Center for Research on Women and Social Justice

Executing Justice: America and the Death Penalty is a coordinated program of events and new teaching initiatives, scheduled through the winter and the spring of 2003, that sets out to explore the highly sensitive and complex topic of capital punishment in the USA in depth, in multiple formats and from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Capitalism & Its Culture: Rethinking Mid 20th Century A Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara February 28 - March 1, 2003. At the opening of the 21st century, the power and pervasiveness of American capitalism and of the equation that links open markets to democratic institutions has become so much the common wisdom of our existence that we define as irrational those who question these relationships and their worldwide cultural manifestations. Words like "reform" and "liberalization" now denote the process whereby a global market in labor, capital, and ideas replaces the regulatory regimes, either authoritarian or social democratic, that were erected during and after the Great Depression. The point of this conference is to revisit those modernist dichotomies and to interrogate the ways in which writers and intellectuals naturalized the existence of a market economy. We want to ask how they put aside the political agendas prominent during the first half of the 20th century, and transposed anxieties once associated with an unstable capitalism onto a very different psychological and cultural terrain.

Critical Globalization Conference: Towards a Critical Globalization Studies: Continued Debates, New Directions, and Neglected Topics May 1-4, 2003. The objective of the conference is to re-examine and recast the emerging fields of global studies in the social sciences, environmental sciences, and humanities, looking at the research as well as pedagogical and policy implications and potential impact on the larger society. Participants will examine global studies as it is emerging in different disciplines and becoming institutionalized in the academy; review the principal theoretical frameworks, key issues and debates, and future directions. A second, and related, objective, is to explore the relationship, including existing and potential bridges, between global studies in the academy, on the one hand, and the process of globalization as it is approached in diverse polities, including national and international policymaking communities, the global justice movement, and other social and advocacy movements. To these ends there will be several cultural activities, public debates, and media events as part of the conference proceedings.

[Events of Interest Archive]