Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Announcing Dr. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro as a 2011 Plenary Speaker

Published on March 2, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 1 Comment Tags: .

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro will join us in Rio de Janeiro as a plenary speaker for the 2011 Global Studies Conference.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro holds his Ph. D. in Anthropology (City University of New York, 1988). He is currently a full Professor of Anthropology in the University of Brasilia; Level 1A Research Fellow of Brazil’s National Council of Scientific and Technological Develoment (CNPq). He was a visiting professor in several universities and research centers in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. He has done research and written on topics such as development, environmentalism, international migration, cyberculture, globalization and transnationalism. His doctoral dissertation on the construction of the Yacyreta Dam won the National Association of Graduate Programs in the Social Sciences 1989 Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation and was published in Argentina, Brazil and the United States. He has written and edited 14 volumes in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and more than 100 chapters and articles in different journals and books in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the U.S., in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Japanese, French and German. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (New York); Advisory Editor of Current Anthropology (Chicago); president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology; a founder and the first chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He is a co-chair of the Committee on World Anthropologies of the AAA and serves on more than 20 editorial boards of journals in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, including the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Journal des Anthropologues and Alteridades. His last books are the edited volume (with Arturo Escobar) “World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power” (Oxford/New York: Berg Publishers, 2006) and “The Capital of Hope”, in Portuguese, about the construction of Brasilia from the workers’ point-of-view (Brasilia: Edunb, 2008).

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website .

Elisa P. Reis to Join Fourth Annual Global Studies Conference

Published on March 2, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 1 Comment Tags: .

Please welcome Professor Elisa P. Reis to our plenary speaker line-up for the Fourth Annual Global Studies Conference.

Elisa Reis is a professor of Political Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds her PhD in Political Science (MIT, US 1980); MA (1972) and BA (1967), Brazil; Post-graduate diploma in development sociology, ILADES, Chile (1968). Professor Reis is a fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) as well as a visiting professor at University of California at San Diego, Columbia University, MIT and Ludwig Maximilians Universitat. Munich.

Author of more than 100 articles in Brazilian and international periodicals, some of her latest work includes “New Ways of Relating Authority and Solidarity: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations”, in The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology, Kalekin and Denis (eds.), Sage, 2009. Among her books, Elite Perceptions of Poverty and Inequality (ed. with M.Moore) Zed, 2005 has been very influential in poverty studies.

Some of Professor Reis’ selected administrative experiences include Secretary of the Brazilian Sociological Society (SBS), President of the National Association for the Social Sciences (ANPOCS), Vice-president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (current), Chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Network for Studies on Social Inequality (NIED) (current), and Vice-president for Latin America of the Comparative Research on Poverty (CROP).

For more information on our plenary speakers, please visit our website .

Business As Usual: The Next Wall Street Collapse

Published on February 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

by Jonathan Kirshner, in Boston Review

The economy teetered on the brink but did not fall into the abyss. The bailouts, the stimulus, and adequate international political comity —each imperfect, even ugly—nevertheless prevented what was otherwise very likely: another Great Depression.

But the collective sigh of relief and overconfident pronouncements emanating from Wall Street and Washington obscure the fact that we have done little to avert an even worse crisis in the future. We may have stanched the bleeding, but the underlying disease—a culture, ideology, and political economy of uninhibited finance—remains. Indeed, by tiptoeing around the real issues we may ultimately make things worse.

To read more…

Why Trade Has Survived the Crisis

Published on February 24, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Jagdish Bhagwati, in The American Interest

The current crisis is twofold: it affects Wall Street and Main Street — that is, both finance and the real economy. It has also been accompanied by a sharp decline in trade. The reasons for this decline — manifested not only in absolute trade volumes but also in the decline of trade to national income (GNP) — involve factors other than protectionism, which has been held at bay in several ways. This fact makes Niall Ferguson’s pessimism seem alarmist.

Given that the ratio of trade to GNP rose strikingly in the decades of growing incomes prior to the crisis, one might expect that it would decrease during a recession in which incomes and consumers demand are on the decline. There are two reasons that explain this reverse phenomenon. First, product components increasingly are outsourced to other parts of the world and then assembled in one place. Thus, even if the value of the final product changes little, the trade in components needed to manufacture that product will rise.

To read more…

Reading Strauss in Beijing

Published on February 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Mark Lilla, in The New Republic

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at the University of Chicago, I had my first Chinese graduate students, a couple of earnest Beijingers who had come to the Committee on Social Thought hoping to bump into the ghost of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who established his career at the university. Given the mute deference they were accustomed to giving their professors, it was hard to make out just what these young men were looking for, in Chicago or Strauss. They attended courses and worked diligently, but otherwise kept to themselves. They were in but not of Hyde Park.

To read more…

Announcing Myrian Santos as Plenary Speaker

Published on February 13, 2011 in Conference and Newsletter. 1 Comment Tags: .

Please welcome Professor Myrian Santos who will be joining the 2011 Global Studies Conference in Rio de Janeiro, 18-20 July.

Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos is Associate Professor of Sociology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She gained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, New York, in 1994. Her research interests relate to collective memory, sociological and cultural theory. She is currently developing research on collective memory and trauma in prisons. Her publications include several books and articles on social theory, museum exhibits, popular culture, carnival festivities, slavery, race relations and, more recently, violence.

For more information on the conference and our plenary speakers, please visit our website.

Jorge Castañeda to Join 2011 Global Studies Conference

Published on February 10, 2011 in Conference and Newsletter. 1 Comment Tags: .

We are pleased to announce that Jorge Castañeda will be joining us at the 2011 International Conference on Global Studies as a plenary speaker.

Jorge Castañeda was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He attempted to run for President of Mexico as an independent candidate in 2006. Castañeda is a renowned public intellectual, political scientist, and prolific writer, with an interest in Mexican and Latin American politics, comparative politics and US-Mexican and U.S.-Latin American relations.

Born in Mexico City in 1953, Dr. Castañeda received a B. A. from Princeton University and a B. A. from Université de Paris-I (Pantheon-Sorbonne), an M. A. from the Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes, and his Ph. D. in Economic History from the University of Paris-I.

He taught at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) from 1978 through 2004, at Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley and (since 1997) at NYU. Dr. Castañeda was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1985-87) and was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant Recipient (1989-1991).

To read more or to find out about our other plenary speakers, please visit our website.

Obamaenon: The Gospel of 'Glocal' Change, Hope, Understanding, and Leadership for a Networking World

Published on January 19, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Obamaenon: The Gospel of ‘Glocal’ Change, Hope, Understanding, and Leadership for a Networking World by Zekeh Gbotokuma is now available from the On Globalization imprint.

The amazing life and career of the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama have inspired millions of people worldwide. They have made any information about this charismatic leader and Nobel laureate newsworthy. That is why there is a Japanese impersonator of Obama and France’s immigrants hope for their French Obama. OBAMÆNON is – unlike other publications about Obama – a must read book, because:

  • It functions as a button that allows the reader to replay, rewind, forward, pause, reflect on and learn from some of the euphoricmoments of Obama’s journey and rise to global super stardom.
  • Its reading is a rehersal for community organizing, bridge building, and global leadership.
  • It is a food for thought about global thinking and local action based on mutual interests, respect and human dignity.
  • It is a passport to global citizenship.
  • It is a recipe for developing a yes we can attitude, the art and strategy of winning.
  • It is a call to believe in oneself, in the power of audacious hope, collective effort, and diplomacy.
  • It is an invaluable contribution to the Obamarama and Obamamania.
  • It is an Obamafying work written by a global citizen and educator.

The Fading Dream of Europe

Published on January 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

By Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely), from The New York Review of Books:

In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream.
The schoolbooks of my childhood were texts designed to teach us why a line was to be drawn between the state and religion, why it had been necessary to shut down the lodges of the dervishes, or why we’d had to abandon the Arab alphabet for the Latin. But they were also overflowing with questions that aimed to unlock the secret of Europe’s great power and success.  More here…

Better World Flux: Revealing the Patterns in the World Bank Open Data

Published on January 14, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From  Information Aesthetics :

Better World Flux [betterworldflux.com] is an impressive interactive data visualization created as an entry for the World Bank Apps for Development competition. The project aims to raise awareness for the UN Millennium Development Goals by letting users visualize and share the valuable stories that are hidden in the World Bank Open Data.

Flux basically consists of a powerful histogram view that summarizes the world state for a given year, with the color green representing ‘good’, and red being ‘bad’. Within each color band, a number of countries are aggregated. The width of Flux ribbon corresponds to the total number of people living in those countries. Each country has a color based on a composite score calculated as the geometric mean of the user-selected indicators for any given year. These indicators can include aspects like ‘Average years of total schooling’, ‘Happiness’, ‘Ratio of female to male primary enrollment’, ‘Access to Water’, or ‘Prevalence of HIV’. Users can thus choose the specific indicators and countries, explore the resulting histogram for trends and patterns over time, and share the resulting visualizations online. More…