Politics from Cambridge.

Moderator: Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant (Ph.D. McGill) is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, and the Director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive (CORA). Her research focuses on Canadian politics, with particular interests in electoral politics, voting behaviour, and public opinion; news media; the political representation of women; and the conceptualization and measurement of sex and gender. She is the author of  (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), which won the 2016 Pierre Savard Award from the International Council of Canadian Studies, and was one of three books shortlisted for the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2014 Donald Smiley Prize. 

The Department of Political Studies Corry Colloquium Speaker Series presents:

Peter Rutland - Wesleyan University

"Russia’s Objectives in the Ukraine War" 

Friday, March 21, 2025 

12:00-1:30 PM

Robert Sutherland Hall | Room 202

Light lunch served

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����ֱ�� the talk:

There is sharp polarization amongst Western analysts about Putin’s objectives in the Ukraine war. Some argue the Russian invasion was a response to a perceived threat to Russian security from the West, which means that if the West acts to lessen that threat, the war can be brought to an end. Others argue that the war is driven by forces structurally embedded in the Russian state and society – and can only be contained by force. Can these two positions be reconciled? Where does the truth lie?

Biography: 

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University where he has taught since 1989. He is associate editor of Russian Review and former editor in chief of Nationalities Papers. He works on the political economy of the post-Soviet space and the dynamics of national identity in that region. Recent articles include  Voices of Peace and War (2023) and  Nationalities Papers (2023). 

The Department of Political Studies Presents The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies Inaugural Lecture

Zsuzsa Csergő - Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies, Queen's Department of Political Studies 

Between Protection and Control: The Politics of Kin-State Activism in Central and Eastern Europe

Thursday, March 6, 2025 

2:30-4:00 PM

Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202

Light refreshments served

Biography: 

Zsuzsa Csergő (PhD in Political Science, The George Washington University, 2000) is The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. She specializes in the study of nationalism and contemporary challenges to democracy, with particular expertise on Central and Eastern Europe. Before joining the Queen’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Women’s Leadership Program in U.S. and International Politics at the George Washington University. From 2013-2020, she was President of the , the largest international scholarly association in the field of nationalism and ethnicity studies. She currently serves as Director of the association’s online initiative, “.”

Dr. Csergő's research contributes to the understanding of tensions between nationalism and democracy in multiethnic societies. Her articles about nationalism, majority-minority relations, kin-state politics, and minority democratic agency in the EU context have appeared in leading journals in her field, including Perspectives on Politics, Foreign Policy, Publius, Nations and Nationalism, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Societies, and other venues. She is the author of Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2007), co-editor and co-author of collaborative volumes (books and special issues) focused on Europeanization and minority political agency, and Central and East European politics. She is currently writing a book about the sources of minority democratic agency in majoritarian states, based on comparative research on six linguistic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe (Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, Poles in Lithuania, and Russophones in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).

Dr. Csergő leads the comparative Minority Institutions Database, which officially launched in March, 2023. She is also the Principal Investigator of a collaborative research project entitled “” (funded by SSHRC), focused on Montreal, Brussels, Belfast, and Vilnius. Additionally, Csergő is a General Editor of the , and a member of , hosted at the University of Glasgow.

To learn more about Dr. Csergő, visit her faculty profile.