CONFERENCES, SYMPOSIA AND WORKSHOPS

January 2008
Luce Workshop on Religion and NGOs
On January 18-19, 2008 we will hold a one-day closed workshop on issues of religion in international affairs that relate to international NGOs, with funding support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Half of the participants will be scholars and half will be leaders in the international NGO community. The point of the workshop is to identify some of the relevant religion-specific factors surrounding issues of cultural conflict and sensitivity that confront all humanitarian organizations working abroad. A post-workshop compilation of all the materials collected and discussed at the meeting will be circulated among participants inviting them to make final revisions and comments; from this material a summary report will be circulated to participants, and be published online and in CD-ROM format as a practical guide.

Winter-Spring 2008
UC Reads 2008: “Globalization”
UCSB has chosen the theme of globalization as the topic for its annual UC Reads program, jointly organized by UCSB’s Davidson Library and the Santa Barbara Pubic Library District. This year’s selected book is Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli of Georgetown University (Wiley & Sons, 2006).

The program kicks off in January and will involve numerous campus units, including UCSB Global & International Studies, in organizing a series of public event at UCSB and across greater Santa Barbara.

Stay tuned here and at the UCSB Reads Library home page for specific announcements.

April-June 2008
UN University: “The World in 2030” Project Planning
The 2030 Project on Global Prospects (tentative title) seeks to consider future challenges, aspirations, and adjustments with an eye to both current trends and the intrusion of unanticipated contingencies, taking into consideration alternative lines of plausible future development (‘scenarios’). Such an effort will enlist outstanding scholars and thinkers who are representative of the world’s civilizations (including those of indigenous peoples) to offer diverse interpretations of what it is reasonable to expect and to hope for by the year 2030. The year 2030 is selected to strike a balance between being too preoccupied with immediate realities and looking so far into the future as to become detached from present realities. A main intention is to produce a publishable series of multi-disciplinary interpretations that are expressive of differences in cultural perspective, policy priority, and empirical assessment rather than to construct a single blueprint of the future of world order. A special effort will be made to involve younger scholars, including graduate students, with a realization that a viable future will be the work of today’s youth.