A Social Research Conference
at New School University
Monday, October 18 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004
There are urgent questions that not only are central to the time and place in which they arise, but that also transcend those particularities. Such questions have rich and complex histories and precarious futures. It is these questions that the Social Research conference series seeks to address.
The immediate motivation for Their America is the sharp increase in anti-American feelings across the globe in the aftermath of 9/11. However, the conference is intended to place this phenomenon in the context of a longer history of attitudes toward the United States over the past approximately seventy-five years as a way of better understanding the current situation.
Given the increasing tendency of the United States to act unilaterally on the world stage, understanding how the rest of the world views us, our administration, and our actions is crucial to comprehending why our actions succeed or fail, and how best to formulate future plans—not only as to how to face or prevent failed states, but in how to face or prevent the myriad transnational challenges that would best be confronted multilaterally and collaboratively (for example, terrorism, environmental despoliation, natural disaster, AIDS and other public health crises).
Of course, even in the current moment of intense anti-American feeling, there continues to be, in many places around the globe, a dynamic tension between responses to the United States’s aggressive military interventions and, for lack of a better shorthand term, what American culture has to offer. It is our hope that the conference will examine this tension as a way of deepening our understanding of the current situation and illuminating ways in which this situation might be made more conducive to global engagement and multilateral cooperation.Our intention is to foster discussion between speakers from across the globe, and between speakers and audience, on how the United States is and has been viewed in various countries over approximately the past 75 years. Our hope is that this discussion will lead to new understandings of how the United States has both succeeded and failed in its political and military interventions, and how our cultural influence is received in other parts of the world. To that end, we have invited speakers from different regions of the world to participate in this conference, because we believe that it is those reflective people native to a country who can speak with most authority about how the US is and has been viewed from elsewhere. We decidedly did not want to brings together a group of American “academic” authorities to talk about how we are viewed from beyond our shores. The countries represented on our agenda currently include the Balkans, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
Their America, like our previous conferences, is not intended as an event at which experts speak with each other, but as a public event, to which we invite an audience that might not usually be exposed to the work of the academy or the processes that drive the making of policy. It is our belief that by educating the public in this way, and inviting our audience to participate in question-and-answer sessions with our speakers, the discussion at this conference, as at all of our conferences, can effect change simultaneously at the political, cultural, academic, and grassroots levels.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2004, 6:00 p.m.- 9:00 p.m.
SESSION I: VIEWS FROM THE UK, MEXICO, GERMANY, AND FRANCE
John Eatwell Former Economic Advisor to Neil Kinock, a member
of the House of Lords and President of Queens College, Cambridge.
Claudio Lomnitz Distinguished University Professor of
Anthropology
and Historical Studies, New School University.
Michael Naumann Former Minister for Culture and Media of Germany
and Editor in Chief of Die Zeit, Hamburg, Germany.
Jacques Rupnik Professor of Political Science and Research
Director
at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI), Fondation
National des Sciences Politiques, Paris; and Professor of History at
the
Sorbonne and of Politics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris.
Moderator: Jonathan Schell Peace and Disarmament Correspondent
at The Nation and Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation
Institute.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2004, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
SESSION II: VIEWS FROM AFRICA, THE BALKANS AND THE MIDDLE EAST
David Mafabi Director of Political Affairs at the Pan African
Movement Secretariat in Kampala, Uganda.
Richard Goldstone Former Judge of The Constitutional Court of
South Africa, Former Chairman of the International Bar Association's
Task
Force on International Terrorism and the International Independent
Inquiry
on Kosovo.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim Human Rights Activist in Egypt; Sociology
Professor, Director and Chairman of the Board of the Ibn Khaldun Center
for Development Studies at the American University in Cairo.
Sari Nusseibeh Former PLO representative in Jerusalem; President
and Professor of Islamic Philosophy of Al Quds University.
Avishai Margalit Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew
University
of Jerusalem.
Moderator: Elzbieta Matynia Director of the Transregional Center
for Democratic Studies and Senior Lecturer in Liberal Studies at the
Graduate
Faculty, New School University.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2004, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
SESSION III: VIEWS FROM RUSSIA, PAKISTAN, MALAYSIA and CHINA
Pervez Hoodbhoy Professor of Nuclear Physics, Quaid-i-Azam
University,
Islamabad, Pakistan.
Fedor Lukiyanov Editor in Chief of Russia in Global Affairs,
Moscow, Russia.
Chandra Muzaffar President of International Movement for a Just
World; previously a Professor at the Centre for Civilisational
Dialogue,
Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.
Yuen-Ying Chan Award winning journalist and reporter for the
New York Daily News; established the Journalism and Media
Studies
Centre at The University of Hong Kong.
Moderator: Arjun Appadurai Provost, Senior Vice President and
John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences of New School University.
65 fifth avenue, room 344, new
york, ny 10003
tel. 212.229.2488
fax 212.229.5476
socres@newschool.edu
