Monday, September 14, 2009

World Poverty: Explanations and Responsibilities

Thomas Pogge, Yale University

4:30pm, Porter 100, Gregg Hall

While world income has grown at an impressive rate, the share of the poorest half has sunk below 1.8% percent of world income. Severe poverty persists in many poorer countries, causing about one third of all human deaths (some 18 million annually) and blighting billions of lives with hunger and disease. What role do global institutional arrangements, such as the rules of the WTO Treaty, play in the persistence of severe poverty? And how does the causation of poverty affect the responsibility of citizens in affluent countries to work for its eradication?

Thomas Pogge is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Declarations of Dependence: Labor, Personhood, and Welfare in South Africa and Beyond

James Ferguson, Stanford University

4:30pm, Porter 100, Gregg Hall

South Africa has in recent decades gone through a wrenching transformation from a labor-scarce society to a labor-surplus one. Labor scarcity through most of the 19th and 20th centuries led to forms of social solidarity and social personhood that had significant continuities with the pre-colonial past (continuities that are obscured by conventional narratives that emphasize the rise of capitalism as a complete and comprehensive break with the past). In recent decades, however, economic restructuring has radically reduced demand for low-skilled, manual labor, and mass unemployment has become a durable structural feature of South African society. This new situation is more radically different from the past than is generally recognized, and calls for new ways of thinking about social membership, work, "dependency", and social assistance. It is suggested that the South African experience reveals, in an extreme and clarifying form, a set of processes that are occurring in many other parts of the world. Better understanding such processes may help us to find our way past some of the current impasses in progressive politics.

James Ferguson is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Is Water 'The New Oil'?:  The New Water Monopolies and the World's Poor

Karen Piper, University of Missouri-Columbia

4:30pm, Porter 100, Gregg Hall

The world's water supplies are gradually being bought up by a handful of multinational companies, including Suez, Vivendi, and Bechtel. These companies, in turn, are supported by World Bank policies that force poorer countries to privatize their water supplies. Piper will look at the consequences of water privatization today, sharing her research in India and South Africa and exploring the stark disparity between World Bank rhetoricand conditions on the ground, or what cartographers call "ground truth."Facing either water cut-offs or being flooded out, local people have taken drastic measures to gain access to the media or to simply continue their water supply and survive, including attempted mass drowning, extended fasts, monkey-wrenching, and riots. Piper will look at the way in which these forms of resistance are changing the shape of development discourse today and shedding light on the gap between "development" and "disaster."

Karen Piper is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Moral and Political Challenges of Climate Change

Dale Jamieson, New York University

4:30pm, Porter 100, Gregg Hall

In order to see anthropogenic climate change as clearly involving moral wrongs and global injustices, we will have to revise some central concepts in these domains. Moreover, climate change threatens another value ("respect for nature") that cannot easily be taken up by concerns of global justice or moral responsibility.

Dale Jamieson is the Director of Environmental Studies, Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law, New York University.

March 25-April 10, 2010

Faces of Globalization, International Film Festival

Thursday, March 25, 2010

NGOs, Civil Society, and Human Rights in Egypt and the Middle East

Maha Abdel-Rahman, University of Cambridge

4:30pm, Porter 100, Gregg Hall

Maha Abdel-Rahman is the University Lecturer in Development Studies at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Global Health and the Global Economic Crisis

Solomon Benatar, University of Cape Town, University of Toronto

4:30pm, Porter 100, Gregg Hall

The evolving global financial crisis reveals both the fragile state of the global economy and the major long-term implications of an increasingly unfair global economy for global health and human flourishing. We are also at a critical juncture in world history in relation to understanding and endeavoring to counteract the adverse effects of modern life on climate change and our natural environment, which also has major implications for health. If the growing world-wide interest and apparent commitment to global health and environmental security are to have a significantly constructive impact it will be necessary for us become more deeply introspective about our value system and reconsider what needs to be done to ensure long-term and secure human flourishing in an interdependent world. It is proposed that belief in endless economic growth and emphasis on an entirely medicalized approach to health needs to be replaced by a vision of healthy human life that is achievable and sustainable for a greater proportion of the world’s population.

Solomon R. Benatar is the Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Director Bioethics Centre, University of Cape Town, and Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto.