IDSS summer conference 2026

Looking at the world holistically: ensuring sustainability, overcoming crises, finding solutions

JUNE 21 – 24, 2026

IDSS in collaboration with Center for Mediterranean Studies, Yaşar University

Yaşar University, Izmir, Türkiye

Save the dates June 21st-24th for our 2026 summer conference at the Center for Mediterranean Studies, Yaşar University, Izmir, Türkiye. Please visit the conference website to read the call and submit your proposal.

The submission deadline is March 1st, 2026.

We welcome proposals for papers and panels that transcend disciplinary boundaries and offer innovative perspectives on the multifaceted nature of current global challenges. We especially encourage proposals that are interdisciplinary in nature, incorporate non-Western or comparative perspectives, and speak to real-world policy and practice.

To submit a proposal, you must create an account at www.isanet.org. There is no submission fee, and you do not need to join the International Studies Association at the time of submission. For more information and updates, see the conference website.  

We look forward to welcoming you to Izmir! If you have questions about submissions or participation, please contact us at IDSS2026@isanet.org. 

IDSS DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR AWARD 2025

The IDSS has established a Distinguished Scholar Award. Presented annually, this award recognizes sustained excellence in Interdisciplinary Studies. Honoring the contribution of the recipient, a panel at the annual ISA conference accompanies the award.

The first recipient of the IDSS Distinguished Scholar Award is George Andreopoulos, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the founding Director of the Center for International Human Rights at John Jay College.

George Andreopoulos was an exceptionally fitting choice for the IDSS Distinguished Scholar Award. His career exemplifies the spirit of interdisciplinary scholarship, bridging international law, human rights, conflict resolution, and political science with remarkable depth and rigor. Throughout decades of academic work, George has not only produced influential research that transcends disciplinary boundaries but has also fostered dialogue among scholars from diverse fields, enriching the study of international affairs. His leadership in both academic and policy-oriented initiatives has had a profound impact on the development of interdisciplinary approaches within the ISA community and beyond. By consistently promoting the integration of legal, political, and ethical perspectives into the study of global issues, George has embodied the very values the Interdisciplinary Studies Section seeks to honor through this award.

Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award 2025

The 2025 Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award recipients are Natasha Wheatley for The Life and Death of States and Elena Shih for Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue. The award was presented to the recipients at the IDSS Business Meeting during the ISA conference in Chicago, Illinois.

Natasha Wheatley’s The Life and Death of States (Princeton University Press, 2023) impresses with its compelling historical argument, the richness of its conceptual framework and its implications for current global conditions. The Life and Death of States fluidly crosses and challenges disciplinary boundaries in a compelling argument that the dissolution of the Habsburg empire reimagined the possibilities and meaning of sovereignty in the modern states system. It successfully weaves political and legal theory focusing on Jellinek and Kelson, among others, together with conceptual and institutional history, capturing the continuities and discontinuities in debates on sovereignty. Moreover, the book challenges us to rethink sovereignty in a world in which decolonization and the end of the Cold War continue to problematize and challenge state boundaries and identities in much of the world, and in which globalization continues to undermine modern meanings of statehood and stateness. 

Elena Shih’s Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press, 2023) stands out for its important and impassioned argument, and for its superb trans-disciplinary method and approach, fluidly integrating political economy, ethnography, human rights and feminism. Manufacturing Freedom’s argument sets the exploitation of sex workers into the context of the more general commercial objectification of the subjects of “humanitarianism.” This is a brave critical work that sees complexity where others see simplicity. Using case studies based on in-depth ethnographic participatory research, the book seeks to recover the voices of sex workers themselves in the Global South that too often are obscured by market-oriented institutionalizations of an anti-trafficking industry. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award

The IDSS has established a book award that recognizes a work that is an original and outstanding contribution to interdisciplinary studies, broadly defined. 

For details, please visit our Awards page

IDSS SUMMER CONFERENCE 2022

Global Crises: Recoveries and Responses

JUNE 17 – 19, 2022

IDSS in collaboration with the Political Science Department, University of Crete

UNIVERSITY OF CRETE, RETHYMNO, CRETE

The current world faces overlapping crises that are global in scope from the Covid-19 pandemic, to expansive and multiple refugee movements, to intensifying poverty throughout the world, to global warming and consequent threats to ways of life and erosions of the landscapes around the world. New forms of power and domination are often manifest and made possible in each of these problematic arenas. Often, as well, these involve technical and scientific solutions that are difficult to reconcile with democratic values and institutions. This has encouraged authoritarian political movements as well as enhanced novel efforts at cooperation, interstate and in civil society. 

This conference provided an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, government officials, representatives of intergovernmental and non¬governmental organizations, and civic leaders to critically discuss some of the theoretical and practical challenges posed by global crises (as well as the contestability of the concept of ‘crisis’) and explore the prospects for sustainable policy responses consistent with international norms and standards.

The aim of this conference was to generate conversations that bring interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on theoretical, social, institutional, cultural and human aspects of responses to and recoveries from contemporary crises. The organizers therefore invited proposals employing various conceptual and methodological approaches, addressing a broad range of issues including:

  • Regional and local experiences refracted through their particular histories, practices, values, institutions or structures. 
  • Comparative studies of responses to current crises.
  • The ways crises affect the lived experiences and everyday life-worlds of people situated in different locations and positions around the world. We therefore welcome papers on cultural, ethnographic, and literary (novels, theater, poetry, etc.) responses to current crises.
  • Genealogical and historical studies of the emergence of ways of thinking about crises and particular crises that bear on dominant and alternative responses.
  • Ethical responses to global crises in general, or to a particular crisis.
  • Affective dimensions of recovering from current crises (for example, the role of mourning).
  • How current crises are likely to change societies, peoples, regions, and the global as they learn to live with and recover from current crises.
  • Historical studies of past responses to crises in so far as they are relevant to current dilemmas.
  • Theoretical interrogations of responses to crises, including the effects on the concepts of sovereignty, security, legitimacy and justice.
  • How crisis is identified, constructed or invoked for political or socio-economic purposes.
  • Possibilities for recoveries involving alternative post-capitalist economies.
  • The role of religion in responses to global crises.
  • How neoliberalism has generated and affected responses to current crises.
  • Papers and panels that relate current crises to structural transformations in the global  economy.
  • Critical studies of how current crises manifest and are likely to affect larger forms and structures and systems of power and authority.
  • The likelihood that current crises will further the occurrence and transformation of war.