Associate Professor of EАGI Maxat Kassen participated in the annual symposium in California (USA)

Associate Professor of Political Science Maxat Kassen participated in the annual symposium as a panel chair in the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, California (USA).

In early September 2017, Associate Professor of the Eurasian Humanities Institute Maxat Kassen participated in the annual symposium of the American Political Science Association as a chair of the panel in San Francisco, California (USA). This prestigious scientific forum was attended by more than 5 thousand scientists from such world famous universities as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Cambridge, California, Chicago, New York and many other institutes and research centers.

The annual congress of the American Political Science Association is a global political platform in discussing promising research areas and exchanging experience and ideas in the development of political technologies in various fields and spheres. The political association itself was founded in 1903 and one of its first chairmen was the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and prominent politician Woodrow Wilson, who later became the 28th president of the United States.

As part of the work of the association, the international scientific symposium is held annually in late August and early September right before lectures start in universities, which gathers eminent scientists from more than 100 countries to discuss various issues in the development of political science in general, and the world of politics, in particular, in all its manifestations. This year, this global scientific forum was devoted to the study of the legitimacy of political power.

In June 2017, Maxat Kassen received an invitation from the organizers of the conference to participate in this representative scientific forum and act as a chair of panel and expert in the field of e-government.

The event was specifically organized for political scientists who studies the application of political and innovative technologies in the sphere , especially in ensuring the legitimacy of power structures and promoting various political campaigns aimed at increasing the awareness of civil society about the purposes and tasks of power structures at various levels, including using information and communication technologies in public policy, national, regional and local political elections, as well as in researching the impact of new technologies of manipulation on public opinion via mass media, the direct participation of citizens in public policy, the prospects for the democratization of political processes in different regions of the world, etc.

The panel on “Digital Political Participation”, in which Maxat Kassen served as chair and expert, was devoted to the study of actual and promising directions in the field, especially in researching the latest digital technologies in public policy, various political social media platforms, big and open data, e-government, etc. Prominent scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and many other countries and from such prestigious universities and research centers as Oxford University, London King College, the University of Canberra, University of Iowa, etc., took part in the work of the panel, which was then followed by the extensive scientific discussion (the official program of the conference could be found here).

Also, as part of the scientific trip on the way back home from the United States, on September 6-9, 2017,our scholar also visited and met with the faculty of the Icelandic University in Reykjavik (Iceland), the Royal Institute of Technology and the University of Stockholm as well as with the researchers from the e-GovLab (the Kista city, Sweden). During the meeting, he discussed the prospects for scientific cooperation in studying the influence of digital technologies on the course of political and economic processes in various regions of the world, in particular, in the development of information societies in Sweden and Kazakhstan. Also, he negotiated the possibilities of implementing mutually beneficial scientific projects in this field.

Maxat Kassen is a former Fulbright Visiting Scholar (USA). In 2011-2012, he completed a scientific internship at the University of Illinois in Chicago (USA) and the Summer Institute at Oxford University in 2011 (Great Britain). He read lectures on the development of e-government phenomena in various research centers and universities in the United States, Europe and other regions, in particular, at the University of Massachusetts, the Department of Political Science, Amherst (2011), the National Center for Digital Government of the United States (December 2011), University of Woodbury, Los Angeles, California (2012), Moscow State University (2014), etc.

Maxat Kassen is an author of two books entitled “Understanding systems of e-government: e-federalism and e-centralism in the United States and Kazakhstan” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015) and “E-government in Kazakhstan: a case study of multidimensional phenomena” (Routledge, 2016) and has more than 40 academic works on digital politics published in various high impact factor journals in the United States, Europe, Russia and Kazakhstan.