Center for Research on Women and Social Justice

Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism? April 12, 2004 at the Corwin Pavilion, UC Santa Barbara. In each historical epoch a prototypical enterprise seems to embody a new and innovative set of economic structures and social relationships. At the end of the 19th century the Pennsylvania Railroad declared itself "the standard of the world;" in the mid 20th century General Motors symbolized sophisticated, bureaucratic management and technologically proficient mass production; and in recent years Microsoft has seemed the template for a postindustrial knowledge economy. At the dawn of the 21st century Wal-Mart has emerged as just this kind of world-transforming economic institution, setting the pattern for a highly integrated, transnational system of production, distribution, and employment.

This is the inaugural conference sponsored by the new University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Work, Labor, and Democracy, the research arm of the campus Labor Studies Program. It exemplifies the integrated character of the work we hope to accomplish. Today, one cannot write a labor or community history without understanding the salient issues inherent in global trade and development, innovations in computer networking, or an analysis of how and why a leading firm has reshaped the market and pioneered new patterns of distribution, consumption, and employment. As Peter Drucker properly announced in 1945, the great corporations of our time are "the representative social actuality...the most important event in the recent social history of the Western World." This is still true, if today on a global canvas.

This conference is sponsored by the Center for Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Hull Center for Research on Women and Social Justice. The UCSB Departments of History and Sociology are also co-sponsoring the conference along with the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Financial support is greatfully acknowledged from UC MEXUS and the UCSB College of Letters and Science and the Divisions of Humanities and Fine Arts and Social Sciences.

International Conference on America and the Reshaping of a New World Order: Normative Implications, Cultural Constraints April 23-24, 2004 at the Corwin Pavilion, UC Santa Barbara. This conference will feature keynote addresses by Ronald Steel and Richard Falk, an evening exhibition of performance art (and walk-through, participatory diaorama on the global) by world famous performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and papers by, among others, Myra Jehlen, Rutgers, Lisa Lowe, UCSD, Eileen Boris, Mark Juergensmeyer, Lisa Parks, Clark Roof, and Juan Campo, UCSB, Carolyn Porter, UCB, Donald Pease, Dartmouth, David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford, Helmut Anheier, UCLA, and Berndt Ostendorf, University of Munich. With the exception of the plenary talks, papers will be kept to 20 minutes in length in order to reserve a maximum amount of time in each session for discussion among the panelists and well as with the audience.

On the Edges of Development: Critical Interventions October 14, 15, and 16, 2004 at the Multicultural Center Theater, UC Santa Barbara. This conference will interrogate the relationship between development and globalisation though the lens of subalternity. The goal of the conference is, therefore, to re-imagine development through the work of scholars and cultural critics, performers, other cultural workers such as film-makers and novelists, non-governmental organisations, and activists from all of these domains.

[Events of Interest Archive]