Political Science - Western University

Tomorrow we welcome Professsor Léa Ravensbergen from McMaster University! She be speaking about "Planning the Just Cycling City" as the past of the Urban Horizons lecture of this term.

📆Wednesday, April 29th, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
📍SSC 7220

Professor Ravensbergen's lecture will also be the opening session of the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance Graduate Student Research Showcase. The Showcase will run from 10:45am to 4:00pm, also in SSC 7200. The Showcase features a great interdisciplinary lineup of 11 presentations by graduate students from across .

Open to all, lunch is provided, and no registration is necessary. So please consider coming out for a session, or for the day, to support our graduate students and hear about their work!

Congratulations to Professor Adam Harmes who was the 2026 Western University recipient of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) Teaching Excellence Award.

The award was presented at the OUSA Partners in Higher Education Dinner at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto on 15 April 2026.

(📸 President and Vice Chancellor at Western University - Alan Shepard)

Thank you to everyone who signed up for the 5x5 Lightning Talks!

Registration is now closed, and we’re excited to showcase the work of our grad student presenters on April 17 at 10AM in SSC 7210.

Come support your fellow students and colleagues, hear fresh ideas, and be part of a lively interdisciplinary conversation.

*Registration closed March 31, 2026

Co-sponsored by the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance

Dr. Mitch Berg | Achieving Tribal, Municipal, and County Cooperation in the United States

📆Tuesday April 28th, 1:30-3:00 p.m.
📍SSC 7220

Dr. Berg is a clinical assistant professor in the Paul H O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and served as City Administrator for the City of Mahnomen, Minnesota, for eight years. He has some unique perspectives on interlocal cooperation in the U.S. that should be interesting.

🚨⚠️*Please note this event has been cancelled. Thank you for your understanding.*

The Robert A. Young Lecture in Political Science

Robust Democracies Are Messy: Coupling, Institutional Failure, and Federalism

Dr. Jenna Bednar - University of Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute

Friday, April 17th / 1:30 PM / SSC 7210

Democratic systems rarely collapse because a single institution fails. They collapse when institutions begin to move in lockstep. Drawing on ideas from complexity science, this talk argues that democratic fragility arises from institutional coupling: when political institutions, information systems, and norms respond to shocks in the same way, failures become correlated across the system. Robust democracies instead preserve diversity in authority, incentives, and information. Federal systems help sustain this heterogeneity by distributing power across jurisdictions and political arenas. The disorder and friction that federalism introduces may be costly in ordinary times, but that very messiness can make democratic collapse far less likely.

All our upcoming events can be found here: https://politicalscience.uwo.ca/about-us/events/index.html

Join us! Making Sense of the Iranian Conflict: A Panel Discussion featuring Drs. Samar El-Masri, Adam Harmes, Matt Lebo

Thursday, April 9 - 3:30-5:00pm

Zoom Link:
https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/j/6161674709?omn=92337520508

Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance | Urban Horizons Lecture Series

Dr. Nathan McClintock | Greenhouse Futures: Agrarian Questions, Infrastructures, and Imaginaries at the Urban(izing) Frontier

📆Monday, April 13th, 3:00-4:30 p.m.
📍SSC 5220

Recent disruptions to the food system caused by the pandemic, extreme weather events, tariffs, and war, have given a significant boost to the promotion and expansion of greenhouses as a key infrastructural component of agri-food production. Greenhouses are not limited to rural agricultural areas, however, but have also become prominent in urban and community (re)development projects in a range of commercial and non-commercial settings.

In this talk, I engage with classic debates in agrarian political economy and more recent debates on socioecological fixes to think through how greenhouse expansion serves to overcome natural obstacles to production, while also articulating with entrepreneurial green development goals. I then discuss how such a fix also depends on a suite of settler-colonial logics and discursive practices. Drawing on examples from two starkly different landscapes – urban Montréal and communities across the Canadian Arctic – I explore how greenhouse infrastructures (and the imaginaries upon which they are poised) reinscribe colonial and developmentalist logics at these two distinct urban(izing) frontiers of (re)development, while in some cases also serving as spaces of contestation and self-determination.

Nathan McClintock is a professor of urban studies at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Montréal, Québec and editor of the journal Urban Geography. His work on urban agriculture, food systems planning, environmental justice, green gentrification, and urban political ecology has appeared in a wide range of journals and edited volumes. His new research focuses on everyday governance and the historical and contemporary entanglements of urban development, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.

The Department of Political Science & the Centre for the Study of Political Behaviour (CSPB) Guest Speaker

Dr. Tiago Ventura | The Partisan Effects of Social Media Bans

📆Monday, April 6th, 2:00PM
📍SSC 7200

Tiago Ventura is an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. His scholarship lies at the intersection between social media usage, online misinformation, and political behavior. Prof. Ventura is also interested in survey research in the digital space, large-scale digital experimentation, and the use of large language models in applied social science research.

Abstract: What happens to information environments when democracies ban social media platforms? A large body of work has investigated the consequences of censorship under authoritarianism. More recently, democratic contexts have witnessed the politicization of, and governmental intervention into, major online communication platforms. We study a notable example of this --- the 2024 national ban issued by the Brazilian authorities on the use of the “X” social media platform. We employ an event-study design to investigate the causal impact of the X ban in Brazil and how partisan identity drives responses to the ban. Using a large sample of politically engaged social media users alongside ideal-point analysis, we find strong partisan responses to the ban: conservative users not aligned with the government were significantly more likely to circumvent restrictions, and right-leaning news domains became considerably more prevalent on the platform. We call this a “sorting ratchet” -- in that it segmented the digital public sphere by partisanship and had lasting effects even months after the ban was lifted. In sum, we show that, in democratic contexts, platform bans may have unintended effects of deepening polarization and restructuring information environments in ways that may be difficult to reverse.

📢 Call for Graduate Fellowship Applications!

The Department of Political Science at Western University invites prospective students to apply for one PhD or one MA Fellowship in conjunction with their application to our graduate program. Selected fellows will contribute to Drs. Christopher Alcantara and Laura Stephenson’s SSHRC-funded project, “The Determinants of Public Support for Indigenous Reconciliation Policies.”

🗓️ Deadline: February 1, 2026
📩Applicants must apply to Western’s Political Science MA or PhD program, and separately email Dr. Alcantara ([email protected]).

Please include:

• A cover letter (1–2 pages, single spaced) describing:
• Your definition of reconciliation and interest in public opinion/policy
• Your educational and career goals
• Any relevant substantive, theoretical, or methodological expertise
• A CV detailing relevant experience, training, or publications

We look forward to your applications!

🏅The Western University Political Science Department is proud to announce that William Poirier has been awarded the Dr. Harold D. Clarke Graduate Quantitative Research Methodology Fellowship for his demonstrated ability and interest in Quantitative Research Methodology.

Congratulations, William, on a well-deserved award!