The Experience

The Department of Political Studies oversees two-degree programs, the Single and Joint-Major options in Political Studies and the Joint Major in International Political Economy (IPE). The program educates and readies students for employment, multifaceted democratic engagement, and local/global citizenship in increasingly turbulent times. The Joint Major in IPE reinforces this as it appeals to students with an interest in the interconnected nature of the study of politics and economics at the international and global levels, which they wish to explore while pursuing a joint-major Honours option in another discipline or program.   

Led by experts in a variety of subdisciplines within Political Studies, the department’s courses are designed to encourage investigation, reflexivity, and on-going discussions of pressing topics that raise questions/concerns about the very foundations of current democracies and democratic practices from the local through to the global. The COVID pandemic, the intensifying climate crisis, along with sweeping challenges, legitimate and otherwise, to democratic governance across the planet has taught/reminded us of the importance of governments, governance, active civil society organizations, and an informed public. Democratic governance is an everyday practice and requires the sedimentation of those practices across institutions to uphold values and principles that can then be translated into policies, procedures, and regulations. Our challenge is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary democratic practices and if and how contemporary democracies can be re-imagined and re-purposed to fit the multiple challenges of the 21st century.   

POST graduates are prepared with real world skills that get to the heart of problems to see new possibilities; through research, experiential assignments and field placements, POST students become well versed in the ideas, debates and methodologies that are central to mainstream and alternative political discourse and essential for paid (e.g., careers) and non-paid work (e.g., volunteering) in our communities.   

Experiential learning opportunities are offered throughout the curriculum. In POST 3600H Designing and Doing Qualitative Research, for example, students have the choice to prepare an ethnography, partake in a participatory observation assignment, and go to a presentation in the community and assess the method used underlying the information presented. POST 3850H Leadership Lab: Research and Practice offer students the opportunity to experience team-based research within a think-tank environment. In POST 4850H: Public Policy Field Placement, students are provided practical experience working part time for a non-profit organization (e.g., Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) or government office (e.g., with MPP Dave Smith) engaged in public policy. Our Research Practicum courses provide students withopportunities to support faculty research programs.  

Faculty are at the cutting edge in creating professional research experiences for student participation in the designing, doing, and project management components of their respective research programs. Students are brought into research communities of practice whereby they experience first-hand the necessity for and the complexities of community-based research and qualitative research. Students are mentored, and guided into epistemologies, methodologies, the emergence of new meaning and knowledge, standards of excellence, research ethics and knowledge mobilization, attentive to power relations within university research and community-campus research. This provides real-world and professional experience in research projects, as well as experience in the standards of excellence and ethics. Students and the university sector have identified the involvement of students in faculty research as an important and life-skill enhancing experience. POST continues to be at the leading edge of this worthy endeavour.