PRESIDENT-ELECT

TAEKU LEE

Bae Family Professor of Government, Harvard University

Statement of Views: Throughout my three decades in political science, APSA has been an indispensable and authoritative association for our profession. APSA plays a unique and essential role in representing and supporting the work of advancing knowledge, promoting critical thinking and learning, advocating for the free and diverse exchange of ideas, and championing the public value of reasoned and researched perspectives on politics. Yet our profession mirrors society in facing daunting and even dire issues. Externally, political science (as with higher education more broadly) is increasingly distrusted and under attack; internally, we continue to fall short in addressing inequality in the academy and inclusion within our discipline. These and other challenges make the work of APSA critical now more than ever and, if elected, I would be honored to serve as President-Elect to work with everyone in the association to tackle them head on.

VICE PRESIDENT

JAMIE DRUCKMAN

Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

Statement of Views: APSA represents and organizes a diverse group of social scientists. This includes individuals from varied socio-economic and demographic backgrounds, who live in different places, and who have differing access to resources. Political scientists also widely differ in their teaching philosophies, research and intellectual agendas, as well as service and community activities. APSA plays a crucial role in providing spaces for political scientists with distinct interests and goals while also bridging differences to harness heterogeneity to ensure the profession amounts to more than the sum of its parts. I am committed to developing institutions that provide opportunities for political scientists to interact with those who share their backgrounds and interests as well as institutions that connect people with distinct experiences and goals. The hope is that such efforts will situate the profession to contribute to building, stabilizing, and enhancing democratic regimes while also attending to human rights across the globe. It is vital too that political scientists come together in their commitment to produce and share credible and high caliber research and pedagogy, and to improve the profession and the larger society.

LILLY GOREN

Professor of political science and global studies, Carroll University

Statement of Views: For over three decades, I have served political science as a discipline in a host of different ways, including in a variety of positions within APSA. In so doing, I have long advocated for APSA’s attention to faculty (and thus students) at all kinds of colleges and universities. The role of APSA should be to engage and support scholars and teachers, including supporting public scholarship, civic engagement, collaborative, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to teaching, publishing, and work in political science. Having previously served on the Executive Council, it is clear that diverse voices from diverse institutions with a diversity of academic experiences need to be constantly and fully integrated into the professional organization itself and to reflect these varied perspectives and experiences. In order to integrate and reflect theses varied perspectives, APSA and the Executive Council need to pay particular attention to under-represented groups within the organization, especially individuals of color, women, religious and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ members. I hope to be able to bring some of these voices and perspectives to the Executive Council and thus to the organization as a whole.

CAMERON THIES

Dean of James Madison College and MSU Foundation Professor, Michigan State University

Statement of Views: I have been involved with APSA since I was a graduate student. The association has provided me innumerable opportunities to improve my teaching and research, alongside service roles that helped develop my leadership skills. I am honored to have the opportunity to give back to the association by serving as a Vice President. I want to ensure that APSA is a welcoming academic home to all who study and teach about politics. We all gain from each other’s experiences in a more inclusive association. I will continue to advocate for APSA’s efforts on behalf of teaching, as one who has been involved for many years in the TLC. Finally, my own teaching and research interests focus on international relations. In this role, I hope to support APSA’s efforts to connect with other international associations and support research and teaching around the world. I have many connections to enable these efforts as a former president of the International Studies Association. I look forward to bringing my particular set of skills and interests to bear on these and other important issues on behalf of the association’s membership.

TREASURER

SARA WALLACE GOODMAN

Chancellor’s Fellow and Dean’s Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine

Statement of Views: It is an honor to be nominated for this office. APSA does important work, both professionally and publicly. In both capacities, it bears a weighty responsibility to confront unprecedented challenges and guide its membership through critical times, from increasing employment precarity to threats against free speech in the academy. At the same time, we must remain steadfast in our commitment to maintaining momentum on important organizational values, such as deepening our ability to engage with and represent diverse perspectives. I believe APSA can continue to play a constructive role in advocating for political science to the public while pursuing inclusive excellence within. APSA represents a broad coalition of scholars—it reaches across all types of institutions and is global in membership. Our breadth in membership and depth in core commitments are our strengths and maintaining them in my service as Treasurer is both an honor and an act of citizenship.

COUNCIL

JULIA AZARI

Professor of political science, Marquette University

Statement of Views: My ambition for political science is for us to be a bold discipline, on the cutting edge of discovery and the fight for global democracy. As an active public-facing scholar, I see communicating about political science as an exciting intellectual enterprise, not just a translation of journal articles into smaller words and fewer regression tables. I am interested in enhancing opportunities for political scientists to engage beyond academia, and finding ways to amplify new voices. We are strengthened by including perspectives from scholars at all types of institutions, including contributions by graduate and undergraduate students at these institutions. I hope to be involved in discussions about outreach, conference accessibility, and making the strongest possible public case for the value of political science.

MICHAEL GOODHART

Professor of political science, gender studies, and philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

Statement of Views: Having directed a center and helped to organize (hastily) an online annual conference for the APT during the lockdown, I have been thinking a lot about how to design virtual scholarly experiences that provide valuable benefits for differently situated members of our professional communities. I’m especially interested in working to develop conferencing and networking strategies and infrastructures that can help us to make our activities more equitable, inclusive, and accessible, more climate-friendly, and more resilient against unforeseen disruption. My thinking about these matters has raised big questions about how our professional networks and associations operate at present, and why (with what justification? because of what histories?). These lead to even bigger questions about our responsibilities as scholars and educators in times of radical and growing inequality and threats to democracy, precarity within and outside our profession, and impending climate transformation. I hope to encourage APSA to consider and act on these challenges.

ALICE J. KANG

Associate professor of political science and ethnic studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Statement of Views: It is an honor to be nominated for the APSA Council. I have served on the executive committee of the Women and Politics Research Section and co-organized the APSA Annual Meeting conference program for the Women and Politics and the African Politics sections. If elected, I would bring to the Council an abiding interest in how changes in practices and rules can improve inclusion. Given the size of the APSA membership, issues of injustice and inequity are undoubtedly alive in the profession. The question is how the association can address these proactively to better serve all its members. As a part of the Council, I would seek to learn more about the challenges that varied members encounter across institutional spaces, with an eye to asking what changes to existing practice and new initiatives can be adopted so that all are supported within the profession.

ALISON RIOS MILLETT MCCARTNEY

Professor of political science and Faculty Director of the Honors College, Towson University

Statement of Views: As a faculty member at a teaching-focused institution, I have directly benefitted from APSA’s opportunities to pursue the scholarship and pedagogy of teaching and learning nationally and internationally through APSA conferences, publications, and resources. I continue to hone my pedagogy and research through the network of supportive colleagues that APSA has helped to cultivate. If elected, my goals on APSA Council would be to maintain and grow these options for all political science educators at all types of higher education institutions internationally and to work on including our K-12 partners in APSA programming. Rapid social and economic changes continue to define APSA’s role in providing forums for research in political science education. Thus, collaborations need to occur within and between graduate, undergraduate, and secondary education programs so that our learning expectations will better align and so that we can advance evidence-based pedagogies that achieve our collective goals. Next, given that higher education operates in a global context, I believe that APSA has a responsibility to build stronger partnerships with other countries’ political science associations. Finally, I hope to encourage more mentoring of and resources for graduate students in political science for careers related to pedagogy and research and for careers outside of academia so that they are prepared for the challenges of an ever-changing job market.

TAMIR MOUSTAFA

Professor of international studies and Stephen Jarislowsky Chair, Simon Fraser University

Statement of Views: I am honored to be nominated to serve on the APSA Council. As a scholar who has often felt out of place in our discipline, I am keenly interested in supporting APSA policies and practices that will help to foster a more inclusive, ethical, engaged, and self-reflexive profession. APSA has an essential role to play in supporting all forms of diversity in our profession, not least of which are methodological and epistemological diversity in political science scholarship. Examining the history of our profession is essential for fostering reflexivity and building awareness of the political dimensions of the knowledge we produce. I believe we should build a political science that is conversant with other disciplines and engaged with the problems of the world around us. More generally, I believe it is vital to address structures of exploitation within the academy, particularly regarding contingent faculty. If elected to the APSA Council, I will contribute to the efforts of many in the Association who are working to build a more inclusive and engaged profession alongside the perennial objectives of promoting excellence in research and teaching.

DANIEL NIELSON

Director of Government Department Graduate Studies, Co-Director of Innovations for Peace and Development, and professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin

Statement of Views: I am a committed APSA member and feel humbled to be nominated to the APSA Council. If elected, I will promote leaning into global diversity and its potential for collective problem-solving. Our discipline has many strengths, but a critical advantage derives from our appreciation of the world’s heterogeneity. As an experimenter in the comparative politics and international relations of global development, I am struck by how often programs that have worked in one setting work very differently in others. This is not surprising to political scientists highly attuned to the vast variety of political cultures and institutions, but it may perplex those assuming uniformity in incentives and behavior. We also value how groups form diverse institutions that produce outcomes sometimes quite different from the wishes of individuals on average. I hope to increase engagement with scholars from non-traditional backgrounds and lower-income countries, including through sharing research and expanding collaboration. They can guide us in making sense of and working together to address the world’s critical problems—including climate change, poverty, and corruption—whose effects and potential solutions manifest so differently from place to place. I will also continue my efforts to encourage the ethical practice of social science that protects participants’ autonomy, promotes justice, and expands the beneficence of research.

CANDIS WATTS SMITH

Associate professor of political science and Interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Duke University

Statement of Views: It is an honor to be nominated to serve on the Executive Council. I have had the fortune of being involved with APSA for nearly two decades, attending my first conference as a participant of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute. Supporting RBSI is just one of the ways APSA has helped to diversify our discipline, expand the networks and opportunities for historically underrepresented groups, and enhance excellence. I share this commitment. Over the course of my career and engagement with APSA, I have become privy to some matters that I hope our national association will address. One concerns the high-level and day-to-day challenges of editing and publishing in many Political Science journals; these challenges range from preparing faculty to negotiate contracts with publishers to ensuring that junior scholars learn to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of our discipline’s norms and trends. Another relates to ethics in research publishing, with an eye toward pinpointing a shared definition of (co-)authorship and ways to give credit to key collaborators. Finally, I hope that we can advance a professional development toolkit for (senior) scholars to more effectively mentor and advocate for junior scholars and scholars from marginalized groups, especially when thorny issues of ethics arise. I am committed to our discipline and APSA’s members. I hope to take part in navigating our shared challenges and uplifting innovations in research, teaching, and service.

SHATEMA THREADCRAFT

Associate professor of gender and sexuality studies, philosophy and political science, Vanderbilt University

Statement of Views: It is an honor to be nominated for the APSA Council. I have served on the executive committee of the Women and Politics Research Section and co-organized the APSA Annual Meeting conference program for the Women and Politics and the African Politics sections. If elected, I would bring to the Council an abiding interest in how changes in practices and rules can improve inclusion. Given the size of the APSA membership, issues of injustice and inequity are undoubtedly alive in the profession. The question is how the association can address these proactively to better serve all its members. As a part of the Council, I would seek to learn more about the challenges that varied members encounter across institutional spaces, with an eye to asking what changes to existing practice and new initiatives can be adopted so that all are supported within the profession.