From april 11th to april 16th of 2008, I will be attending the “ECPR 2008 Joint Sessions of Workshops. This year, this conference will be held in Rennes, France. This conference consists of numerous workshops on widely different topics. Each workshop takes 5 days and all participants present a paper and discuss the papers of the other participants. The workshop I will be attending is on `methodological pluralism’. There, I will be presenting a paper, titled `Uncertainty as a guiding principle in methodological pluralism’.

From the website of the conference:

The Joint Sessions of Workshops have been referred to as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the ECPR and are recognised as one of the main highlights of the world’s political science calendar.  The Joint Sessions have taken place annually in the spring since 1973.

The main aim of the workshops is the participation and equality of endeavour between advanced students, younger and newer members of the profession and well-established professors. In order to achieve this, the size of each workshop is strictly limited. Each participant is expected to be carrying out research in the field of the workshop, so that he or she can present a paper or research document for discussion, as well as take part in the discussion of the other papers presented.

If time allows, I will be blogging about my visit to this conference. All posts will be made available through this page, so should you want to remain up-to-date, all you need to do is to bookmark this page. Below, links to all posts regarding this conference will be collected.

The conference paper, my presentation and the presentation notes can be found by following this link: Uncertainty as a guiding principle (will be available april 12th, 12.00 hours.)

A somewhat more personal record of my experiences will can be found the following days, by following these links: (obviously, these will be posted in due time)

• Day 1: Travel and arrival
• Day 2: Presenting
• Day 3: Being discussant and having a half day off
• Day 4: It’s becoming practical
• Day 5: Last day of papers
• Day 6: Wrap-up, travel, and reflection

I will write some on the content of the conference as well. I have decided not to `live-blog’, for I don’t want to write about specific presentations and / or papers. However, since I will probably be highly inspired during this conference, I’ll almost surely write about those intellectual impressions. Those posts will only be about topics encompassing more than a single paper. In due time, the will be made available below.