Place, Locality, & Globalization

October 28
UC Santa Cruz
Kresge College, Room 159

This conference emerges from a year-long discussion among faculty in UCSC's Anthropology and Philosophy departments. Our conversations have been provoked by an interrogation of current discursive models of globalization and locality. It is commonplace to argue that we have entered a distinct period of social organization characterized simultaneously by a radical disintegration of temporal and spatial distances and a reconfiguration of localities and local subjects under the sign of a global modernity. Debates have often circled around questions of homogenization and hybridity. Are we witnessing the inescapable obliteration of the particularity of place by a universalizing space? We want to subject these binary formulations themselves to analysis and critique. This conference, which brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, offers an opportunity for critical dialogue with colleagues who are grappling with such issues.

Hugh Raffles and Lisa Rofel (Anthropology, UCSC), conference organizers and members of the Working Group on Place, Locality, and Globalization. Sponsored by the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies, The Center for Cultural Studies, and the Institute for Humanities Research.

Notes on Speakers:

Wlad Godzich
Recently appointed Dean of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor Godzich has held appointments in French, Comparative Literature, and Russian and Eastern European Literatures at major universities in North America and Europe. The author of several books, including The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minnesota, 1987), The Culture of Literacy (Harvard, 1994), and numerous edited volumes, Professor Godzich was founding editor of the University of Minnesota Press's highly influential Theory and History of Literature (THL) series.

Charles L. Briggs is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Among his many publications are Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality (Oxford, 1996), and Infectious Diseases and Social Inequality in Latin America: From Hemispheric Insecurity to Global Cooperation (co-authored, 1999).

Jacqueline Nassy Brown is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently completing a book entitled Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race and Identity in the Port City of Liverpool, England.

Anthony D. King is Professor of Art and Art History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His most recent books include the edited volume Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minnesota, 2nd edition, 1997), and the monograph Global Cities: Post-imperialism and the Internationalization.

Pheng Cheah is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998) and Thinking Through the Body of the Law (NYU, 1996). One of his current book projects is entitled Spectral Nationality, which looks at the philosopheme of culture as freedom in modern philosophy and in decolonizing nationalisms.

Grahame Thompson is Professor of Government and Policy at the Open University, UK. He works on the political economy of the international system. His recent Globalization in Question (with Paul Hirst, Polity Press, 1996/1999) has provoked considerable debate. His new book, Between Hierarchies and Markets: The History and Significance of Network Organization (Oxford) will be published in 2001.

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, 1993), addressed questions of marginality and state rule in Indonesia. Her book in progress is on environmental discourses and the locations of global politics.

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, her publications include: The Global City (Princeton, 1991); Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New Press, 1998); and Guests and Aliens (New Press, 1999).

8:15 AM Continental breakfast

8:45 AM Hugh Raffles Welcome

9:00 AM Wlad Godzich Keynote
The Ends of Globalization


Session I
Inside A World in Motion
9:30 AM-12:30PM

Charles Briggs
Local and Global Narratives in Epidemiologies of Infectious Diseases

Jacqueline Nassy Brown
Rooted in the Global, Routed through the Local: Cosmopolitanism in Liverpool's Age of Sail

Anthony King
Globalized Localities: Old Wine, New Bottles?

Pheng Cheah
Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion


Session II
Borders & Temporalities
1:30-4.30PM

Grahame Thompson
The Limits to "Globalization": Taking Economic Borders Seriously

Anna Tsing
Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear

Saskia Sassen
Spatialities and Temporalities of Globalization


4:30 PM Lisa Rofel
Closing Remarks

Reception follows

Copies of Place, Locality, and Globalization conference papers are available for UCSC faculty and students.

Conference is free and open to the public.