Top of the Page: Attendees stride through the welcome sign between Registration and the Exhibit Hall in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The meeting spaces were expansive and welcoming, setting the tone for the conference theme “Great Transformations: Political Science and the Big Questions of Our Time.”
APSA welcomed 6,800 political scientists from around the world to Philadelphia for the 112th Annual Meeting September 1–4. At the meeting, APSA colleagues, including faculty and students, policymakers, journalists, and citizens interested in political science gathered for four days of panels, roundtables, and special events for scholars to present, learn, and network at the largest political science conference. Attendees explored an exciting program, which brought together more than 1,500 sessions on the latest scholarship in political science focused on the 2016 theme “Great Transformations: Political Science and the Big Questions of Our Time.” The 2016 Annual Meeting Program Chairs, Kimberly Morgan, The George Washington University, and Deborah Schildkraut, Tufts University, organized the meeting around diverse approaches to all subdisciplines of political science.
Preconvention activities began on Wednesday, August 31, with registration and 26 short courses and workshops. These programs allowed for a deep dive in a focused environment. They were professional-development focused, subfield specific, or thematically of the same spirit or accomplishing the same knowledge-sharing and learning goals. The day concluded with the APSA Awards Ceremony, where the association celebrated and recognized 29 individuals for notable career and research achievements.
Thursday, September 1, marked the official beginning of the meeting and featured the first two breaking news sessions “Taking Stock of the Brexit Shock” and “Did the Party Decide” as well as panels and roundtable discussions. APSA members also participated in a discussion on governance reform at the All-Member Business Meeting. The first day of the meeting culminated with the presidential address by APSA President Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University, on “Left Pessimism” followed by the Opening Reception. During the sessions on Friday and Saturday, attendees enjoyed a variety of division, related group, and professional development panels. Also featured were another breaking news session “Rage Against the Machine: Populist Politics in the US, Europe and Latin America”; Kathryn Sikkink’s plenary “Are We Making Progress on Human Rights? Transformations in Knowledge and Activism”; and a plenary roundtable “The State of Race Relations in the US.”
Attendees also networked and celebrated throughout the weekend, attending a variety of evening events like the International Attendee Welcome, the Reception Honoring Teaching, the Graduate Student Happy Hour, the RBSI 30th Anniversary Reception, university alumni receptions, and a variety of APSA Organized Section annual meetings and receptions. Many attendees visited eJobs Placement Services, which provides onsite interview space for APSA members and university departments. Nearly two thirds of attendees used the variety of “green” options for navigating the conference content, whether it was the interactive online program, the mobile app, or the ePDF program. The 2016 meeting also successfully debuted APSA’s first electronic, multimedia poster hall using iPosters! With interactive features such as the ability to enlarge graphics and images as well as include video and audio clips, the iPosters provided a much more interactive experience for poster authors and attendees alike. In addition to viewing posters onsite in Philadelphia, APSA attendees and members may view 2016 Annual Meeting posters pre- and post-conference via an online gallery, providing a much wider window of engagement for authors to receive feedback as well as a convenient way for APSA colleagues to share feedback or find opportunities for collaboration, all while eliminating high printing costs and travel risks for poster authors.
The packed APSA exhibit hall featured 75 organizations including political science publishers, news and media outlets, educational technology companies, research organizations, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. A robust variety of sponsored social events on the exhibit show floor also provided valuable opportunities for networking outside the sessions, including the Headshot Lounge, sponsored by Pearson, which allowed APSA attendees to have new professional photographs taken. As always, the APSA Lounge offered a comfortable space for where attendees could meet to discuss issues of mutual interest.
APSA would also like to express our deep appreciation to our corporate sponsors: Cambridge University Press, Routledge, the Agenda Game, Diplomacy Center Foundation, the Foreign Policy Association, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Nature Human Behavior, Oxford University Press, Pearson, Pi Sigma Alpha, The Quality of Government Institute, Varieties of Democracy, and West Acadmic.
We are very much looking forward to our next annual meeting in San Francisco, August 31–September 3, 2017. See you there!
