The Annual Doctoral Conference (ADC) is a graduate students' conference at CEU that has been organized every year since 2006.
The two to three days long conferences consist of several panel sessions, where students can present and discuss their research papers. Discussants in the panel sessions include renowned CEU professors and invited guest speakers. Panel sessions are usually followed by roundtable discussions. For 15 years, the ADC took place in CEU's Budapest campus. Since CEU's move to Austria, the ADC will take place in CEU's new campus in Vienna.
For students in the earlier stages of their career the conference provides an opportunity to train for a first contribution to a scientific conference. For students in later stages, the paper proposed for the conference can be seen as a ‘job market’ paper, i.e. a paper a student would select to present if she or he is invited to a job talk.
Below you can find information about the previous Annual Doctoral Conferences and the upcoming one.
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20TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
April 28-30, 2025 - CEU Vienna Campus
Hosted by the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations; the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy; and the Department of Philosophy, the 2025 Annual Multidisciplinary Doctoral Conference at Central European University invites scholarly reflections on how futures of flourishing can be envisioned and enacted amid complex global transformations. This year’s theme, “Flourishing Futures: Rethinking Politics, Environments, and Existence”, encourages participants to interrogate and transcend entrenched frameworks, assumptions, and binaries that shape the ways we conceptualize the world and our place within it, while also opening space for empirically analyzing the mechanisms, institutional dynamics and measurable impacts of these frameworks on political, social and environmental outcomes.
This conference invites empirical, and theoretical reflections on governance structures, environmental paradigms, philosophical ideas, and particularly the boundaries and categories that have historically defined them. How do dichotomies such as reason/nature influence politics, ethics, and existence? How might they enable or hinder the possibilities for coexistence, equity, and resilience? Which new categories emerge in the current political dynamics and how do we best understand them? Can we see societies, institutions and various publics adapt to current social challenges? What alternative paradigms, practices, and methodologies can illuminate pathways toward interconnected futures that extend beyond human perspectives?
We encourage participants to engage with these inquiries, drawing from and contributing to interdisciplinary conversations that imagine a world where flourishing extends across entities, species, systems, and ideas.
- Conference Call
- Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2025
- Paper submission deadline: March 31, 2025
- Contact: adc2025@ceu.edu
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19TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
April 17-19, 2024 - CEU Vienna Campus
CEU invites paper proposals for its 19th Annual Doctoral Conference: (RE)SEARCHING POWER: Emerging approaches across disciplines.
The conference provides a professional, supportive, and international environment for PhD students and early career researchers in various fields of the humanities and social sciences to discuss their works in progress, establish formal or informal networks, and initiate future collaborative research. The aim is to share our understanding of power through different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies by discussing research and practice in terms of institutional, colonial, racialized, gendered, economic, behavioural, or biopolitical power, amongst others.
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18TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
The theme this year was Bursting Bubbles: The politics in crisis and the politics of crisis.
April 3-5, 2023 - CEU Vienna Campus
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17TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Central European University’s Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations invites paper proposals for its 17th Annual Doctoral Conference: POLITICS OF UNCERTAINTIES.
We live in a time of uncertainties. The impact of the covid-19 pandemic puts into question previous habits, assumptions, theoretical frameworks, methods, leaving us with a sense of dismay and disarray, facing the fragility of old and comfortable certainties. But the awareness of such precariousness produces an open space for new practices and ideas. Therefore, we recognize that times like this could be the most fertile and fascinating times for scholars, and for young scholars especially, who are working on theoretical, empirical, or methodological issues, and are willing to share and confront their outputs. Thus, we welcome scientific contributions reflecting on individual, national, transnational, and global challenges driven by the loss of certainties and by unprecedented changes.
Vienna and online, 6-8 April 2022
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16TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Central European University’s Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations had its first virtual conference
The theme this year is: Politics in the 21st Century. Thematically, the conference proposes an appreciation of (re)searching the ‘political’ in the face of 21st-century challenges. Resisting the scholarly urge to particularise these challenges now, we seek to provoke discussions about continuities and discontinuities in Politics as a discipline and politics as the very phenomena we study in varied contexts.
Zoom, 7–9 April 2021
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15TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
The conference aims to bring together diverse submissions dealing with relevant questions, puzzles and dilemmas from Political Theory, Political Science, Public Policy and IR in an effort to showcase the richness of the Social Sciences.
The conference was programmed to take place in March 2020 but was cancelled due to COVID
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14TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
The conference provides doctoral students of program the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects and to refine their theoretical and methodological approaches. Post 1st-year PhD students can submit Workshop/Joint Session Proposals.
Budapest, 27-29 March, 2019
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13TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
The conference aims to bring together diverse submissions dealing with relevant questions, puzzles and dilemmas from Political Theory, Political Science, Public Policy and IR in an effort to showcase the richness of the Social Sciences.
Budapest, 21-23 March, 2018
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12TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
The 12th Annual Doctoral Conference is organized around the theme "Politics in Illiberal Times".
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11TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Doctoral School of Political Science, Central European University
Budapest, 5-6 April, 2016.
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10TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Doctoral School of Political Science, Central European University
Budapest, 20-21 April, 2015.
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9TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Doctoral School of Political Science, Central European University
Budapest 24-25 April, 2014
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8TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Doctoral School of Political Science, Central European University
Budapest 25-26 April, 2013
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7TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Hosted by the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations at CEU and the Institute of Political Science at the Corvinus University of Budapest.
Budapest 25-27 April, 2012
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6TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
The conference was jointly hosted by the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations at CEU and the Institute of Political Science at the Corvinus University of Budapest.
Budapest 28-29 April, 2011
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5TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Corvinus University of Budapest / Institute of Political Science
Central European University / Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations
Budapest 6-7 April, 2010
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4TH ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Corvinus University of Budapest / Institute of Political Science
Central European University / Department of Political Science
Budapest 30-31 March, 2009
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3RD ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Central European University / Department of Political Science
Special Guest: Corvinus University
Budapest 31 March - 2 April, 2008
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2ND ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Central European University / Department of Political Science
Budapest 2-3 April, 2007
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1ST ANNUAL DOCTORAL CONFERENCE
Central European University / Department of Political Science
Budapest 13-14 April, 2006
