Political Networks Conference (POLNET)

The Department of Political Science at Duke University will host the 12th Annual Political Networks Conference and Workshops from May 29th - June 1rst. All workshops and panels will be held in and around the library in central West campus, in Perkins and Rubenstein libraries, only a short walk from the beautiful Duke Gardens. Additional events will be held at the conference hotel, the Washington Duke Inn.

The conference will commence on May 29th with two days of training workshops, covering introductory and advanced topics in network analysis with applications to political science. These workshops are organized by the Political Networks section of the American Political Science Association and sponsored in large part by the National Science Foundation. This year, Michael Heaney and Bruce A Desmarais will be offering introductory workshops in social network analysis (SNA) and SNA in R, respectively; Katherine Ognyanova and Bailey Fosdick will be offering workshops in visualization and latent space models, respectively; Peter Mucha and Lorien Jasny will be offering new workshops in community detection and ERGMs, respectively; and Dave Siegel and Jenn Larson will be offering new workshops in the theory of behavior in networks and how to tie theory to empirics, respectively. Further details will be posted here when available.

Following the workshops, all conference attendees are invited to an evening reception and plenary talk on May 30th. Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Jim Moody. Jim is the Robert O. Keohane professor of sociology at Duke University. He has published extensively in the field of social networks, methods, and social theory. His work has focused theoretically on the network foundations of social cohesion and diffusion, with a particular emphasis on building tools and methods for understanding dynamic social networks. He has used network models to help understand school racial segregation, adolescent health, disease spread, economic development, and the development of scientific disciplines. Moody's work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and has appeared in top social science, health and medical journals. He is winner of INSNA's (International Network for Social Network Analysis) Freeman Award for scholarly contributions to network analysis, founding director of the Duke Network Analysis Center and editor of the on-line Journal of Social Structure.

Panels will begin on May 31rst and conclude after lunch on June 1rst. In addition to panels, there will be the the traditional mentoring lunch and poster session on the 31rst. Dinner will be provided on the 30th and 31rst and breakfast and lunch all four days. A conference application form can be found in the Call for Papers link on the left. Thanks to the generosity of the National Science Foundation, we will be able to offer a limited number of fellowships. A fellowship application form can be found in the Fellowships link on the left. Stay tuned for further details on travel and housing information.

Conference Host: David A Siegel (Duke University)

Program Chairs: Cesi Cruz (University of British Columbia) and Justin H Gross (University of Massachusetts)

Fellowship Committee: Stefan Wojcik (chair), Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, Lauren Ratliff-Santoro, and Jack Riley

NSF grant PI: Jennifer Nicoll Victor

Please contact polinetworksconference@gmail.com for any inquiries about the conference.