Dear friends and colleagues, Please support this petition to APSA
and forward it to any political scientists who might be interested in
strengthening green/environmental panels at APSA.
Thanks, Parakh
Parakh Hoon
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24060
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: WHITEMAN, DAVID <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 4:17 PM
Subject: help increase the visibility of green/environmental panels
at APSA
To: [email protected]
Dear Colleagues,
In the spirit of the global deliberations now going on in
Copenhagen, please give us one minute of your time to help us raise
the visibility of climate change and sustainability within the APSA
by signing our petition to restore the Related Group on Green
Politics and Theory to the status of an Organized Section. The
most tangible result of a successful petition will be to add four
additional panels each year focused on these critical issues. (And
signing the petition does not obligate you to join the new Section--
it just indicates that you support its creation.)
To sign the petition, go to: http://www.petitiononline.com/
mod_perl/signed.cgi?apsagpt (the text is also printed below). Only
your name will be listed--your email address will not be revealed
or used. If you have already signed our petition, thank you very
much!
If you would prefer just using email, send a message to
[email protected] with your full name and a sentence
confirming that you are a current APSA member and support the
creation of an APSA Organized Section on Green Politics and Theory.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO YOUR FRIENDS AND OTHER RELEVANT LISTS!
We only need 55 more signatures to reach the 200 required by the APSA.
Thank you for your help!
Petition supported by: John Rensenbrink (Bowdoin College), Robyn
Eckersley (University of Melbourne), Timothy Luke (Virginia Tech
University), Kimberly Smith (Carleton College), Frances Piven (City
University of New York), Michael Cummings (University of Denver),
John Meyer (Humboldt State University), Harlan Wilson (Oberlin
College), Steve Vanderheiden (University of Colorado), Joel
Kassiola (San Francisco State University), David Whiteman
(University of South Carolina).
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PETITION TO CREATE AN ORGANIZED SECTION ON GREEN POLITICS AND THEORY
We petition the American Political Science Association (APSA) to
restore the Related Group on Green Politics and Theory (formerly
the Organized Section on Ecological and Transformational Politics)
to the status of an Organized Section. After three years of
reorganization, we believe that the group is once again ready to
fulfill its important role within the ASPA.
The purpose of the Section is:
--to foster the study of green politics and theory within the
discipline of political science;
--to encourage innovative and rigorous research in the area of
green politics and theory;
--to provide for the development of a supportive community of
scholars within the larger political science and interdisciplinary
academic community.
As the dimensions of the continuing global ecological crisis become
better understood, with the accelerating melting of glaciers, IPCC
data indicating more serious global warming, water shortages, air
pollution, and environmental-caused diseases, the importance of
encouraging the study of green politics and societal transformation
becomes even greater. Recent events such as Al Gore’s Nobel Prize
and the global meeting on climate change in Indonesia emphasize the
need for more focus on these issues within the APSA, and an
important step is to restore the Green Politics and Theory section
(now a Related Group) to its previous status as an Organized Section.
Such an increase in organizational visibility and stature will
create more panels at the annual meeting so that scholars within
Political Science—and without—studying green and environmental
politics can showcase their work and inform other political
scientists about the relevance of this arguably the planet’s most
important challenge and research subject. Also, it will give
graduate students more space to present their work as they develop
their research agendas.
The global ecological crisis not only cuts across disciplines, it
is a discipline-wide, urgent subject within the discipline of
Political Science: political theorists, Americanists, policy
students, International Relations specialists, urbanists,
comparativists, and social change advocates, all can find a
component of this wide-ranging subject that is central to their
concerns. Regional conferences regularly feature a substantial
number of panels addressing issues of green politics, in particular
a very active group on Green Political Theory at the Western
Political Science Association meetings.
For these reasons, we petition the APSA to restore the Green
Politics and Theory group to Organized Section status. With the
signatures of 200 members attached to this petition, we will be
taking another step in focusing more attention on this vital topic
and giving it the central place in our discipline that it deserves.
David Whiteman
Faculty Principal, Green Quad
University of South Carolina
Phone: 803-777-2093
www.GreenQuadCommunity.org
