Upcoming Conference
This, the 21st in the Social Research conference series, will seek to examine what moment we are in with regard to how both our government and other political and cultural institutions organize, fund, restrict, facilitate, or otherwise affect the flow of knowledge and the implications of this for our democracy. There is no question that the free access to knowledge and information are the bedrock of all democratic societies, yet no democratic society can function without limits on what can be known, what ought to be kept confidential and what must remain secret. The tension among these competing ends is ever present and continuously raises questions about the legitimacy of limits. What limits are necessary to safe guard and protect a democratic polity? What limits undermine it? The critical question this conference will seek to answer is what the limits are that are necessary to protect democracy and what sorts of limits undermine it? To this end, the conference will examine government and technological structures and mechanisms that limit transparency and the flow of information, the influence of private interests and government over media and the propagation of misinformation, and the host of other powerful forces that surround policy making that curtail our knowledge and threaten our privacy. We will also look at the other institutions that significantly affect what we can know, what we ought to know and what we should try to know, like the research community itself as well as the implicit limits located within our culture that strongly influence what we seek to know and what we are content not to know.
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Recently Past Events
Tensions between religion and secularism are long-standing, widespread, and increasingly fierce, evidenced by debates over evolution, separation between religion and education, religion and science, and religious influences on political decisions. This, the 20th in the Social Research conference series, was a forum for discussions about the past and future separation between the religious and the secular. Charles Taylor delivered the keynote address.
The proceedings of this conference will be available in Social Research Volume 76, Number 4 (Winter 2009).
This conference was made possible with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.
A group of experts discussed current trends that are reshaping universities around the world. The considered the benefits and the risks to universities as they navigate rapid globalization, international collaborations, massification, corporate partnerships, and the growing number of franchises. This conference also commemorated the 75th anniversary of The New School’s University in Exile, founded in 1933 as a haven for European scholars rescued from the ravages of fascism.
The proceedings of this conference are available in Social Research Volume 76, Number 3 (Summer 2009).
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