CPSA | ACSP

Last year’s conference theme was “The Politics of Belonging: Conflict, Community and Curriculum”. This year’s conference builds on this theme with a focus on conflict, community and curriculum but through a different lens: division.

During the 2025 Canadian federal election, Prime Minister Mark Carney repeatedly used the term “hinge moment,” bringing focus to the major issues of the time. Carney was responding to unexpected and historic economic and existential threats to Canada from American President Donald Trump; Carney declared the relationship between the two countries would never be the same. The Trump threat is only another layer of division that builds on Canada’s historic and contemporary governance and political challenges. The efforts toward Indigenous recognition and reconciliation, functional multiculturalism, and effective federalism continue while the external threat builds.

Across the globe other states face “hinge moments” – the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South Asia and Africa are a few of the areas facing major on-going or potential conflicts. The world is a tenuous place. Divisions are taking hold. The study of these divisions could impact change. How transformative or new are these divisions?

On post-secondary campuses division is found in increasingly fraught pedagogical challenges as faculty and instructors confront artificial intelligence in teaching and learning. The academy is facing its own “hinge moment” as old ways of thinking and doing things are turned upside down. The perilous nature of many university programs, especially in the Arts and Social Sciences, contribute to growing precarity. Are we, as political scientists, doing work that is contributing to understanding today’s opportunities and threats in this moment?