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UPCOMING EVENTS:

GSA/NA 2011 Conference
University of Charleston
West Virginia

GSA/NA 2012 Conference
University of Victoria
British Columbia, Canada


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Update: March 13, 2010
CALL for PAPERS: GSA North America 2010 Conference

GLOBAL CRISES AND BEYOND
May 7-9, 2010


University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

College of Education
1310 S. 6th St., Champaign, IL 61820
phone: (217) 333-0960
fax: (217) 333-5847
email: info@education.illinois.edu

Now accepting 100-word abstracts on all topics related to globalization. Send your abstract to Jerry Harris at gharris234@comcast.net by April 19, 2010.

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Call for Papers

Contemporary Social Movements and the Social Forum Process:
From the Global to the Local

June 21, 2010
University of Michigan’s Detroit Center
Detroit, MI

This one-day research conference seeks to draw together scholars engaged in research on the social forum process in order to strengthen our understanding of this important political process, especially U.S. activists participation within it, as well as to strengthen our methodological tools.

The World Social Forum (WSF) process represents one of the most important political developments of our time because it has encouraged the mobilization and expansion of transnational and other alliances among progressive social justice activists. Social Forums provide “open spaces” where a variety of social actors—grassroots activists, staff within unions and non-governmental organizations, policy experts, students, intellectuals, journalists, and artists—from around the world, or particular regions, can meet, exchange ideas, and coordinate actions. While participants are divided in terms of priorities and preferred goals and tactics and work within various locales, the Social Forum process has significantly helped to bridge geographical, political, and social and cultural divides among participants in the global justice movement and to strengthen various transnational campaigns for social justice.

In its nearly ten years of existence, the WSF process has mobilized millions of individuals in well over a hundred countries, encouraging popular discussion and debate as well as action to address some of the most pressing conflicts of our day. The fourth WSF meeting to occur in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005, drew 155,000 registered participants from 135 countries and a wide range of social movements. While the 2007 WSF meeting in Nairobi, Kenya drew about half this amount, it was still remarkably large given that it was the first WSF meeting to take place in Africa. Meanwhile, hundreds of regional, thematic, and local Social Forums have been organized; although this trend has been mainly concentrated within Latin America and Western Europe, the spread of sub-global Social Forums is now reaching other parts of the globe, including North America. The first U.S. Social Forum, held in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2007, was an historic meeting drawing together about 10,000 social justice activists, who were very diverse both in terms of their movement and organizational affiliations as well as their race and ethnicity. The second USSF meeting will be held on June 22-26, 2010 in Detroit, Michigan, presenting a historic opportunity to study this exciting political process in action.

This one-day conference seeks to bring together graduate students, faculty, and other scholars that are studying the social forum process to exchange ideas and prepare for the research that they will undertake while attending the 2010 meeting of the USSF. Scholars interested in participating are invited to submit abstracts, papers, or workshop proposals on the following kinds of topics:

  • research findings about social forum participants and/or events;


  • how participants (organizational or individual) organize social forum activities and prepare for their participation within them;


  • the impacts of social forum participation on individuals, organizations, or social movements (in terms of their ideas, social networks, action plans, etc.);


  • political debates taking place at the social forum or surrounding the social forum process;


  • the emergence of new kinds of political ideas and practices among social forum participants;


  • the relationships between scholars and activists in the social forum process;


  • new methods and strategies for studying social movements and the social forum process;

Please e-mail your submission by 4/1/10 to: ussf.conference@gmail.com. All submissions should include the names, institutional affiliations, and contact information for the authors, including their e-mail address, phone number, and preferred mailing address.


NEW!

The Nation in the Global Era: Conflict and Transformation includes papers presented at the 2008 GSA North American Conference held at Pace University in New York City. This volume offers unique perspectives into a range of important current topics for both activists and scholars concerned with globalization. The articles combine the study of globalization as an integrated world system with the specifics of how individual nations and groups are inserted into the larger economic, social, cultural and political patterns. This essential approach seeks out those forces that create a shared world system, yet understands the multiple levels and variances under which that system develops.

Explore the Table of Contents


Order directly from the GSA and get the book for the special low price of $25.00 (while supplies last)!



PAST GSA NORTH AMERICA CONFERENCES

2009: Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Globalization and the Struggle for Peace and Human Rights

Date: May 8 - 10, 2009


Download the Conference Program.

Download the Conference Abstracts.



2008: Pace University, New York
The Nation in the Global Era: Nationalism and Globalization in Conflict and Transition

Date: June 6 - 8, 2008




Download the Conference Program.

Download the Conference Abstracts.

Keynote Speakers







2007: University of California, Irvine
The Contested Terrains of Globalization

Date: May 17 - 20, 2007

GSA 2007 Conference Poster

Download the Conference Program.

Download the Conference Abstracts.

Download the conference poster (11"x17").

Download the conference poster (8.5"x13").









2006: DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois
Alternative Globalizations

Date: May 12 - 14, 2006

Read the Alternative Globalizations Conference Abstracts

See the Alternative Globalizations Conference Schedule




2005: University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Crosscurrents of Global Social Justice: Class, Gender and Race

Date: May 13 - 15, 2005


Download this conference poster.(PDF:993kB)



2004: Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
Globalization, Empire and Resistance

Date: April 23 - 25, 2004

In 2004 Brandeis University hosted the third North American GSA conference on Globalization, Empire and Resistance. It was a progressive conference embracing a variety of critical, and radical perspectives on globalization. Many leading scholars from all over the world explored the many effects of globalization-as well as alternative visions. Featured speakers included:

  • Seymour Melman


  • One of America’s most respected scholars on capitalism and U.S. militarism from Columbia University spoke on “The Permanent War Economy”

  • Leo Panitch


  • Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University, Toronto, co-editor of the Socialist Register, and co-author of Global Capitalism and American Empire spoke on “Global Capitalism and American Empire”

  • Sam Gindin


  • Packer visiting Chair in Social Justice at York University, Toronto, former head of research and assistant to the President, Canadian Auto Workers’ Union, and co-author of Global Capitalism and American Empire spoke on “Labor Resistance in the Era of Globalization"

  • William Tabb


  • Professor of economics at Queens College, New York, Monthly Review contributor and author of "The Amoral Elephant" spoke on "The Global State and Economic Institutions"

  • Jose Maria Sison


  • Former senior research fellow and professor at the University of the Philippines, co-founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines spoke via video satellite from Holland on “War, Imperialism, and Resistance from Below”

  • Leslie Sklair


  • From the London School of Economics, and author of "The Transnational Capitalist Class" spoke on “Globalization, Imperialism and the International System”

  • Edna Bonacich


  • Professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of "Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry" spoke on “Labor, Immigration and Global Production”




2003: University of California - Santa Barbara
Towards a Critical Globalization Studies: Continued Debates, New Directions, and Neglected Topics

Date: May 1 - 4, 2003

See images from the conference.

Some one hundred scholars, public intellectuals, and global justice activists from around the world gathered at UCSB on May 1 through 4, 2003 to discuss the future of globalization. Participants came from Armenia, Canada, Ecuador, France, Holland, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay, among other countries.

The "Towards a Critical Globalization Studies: Continued Debates, New Directions, and Neglected Topics" conference successfully examined the development of global studies in the academy and explored the bridges between global studies and the global justice movement.




2002: Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois
Globalisation and Social Justice

Date: May 10 - 11, 2002

In May of 2002 the very first annual conference of the North American GSA was held at Loyola University in Chicago. Jointly sponsored by the GSA and the department of sociology at Loyola University, the conference theme was ‘Globalisation and Social Justice’. It proved to be a highly successful event with over fifty papers and workshops, covering a broad spectrum of themes concerning issues of global social justice. The keynote speakers were also excellent and included Leslie Sklair, one of GSA/UK’s vice presidents, who played a prominent role at the conference as a whole.

The quality of the papers was extremely high and they generated many hours of intensive and exciting discussion and argument. Academics from an impressively wide range of disciplines and research areas came from far and wide across the United States. However, there were also a number of speakers and participants who were political activists, such as current or former trade union organizers or people presently involved in various fair trade campaigns linked partly to student protests around the campuses of the US.

Despite the clearly focused sense of realism among the conference participants concerning the vast problems of social division, social exclusion and conflict that are currently only too evident in the world at the present time and the anxieties about the quality of world political – and especially American – leadership, an encouraging atmosphere of guarded optimism in relation to the real possibility of increasingly effective alliances and political struggles against global poverty was also quite evident.

It was gratifying to encounter quite a number of GSA members who managed to attend the Chicago conference including three from Britain, one from Canada and three from the USA. One of the key events scheduled at the conference was the inauguration of the North American chapter of the GSA. The first GSA branch or chapter to be established outside the UK. More than twenty people attended this special meeting and after some discussion the new branch was duly set-up. What was particularly encouraging was the number of postgraduate students who were prepared to become involved in helping to establish the new North American branch of the USA and, moreover, presence among these postgraduates and other participants who were people living in the USA but who had strong links with countries in Central America and South East Asia. They quite rightly insisted that right from the outset the new branch must concern itself as deeply as possible with the problems and themes of Southern peoples and countries if be a truly global association are to have any meaning.

From the Global Studies Association Newsletter, Issue 2, July 2002
Paul Kennedy, GSA Secretary

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