Pitt Faculty Coordinating Conference on Globalization and Diversity/Inequality in Latin America, March 23-24 in PAA

A conference titled “Globalization and Diversity/Inequality in Latin America: The Challenges, Opportunities, and Dangers” will be held March 23-24 in the Pittsburgh Athletic Association in Oakland. The free public conference, coordinated by faculty from the Departments of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and Political Science in Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences, will bring together eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines and professions to consider globalization issues for conventional political and new social movements, indigenous communities, women, and ethnic and racial minorities.

The conference will include four panel discussions. Their titles and participants follow.

• “Global Communications and New Technologies” (9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. March 23) will address the impact of new
  technologies and global communications on social movements. Participating scholars will include Omar Cardona of the Center for Disaster and Risk Studies, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of the Andes, Colombia; Michael Handelsman, Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tennessee; and Nuno Themudo, an assistant professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
• “Increasing/Decreasing Inequality” (2-5 p.m. March 23) will address the question of how structures of inequality in Latin America have been affected by recent patterns of globalization in the region. Participating scholars will include Miguel Angel Centeno, Department of Sociology, Princeton University; Ricardo Forster, professor of philosophy, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Humberto Lopez, Office of the Chief Economist, Latin American Department, The World Bank.
• “Leadership and Access to Power” (9 a.m.-noon March 24) will examine the new styles of leadership that enabled Hugo Chávez, Juan Evo Morales Ayma, and Michelle Bachelet to capture the attention and support of large numbers of Latin Americans who essentially had been left out of political discourse. Participating scholars will include Javier Auyero, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Ana María Bejarano, political science department, University of Toronto; and Kenneth Roberts, Department of Government, Cornell University.
• “Social Movements in National and Transnational Contexts” (2-4:30 p.m. March 24) will consider whether there is a distinctive place of Latin America in the geography of the emerging transnational activist networks. Participating scholars will include Magdalena Cajias, High University of San Andres, Bolivia; Mario Gustavo Guzmán Saldaña, ambassador of Bolivia to the United States; and Ana Rebecca Prada M., High University of San Andres, Bolivia.

The conference is being sponsored by Pitt’s Global Studies Program, Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Department of Political Science, and Office of the Provost and by the U.S. Department of Education. For more information, visit www.ucis.pitt.edu/clas/events/gap_conference.html.