The Social and Natural Limits of Globalization and the Current Conjuncture
August 7, 2009
University of San Francisco
The current international economic crisis foregrounds long-standing questions about the social and natural limits of globalization. Critics of the neoliberal turn have emphasized the extent to which social relations and nature are being commodified by the advent of a global market society, but so too are we increasingly aware of the diverse forms of resistance that pressures towards commodification encounter. This one-day conference explores the relationship between the political-economic transformation that engenders globalization, and the social and ecological challenges confronting the continued expansion and deepening of that process. We are particularly interested in thinking about news ways in which Polanyi’s fictitious commodities—land, labor and money—are implicated in the making and unmaking of global markets.
The Social and Natural Limits of Globalization and the Current Conjuncture
August 7, 2009
University of San Francisco
Conference Schedule
8:15-8:30 Continental Breakfast
8:30-9:30 Opening Plenary
Speaker: John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, “The World-System Crisis: Ecology, Economy, Empire”
Presider: Andrew Jorgensen, University of Utah
9:30-11:10 Paper Session #1: Concurrent Panels details
1. Finance and Financialization
2. Institutions, Inequality and Development
3. States, Scales and Alternative Futures
11:10-12:50 Paper Session #2: Concurrent Panels details
4. The Social Foundations of Environmental Change
5. Cross-Border Organizing and Transnational Activism
6. Global Food Crisis: The End of Cheap Food?
12:50-1:00 Pick-up box lunches
1:00-3:00 Lunchtime Plenary Session, “The Counter-Movement(s) Today”
Speakers: Fred Block, University of California Davis
Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California Riverside
Valentine Moghadam, Purdue University
Timmons Roberts, Brown University
Presider: Robert Ross, Clark University
3:00-4:40 Paper Session #3: Concurrent Panels details
7. Migration
8. States, Scales and Regulation
9. Environmental Activism and Climate Politics
4:40-5:30 Closing Plenary and General Discussion, “Making Connections: Thinking across the social and natural in global context”
A panel of several conference organizers will offer brief introductory remarks before opening the floor for general discussion.
Co-Sponsored by the Political Economy of the World-System, Environment and Technology, and Marxist Sociology Sections of the ASA, with the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the journal Critical Sociology.