Britain & Ireland Association for Political Thought (APT)
The constitution and officers of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought (APT) were formally approved on 9 January 2009 at the Oxford Political Thought Conference. The decision to create this Association had been taken at the previous conference in 2008. The Association’s aim is to promote the study of all branches of political thought. The study of political thought tends to be dispersed within and across a number of different disciplines – political science, philosophy, history, law, sociology, economics, and cultural and literary studies, amongst others – and to involve a wide variety of approaches. As a result, the distinctive interests and concerns of this subfield risk being lost because so much academic policy focuses on addressing the main branches of those disciplines within which political thought is to be found - and the fact that political thought often challenges the boundaries of these disciplines makes it even easier to ignore or marginalise. The foundation of the APT is intended to address two main dimensions of this situation:
First, by providing a mechanism for advocating, to relevant policy makers, the concerns of those engaged in political thought, it aims to overcome the tendency for political thought to be marginalised or fall between different disciplines (for example, in the way support for research and graduate study in the field is divided between the ESRC and AHRC).
Second, it aims to facilitate scholarly interaction and collaboration amongst the whole range of practitioners in the field.
In promoting these dual aims, the Association seeks to:
- Represent the interests of political thought with regard to both teaching and research in relation to the relevant governmental and non-governmental bodies (e.g., HEFCE, ESRC, AHRC) and secure and even advance its place within the Academy.
- Act as a facilitator for the research activities of its membership (for example, by, among other activities, establishing a web site and e-mail lists to advertise conferences and symposia, alerting members to grant opportunities and helping to link people for grant projects through a register of interests, opening up new publishing outlets for theorists and supporting existing ones through links with publishers and contacts with the main general and specialist journals to which those in the field regularly submit).
- Assist the exchange of ideas on teaching activities e.g. through sharing reading lists via the web site.
- Forge connections with related associations in the UK and other countries.
The Association will be formally linked to both the January Oxford Political Thought Conference, at which there will be an annual plenary meeting of the Association, and the Manchester Workshops in Political Thought that take place every September. All participants at these conferences will automatically become members of APT for that year.
Membership costs £10 and is open to persons interested in furthering the purposes of the Association and in participating in its activities, including college and university faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars and researchers with an interest in political thought from all disciplines and countries.
Requests to join should be sent to Dr Elizabeth Frazer.
Richard Bellamy (Chair of APT)
|
