DESMOND TUTU COMING TO NEW YORK

The Center for Comparative Literature and Society will be hosting a conference on International Civil Society, World Governance, and the State on March 30 - April 1, 2005. The keynote event, to be held on the evening of March 30 in the Rotunda of Columbia University's Low Memorial Library, will feature Archbishop Desmond Tutu and renowned writer Toni Morrison in dialogue, with Professors Mary Robinson, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Dr. Shashi Tharoor as discussants. This dialogue will be followed by a two day conference (March 31-April 1) in the Teatro of the Italian Academy for Advanced Study, 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Registration is required for the keynote event through our website. For further information, please visit www.columbia.edu/cu/ccls or contact ccls@columbia.edu.

This dialogue, between a literary figure and one concerned with justice in its broadest understanding will, we hope, prepare us to think about the global role of comparative literature in a multilingual world, which is both too complex and too turbulent to be understood only through the methodologies of the social sciences.

International Civil Society and world governance are accepted by many as the only means to a just world under globalization. Yet there are critiques of this position across the political and cultural spectrum as well. Academic scholarship on civil society discourse seems set apart from these debates, and activist work is often undertaken without consideration of long-term consequences. Gender, which is deeply implicated, in globalization, in military and humanitarian intervention, in networking through information technology and the like, is inadequately addressed in many discussions of civil society or world governance, reduced to a side issue or a self-evident area of interference.

Our conference promises to build bridges and to foster integrative analyses, by bringing advocates or critics of civil society or world governance together with literary and cultural workers and scholars engaged in research on these topics. It will draw speakers from all perspectives, establish connections between scholarship and world developments, across the disciplines and the North-South divide. We are inviting academics as well as people from outside the university, writers, those engaged with policy, and activists more directly involved in the field. Questions of gender will be involved at all levels.

This event is made possible thanks to the support of the Ford Foundation, the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, The Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Conference Participants

Plenary Session

Desmond Tutu: human rights, involvement of the disenfranchised and oppressed in the new nation.

Toni Morrison: author, imagining slavery and understanding the historically disenfranchised in the context of the new multicultural America; placing women in our consideration of the history of social injustice and the hope for justice.

Mary Robinson: Former President of Ireland, former High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN: global human rights, ethical globalization, inter-cultural dialogue among women of the world.

Amartya Sen: Nobel Laureate, Harvard University: early involvement with feminist questioning of famine policy, active participation in global justice and bringing non-violence to identity politics; fighting for human well-being as opposed to mere economic growth.

Joseph Stiglitz: Nobel Laureate, Columbia University: active critic of the askew policy of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund while in office as Chief Economist of the World Bank; direct involvement in world governance policy.

Shashi Tharoor: pro-active United Nations under-secretary, close to Kofi Annan; fiction writer with deep understanding of the tribulations of religious fundamentalism in India and elsewhere.

Conference

Farida Akhter: Executive Director of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives), Bangladesh; front line activist for reproductive health and womenâ€™s empowerment. Also runs the only womenâ€™s bookstore and restaurant in Dhaka.

Lynne Alice: International Relations, Deakin University (Australia). Spent 2001-2003 in Kosovo where she taught sociology and politics as part of a team of international professors helping with the reconstruction of Prishtina University.

Andrew Arato: Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, New School University: The Frankfurt School; the history of social thought; theories of East European societies and social movements. Sociology of rights; theory of society-type societies; constitutions and democracy.

Anannya Bhattacharjee: writer and activist in social justice, Program Officer at the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program, and the former Executive Director of CAAAV (Organizing Asian Communities); founder and former Executive Coordinator of Sakhi for South Asian Women; and co-founder of the SAMAR Collective (a South Asian media resource) both based in the New York area; sustained participant in World Social Forum

Jean Cohen: Professor of Political Science, Columbia University. A specialist in contemporary political and legal theory with particular research interests in democratic theory, critical theory, civil society, gender and the law.

Jean-Marc Coicaud: Head of the New York office of U.N. University; former Senior Academic Officer in the Peace and Governance Programme at UNU in Tokyo (1996-2003). Current project focuses on the politics of international solidarity.

Dana Fisher: Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University. Political and environmental sociology. Presently, projects that explore the ways that civil society participates in political processes-on the local, national and international levels

Jean Franco: Professor Emerita, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Major Latin American gender theorist; former director of the Latin American Institute at Columbia; recipient of many honors from Latin America as a thinker on social justice.

John Harriss: Professor, London School of Economics. expertise in economic sociology, political sociology, political anthropology, social capital and civil society, the politics and political economy of India and social and political aspects of globalization: agrarian change; agrarian institutions; development policy; development studies; informal sector; NGO; organization; political economy; rural development; rural poverty; social history; third world; urban labor.

Cori Hayden: Assistant Professor, University of California-Berkeley. Cultural anthropologist working on the contemporary biosciences in the Americas and the U.K. Her work has primarily explored how claims to and about biological material and knowledge help shape contemporary social imaginaries of participation and marginalization. Recent ethnography tracks relationships among 'local' communities, public sector scientists, and drug companies involved in controversial benefit-sharing agreements.

Amina Mama: Chair of Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa; provides intellectual and strategic leadership to the African Gender Institute, where she also served Director (1999-2002); initiated and currently convenes the â€˜Gender and Transformationâ€™ graduate programme in gender studies at the University of Cape Town, a network of teachers and researchers working with gender in African universities.

Mahmood Mamdani: Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the Department of Anthropology, and the Director of the Institute of African Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Dynamic commentator on the War on Terror and the loss of civil liberties.

Farhad Mazhar: major activist leader in ecological agriculture, poet, and investigative journalist, Bangladeshi freedom fighter

Elsa Stamatopoulou: Acting Director of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, New York Office; travels globally to participate in indigenous cultural rights

Kendall Thomas: Nash Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School: constitutional law and critical race theory; queer theory as it intersects with African-American identity politics

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