Social Agency in a Globalizing World: Where Now?

A public forum presented by Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre, UTS and the Institute for Culture and Society, UWS

When: 22 July 2015, 9.30am–8pm
Where: Lecture Room 4K, UTS Library, Quay Street, Ultimo
RSVP: Please register online
Contact: James Goodman

Globalising forces create new power sources and unleash new political possibilities. Global contestations reconfigure ideologies and political communities across the political spectrum. How has this process developed under the current neoliberal wave of market globalism, now thirty years in the making? Looking back, across the ebb and flow of antagonism, what can we look forward to? What might active political agency look like in the Anthropocene?

This public forum draws an extraordinary group of activists and scholars together to explore these issues from a variety of perspectives to generate a deepened understanding of present-day dynamics of global political contestation.

Program

Exhibition

RANA PLAZA: MURDER NOT TRAGEDY.
A photographic exhibition from Drik Gallery, Dhaka, Bangladesh, supported by the Australia Bangladesh Solidarity Network.

Public Lecture

THE HUMAN CONDITION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Dipesh Chakrabarty, 6.00 pm, Building 2, level 3, Room 17 (UTS Tower) CB02.03.17.

Participant details

Virginia Barratt, University of Western Sydney’s Writing and Society Centre. Her work in the area of experimental poetics remediates certain embodied practices from pathological narratives, describing new philosophical and strategic spaces of urgency and agency. She has worked in the fields of gender and technology, performance, writing and academia. She was involved in Bentley Blockade and is an activist choosing to live and work in an ethics of sustainability. Her poetic and performative works are forthcoming: Stein and Wilde and Writing from Below.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago. His books include Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2015); Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; 2008); Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002); Cosmopolitanism (Duke, 2000); From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford, 2007). He is currently working on two books, provisionally entitled The Climate of History (Chicago) and History and the Time of the Present (Duke).

Kathy Gibson, Institute for Cultural and Society, University of Western Sydney. Her books include The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Blackwell, 1996); A Postcapitalist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

James Goodman, UTS. His books include Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy(Sage, 2013), and Climate Upsurge: An Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics (Routledge 2014); Crisis, Movement, Management: Globalising Dynamics (Routledge, 2014); Disorder and the Disinformation Society (Routledge, 2015).

Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne. His books include Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne University Press, 2015); Waiting (Melbourne University Press, 2009); White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Pluto Press, 1998; Routledge, 2000).

Paul James, Institute for Cultural Research, UWS. His books includeUrban Sustainability in Theory and Practice: Circles of Sustainability (Routledge, 2015): Sustainable Development, Sustainable Communities (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism (Sage, 2006); Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism (Pluto, 2005); Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (Sage, 1996); and 16 volumes mapping the field of globalization in series called ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ (Sage 2004–2014).

Kanchi Kohli, independent researcher, New Delhi. She brings experience of close to 15 years in environment and forest governance-related issues. A campaign and research advisor to national-level networks and organizations related to impacts of industrial expansion as well as issues related to agro-biodiversity. She regularly lectures and gives presentations at several national and international universities and research centers.

Manju Menon, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and visitor at the Anthropology Department Yale University. She researches environmental law-making and implementation processes related to infrastructure projects. She was awarded the Nehru-Fulbright fellowship in 2011; is a member of Kalpavriksh, an environment research group since 2000; and author for the popular media.

Francesca da Rimini is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Technology Sydney (Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology). Her work over the past 25 years as a cultural activist, writer and academic has employed a range of creative platforms and modalities to investigate the radical political, social and psychological potential of information communication technologies. She is a co-author of Disinformation Society: The Dynamics of Networks and Software (Routledge, 2015).

Ariel Salleh, Political Economy, University of Sydney. Her books include Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (Pluto Press/Spinifex, 2009); and Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (Zed Books and St Martins Press, 1997).

Manfred Steger,Political Science, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His books include Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy (Sage, 2013); The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (OUP, 2008.); Globalization: A very short Introduction (Oxford, 2003, 2009); Globalism: The New Market Ideology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, 2009); Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism (Cambridge, 1997).