Global Studies Assocation North America Events: Conference Speakers 2005

Alejandro Portes

Alejandro Portes is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. He has formerly taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the John Dewey Chair in Arts and Sciences; Duke University, and the University of Texas-Austin. In 1997, he was elected president of the American Sociological Association and served in that capacity in 1998-99. Born in Havana, Cuba, he came to the United States in 1960. He was educated at the University of Havana, Catholic University of Argentina, and Creighton University. He received his M. A. and Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Portes is the author of some 220 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. His books include City on the Edge - the Transformation of Miami (California 1993), co-authored with Alex Stepick and winner of the Robert Park Award for best book in urban sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for best book in urban anthropology in 1995; and Immigrant America: A Portrait (California 1996), designated as a Centennial Publication by the University of California Press.

His current research is on the adaptation process of the immigrant second generation and the rise of transnational immigrant communities in the United States. His most recent books, co-authored with Rubén G. Rumbaut, are Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation and Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (California 2001). Legacies is the winner of the 2002 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association and of the 2002 W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Award for best book from the International Migration Section of ASA. His most recent articles on immigrant transnationalism have been published in the American Sociological Review (2002); American Journal of Sociology (2003); and the International Migration Review (2003).

back to top

Patricia Fernandez-Kelly

Patricia Fernandez-Kelly is a social anthropologist with an interest in international development. She was an early student of export-processing zones in Asia and Latin America with special attention to Mexico's maquiladora program. Her book on that subject, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier was featured by Contemporary Sociology as one of twenty-five favorite books of the last twenty-five years. With Lorraine Gray, she co-produced the Emmy award winning documentary, The Global Assembly Line. She has written on migration, economic restructuring, women in the labor force, and race and ethnicity. Her latest project is a study of fifty African-American Families living in poverty.

Some of her recent publications include "Community of Saints: Gender and Popular Religious Practice among Cubans in South Florida", "Delicate Transactions: Gender, Home, and Employment among Hispanic Women", "Economic Internationalization and Gender Revisited", "Feminist Studies and World System Analysis: Reconciling the Issues", and "The Future of Gender: Effects of Global Economic Change."

back to top

Frances Fox-Piven

A well-known political scientist, social critic and activist, Piven has expertise ranging from social welfare, public health and public policy to voting behavior, comparative labor parties in industrial democracies and women's politics. Her work, in particular, focuses on the uses of political science to promote democratic reform.

As a scholar and writer, Piven has co-authored with Columbia University sociologist Richard Cloward a number of books, including Regulating the Poor, a landmark analysis of the role of welfare policy in the economic and political control of the poor and working class, Why American's Don't Vote, Why Americans Still Don't Vote and The Breaking of the American Social Compact, among others.

As an activist for the poor and women's and voters' rights, Piven was instrumental in helping liberalize welfare in the 1960s, which helped reduce extreme poverty in the United States, and co-founding Human SERVE (Service Employees Registration and Voter Education), an organization that established motor-voter programs in selected states as precedents for the federal legislation.

She is the recipient of many honors, the American Sociological Association Career Award for the Practice of Sociology (2000), the Mary Lepper Award of the Womens' Caucus of the American Political Science Association (1998); the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association; the Tides Foundation Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy (1995); the Annual Award of the National Association of Secretaries of State (1994); President's Award of the American Public Health Association (1993), Lee/Founders Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Prize; and the C. Wright Mills Award.

back to top

Judith Blau is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and co-founder and U.S. Chapter Coordinator for Sociologists Without Borders.

Michael Zweig is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he has received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

His most recent books are What's Class Got to Do With It?, American Society in the Twenty-first Century (2004) and The Working Class Majority: America's Best-kept Secret (2000).

Professor Zweig received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the University of Michigan where, as an undergraduate, he was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and as a graduate student helped found the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE).

Zweig has a long history of social activism combined with scholarly work and has published widely in professional and general circulation journals, including The American Economic Review, The American Economist, The Review of Black Political Economy, The Review of Radical Political Economics, and TIKKUN. His earlier books include Religion and Economic Justice and The Idea of a World University.

Professor Zweig is active in his union, United University Professions (Local 2190, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO), and has served two terms on its state executive board. He was named "Person of the Year" by the Long Island SUFFOLK TIMES for his writing and community organizing around issues of planning, zoning, and land use.

Walda Katz-Fishman is a scholar activist and popular educator who combines her research and teaching interests in class, race/ethnicity/nationality, and gender inequality and political economy with political activism in bottom-up struggles for economic equality and race and gender justice.

Walda is a professor of sociology at Howard University – where she has taught since 1970, Board Chair of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, a Steering Committee member of Grassroots Global Justice and a Coordinating Committee member of the U.S. Social Forum, among others.

Walda Katz-Fishman was co-recipient with Jerome Scott of the American Sociological Association’s 2004 Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology and has written numerous articles and popular education materials on political economy, race-class-gender inequality, today’s globalization and popular movements for justice, equality and popular democracy.

Jerome Scott is a labor and community organizer and popular educator who brings activists and scholars together for popular economic and political education and action research to develop new leadership for building today’s bottom-up movement for fundamental social change.

A founding member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the auto plants of Detroit, MI in the late 1960s, Mr. Scottt is also Director and past-Board Chair of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide (Atlanta, GA), a Steering Committee member of Grassroots Global Justice and a Coordinating Committee member of the U.S. Social Forum, among others.

Mr. Scott was a co-recipient with Walda Katz-Fishman of the American Sociological Association’s 2004 Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology and has written numerous articles and popular education materials on political economy, race and class, today’s globalization and popular movements for justice, equality and popular democracy.

Dr. Graeme Chesters is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Local Policy Studies at Edge Hill, UK. He is part of the editorial collective Notes from Nowhere who edited/wrote: We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism (Verso: 2003) and the co-author (with Ian Welsh) of Complexity and Social Movements: Protest at the Edge of Chaos (Routledge: 2005 - forthcoming). He co-founded the scholar-activism network - Shifting Ground: www.ShiftingGround.org and is currently Leverhulme Special Research Fellow in Civil Society and the Global Public Sphere, conducting research on participation, deliberation and complexity in the World Social Forum.

Dan Swinney has 35 years of community and labor organizing as well as community-development experience. He worked for 13 years as a machinist in the Chicago area and organized Steelworker Local 8787 at G+W Taylor Forge in Cicero, Illinois and served as Vice President. Taylor Forge closed in 1983.

Dan founded the Center for Labor and Community Research (CLCR) in 1982 in response to the thousands of manufacturing plant closings in the Chicago area. CLCR is a not-for-profit consulting and research organization that specializes in developing innovative and effective High Road approaches to community development, industrial job retention, workforce education, and business development. CLCR provides these services in Chicago and around the country--working for city and state government, unions, community coalitions, businesses, and others. CLCR’s strategic vision is described in detail in a paper by Swinney, Building the Bridge to the High Road, available on CLCR’s web site.

Dan currently serves as co-chair of the New Chicago School for Community Economic Development, on the Boards of the New York Industrial Retention Network, the international Work and Labour Network (RLDWL), the North American Network for the Solidarity Economy (NANSE) and the International Liason Committee for the International Network for the Promotion of the Solidarity Economy (RIPESS). He is a member of the Cooperative Charitable Trust Forum. He has written articles appearing in Social Policy, Business Ethics, New Labor Forum, Working USA, the South Africa Labour Bulletin, Yes! and other publications. He is a speaker, and is a regular guest lecturer at the Harvard University Trade Union Program.