Assistant Professor in Political Theory

Assistant Professor in Political Theory

The Department of Political Science at The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Political Theory. The area of specialization is open.

The successful candidate will have a completed Ph.D. in Political Science (or related field), or be able to adequately demonstrate all Ph.D. requirements are sufficiently close to completion. The successful candidate is expected to have a Ph.D. for the start of the appointment. The anticipated start date is July 1, 2021.

The successful candidate will be expected to develop and maintain an active program of research leading to peer-reviewed publications and the securing of external research funding, and to contribute to the education and training of undergraduate as well as graduate students.

This position is subject to final budgetary approval. Applicants must be prepared to conduct interviews remotely if circumstances require, and understand that a successful applicant may be asked to consider an offer with a deadline without having been able to make an in-person visit to campus should travel or other restrictions apply. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

To apply, applicants must upload online the following in order HERE. Job ID: 37879.

  • an application letter;
  • a curriculum vitae;
  • a statement of teaching philosophy, interests and accomplishments (maximum 2 pages);
  • a description of current and future research interests (maximum 2 pages);
  • evidence of teaching effectiveness (e.g., summaries of teaching evaluations (official preferred), peer reviews of teaching, sample course material); and
  • a 1 page statement about the applicant’s experience working with a diverse student body and contributions or potential contributions to creating/advancing a culture of equity and inclusion.
  • one electronic sample of research or publication.

 

In addition, applicants should arrange for three confidential signed letters of recommendation to be sent separately to the Department of Political Science care of Jeff Yupitun, Assistant to the Department Head, at poli.recruitment@ubc.ca. Review of applications begins on October 1, 2020, and will continue until the position is filled.

UBC-Vancouver’s Point Grey Campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam people, with whom UBC shares a framework Memorandum of Affiliation. For information relating to Aboriginal initiatives that are available at UBC, visit the UBC Vancouver Aboriginal portal at: http://aboriginal.ubc.ca/. The Department of Political Science at UBC is committed to increasing Indigenous engagement within its curriculum.

Equity and diversity are essential to academic excellence. An open and diverse community fosters the inclusion of voices that have been underrepresented or discouraged. We encourage applications from members of groups that have been marginalized on any grounds enumerated under the B.C. Human Rights Code, including sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, racialization, disability, political belief, religion, marital or family status, age, and/or status as a First Nation, Metis, Inuit, or Indigenous person. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however Canadians and permanent residents of Canada will be given priority.

The United States and Canada: How Two Democracies Differ and Why It Matters

by Prof. Paul J. Quirk

The United States and Canada share the longest border in the world, maintain one of the closest alliances, and are notably similar in many ways. Yet the two countries also have important differences, including sharply contrasting political institutions. In The United States and Canada, Paul J. Quirk has gathered a distinguished cast of contributors to present an integrated comparative examination of the political systems of the United States and Canada-with special attention to the effects of political institutions and their interaction with political values, geographic and demographic factors, and other influences. The volume explores the differences between the American presidential (or separation-of-powers) system and the Canadian parliamentary system-focusing on electoral and party systems, executive leadership and the legislative process, bureaucratic influence, and federalism. It proceeds to examine patterns of governance in a wide range of issue areas: economic policy; climate-change policy; healthcare policy; civil rights/integration and immigration; and abortion and gay rights. A sweeping comparative account, this volume serves as an authoritative guide for anyone interested in why the two countries differ and where they might be headed.

Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and the European Court of Human Rights

by Prof. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom and Valerie Sperling (Clark University), with Melike Sayoglu

Women and the LGBT community in Russia and Turkey face pervasive discrimination. Only a small percentage dare to challenge their mistreatment in court. Facing domestic police and judges who often refuse to recognize discrimination, a small minority of activists have exhausted their domestic appeals and then turned to their last hope: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The ECtHR, located in Strasbourg, France, is widely regarded as the most effective international human rights court in existence. Russian citizens whose rights have been violated at home have brought tens of thousands of cases to the ECtHR over the past two decades. But only one of these cases resulted in a finding of gender discrimination by the ECtHR-and that case was brought by a man. By comparison, the Court has found gender discrimination more frequently in decisions on Turkish cases. Courting Gender Justice explores the obstacles that confront citizens, activists, and lawyers who try to bring gender discrimination cases to court. To shed light on the factors that make rare victories possible in discrimination cases, the book draws comparisons among forms of discrimination faced by women and LGBT people in Russia and Turkey. Based on interviews with human rights and feminist activists and lawyers in Russia and Turkey, this engaging book grounds the law in the personal experiences of individual people fighting to defend their rights.

Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?

by Peter Dauvergne

Walmart. Coca-Cola. BP. Toyota. The world economy runs on the profits of transnational corporations. Politicians need their backing. Non-profit organizations rely on their philanthropy. People look to their brands for meaning. And their power continues to rise.

Can these companies, as so many are now hoping, provide the solutions to end the mounting global environmental crisis? Absolutely, the CEOs of big business are telling us: the commitment to corporate social responsibility will ensure it happens voluntarily.

Peter Dauvergne challenges this claim, arguing instead that corporations are still doing far more to destroy than protect our planet. Trusting big business to lead sustainability is, he cautions, unwise — perhaps even catastrophic. Planetary sustainability will require reining in the power of big business, starting now.

National Pathways to Low Carbon Emission Economies: Innovation Policies for Decarbonizing and Unlocking

Edited by Prof. Kurt Hübner

The science is clear: climate change is a fact and the probability is extremely high that it has been caused by humans. At the same time, policy responses are hesitant, rather lukewarm and differ substantially between nation-states. The question is, what drives and what blocks radical action? This book makes the case that institutional settings, path dependence and emerging change coalitions are critical in explaining climate policies across the global political economy.

Technological and social-political innovations are key drivers for dealing with climate change. This class of innovation is very much guided, or suppressed, by a national economy’s established institutional settings. By anchoring national case studies in a version of the well established ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach, the chapters of this book show why some economies are policy leaders and others become policy followers, or even policy interlockers. Moreover, the case studies demonstrate the extent to which external events and institutional constraints from the international polity influence national innovation strategies. Taking a unique analytical approach, which combines insights from innovation policies and a variety of capitalism literature, the authors provide genuine comprehension of the interplay between institutional settings, political actors and climate policies.

National Pathways to Low Carbon Emission Economies offers a valuable examination of these issues on climate change that will be of interest to academics and postgraduates researching climate policy, economic policy and social movements. Furthermore, it is relevant for policy analysts and policy makers who are interested in learning from climate policies in the context of innovation strategies for a range of countries.

Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom: Between Rules and Practice

by Maxwell A. Cameron

Societies create rules that govern our practices. Such rules can only be effective, however, if the intermediaries between rules and practices–institutions–harness the skill, knowledge, and motivation of practitioners. Yet, everywhere institutions seem to be failing. Over-reliance on rules and incentives has not only corrupted the intrinsic motivations that arise from practice, it has also promoted the spread of competitive utility maximizing and thereby discouraged the kind of moral agency necessary for institutions to work well.

In Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom, Maxwell Cameron takes this basic insight as his starting point to argue that the rapid spread of the tenets of a neoliberal political-economic philosophy in our era has contributed to the erosion of institutional capacity. The book contributes to an emerging field of social science research grounded in the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Cameron not only shows how good institutions depend on wise practitioners, he argues that contemporary democratic institutions are being assaulted by excessive partisanship and the hollowing-out of democratic deliberation, by the corrupting effects of money in politics, and by the use of neoliberal techniques of governance that are designed to foster competition rather than the pursuit of common goods.

At once a valuable guide to designing effective institutions and a trenchant critique of contemporary institutional failure, Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom promises to reshape our understanding of one of the most basic building blocks of contemporary social and political life.

 

The Myth of International Order

by Arjun Chowdhury

In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime’s collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war showed Foreign Policy’s index of failed states to be deeply flawed–FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong, but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than Sweden.

Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his launching point Charles Tilly’s famous dictum that ‘war made the state, and the state made war,’ Arjun Chowdhury argues that the problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic power with stability. But major wars are the true source of stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival. Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable: there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India’s districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the majority of states in the world–about two thirds–are weak states.

Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international security requires a normative shift : the language of weakness and failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions. Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war, which is an extremely costly approach–in terms of human lives and capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak. Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink foundational concepts of international politics like political stability and state failure.

Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony

by Barbara Arneil

Winner of the 2018 APSA David Easton Award and the CPSA C.B. Macpherson Prize

Modern colonization is generally defined as a process by which a state settles and dominates a foreign land and people. This book argues that through the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth centuries, thousands of domestic colonies were proposed and/or created by governments and civil society organizations for fellow citizensas opposed to foreigners and within their own borders rather than overseas. Such colonies sought to solve every social problem arising within industrializing and urbanizing states.

Domestic Colonies argues that colonization ought to be seen during this period as a domestic policy designed to solve social problems at home as well as foreign policy designed to expend imperial power. Three kind of domestic colonies are analysed in this book: labour colonies for the idle poor, farm colonies for the mentally ill and disabled, and utopian colonies for racial, religious, and political minorities. All of them were justified by an ideology of colonialism that argued if people were segregated in colonies located on empty land and engaged in agrarian labour, this would improve both the people and the land. Key domestic colonialists analysed in this book include Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, and Booker T. Washington. The turn inward to colony thus requires us to rethink the meaning and scope of colonization and colonialism in modern political theory and practice.

The Canadian Party System: An Analytic History

by Richard Johnston

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. It has too many parties, it is susceptible to staggering swings from election to election, and its provincial and federal branches often seem unrelated. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now.

In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions underpinning the system. Chief among them was domination by the centrist Liberals, stemming from their grip on Quebec, which blocked both the Conservatives and the NDP. As Johnston shows, the Conservative Party could win only with short-lived coalitions of francophobes and nationalist francophones, often built by soaking up populist tension. Moving beyond the national realm, he also takes a close look at the stunning discontinuity between federal and provincial arenas, another peculiarity of the Canadian system.

For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.

This book is for scholars, researchers, and students in Canadian party politics and comparative politics.

Environmentalism of the Rich

by Peter Dauvergne

Over the last fifty years, environmentalism has emerged as a clear counterforce to the environmental destruction caused by industrialization, colonialism, and globalization. Activists and policymakers have fought hard to make the earth a better place to live. But has the environmental movement actually brought about meaningful progress toward global sustainability? Signs of global “unsustainability” are everywhere, from decreasing biodiversity to scarcity of fresh water to steadily rising greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, as Peter Dauvergne points out in this provocative book, the environmental movement is increasingly dominated by the environmentalism of the rich—diverted into eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation, energy efficiency, and recycling. While it’s good that, for example, Barbie dolls’ packaging no longer depletes Indonesian rainforest, and that Toyota Highlanders are available as hybrids, none of this gets at the source of the current sustainability crisis. More eco-products can just mean more corporate profits, consumption, and waste.

Dauvergne examines extraction booms that leave developing countries poor and environmentally devastated—with the ruination of the South Pacific island of Nauru a case in point; the struggles against consumption inequities of courageous activists like Bruno Manser, who worked with indigenous people to try to save the rainforests of Borneo; and the manufacturing of vast markets for nondurable goods–for example, convincing parents in China that disposable diapers made for healthier and smarter babies.

Dauvergne reveals why a global political economy of ever more—more growth, more sales, more consumption—is swamping environmental gains. Environmentalism of the rich does little to bring about the sweeping institutional change necessary to make progress toward global sustainability.