Presentation (with Jerry Harris): Building the Counter-Hegemonic Bloc to Neo-Liberal Dystopia

William K. Carroll is a critical sociologist with research interests in the areas of social movements and social change as well as the political economy of corporate capitalism. His current research is focused around the "Alternative Policy Groups and Global Civil Society" project, an investigation of the networks, discourses and practices of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and mobilization. His latest book, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class (Zed Books) was published in the autumn of 2010. Read more >>

Presentation (with Lauren Langman, Jackie Smith, & Jay Smith): The Occupy Movement

Carl Davidson is a former student leader of the new left of the 1960s, serving as a Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. From 1968 to 1976, he worked on the Guardian (US) newsweekly as a writer and news editor. Today he is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, advocating a mixture of market socialism and worker ownership. Recently Davidson led Progressives for Obama, now called Progressive America Rising, as an independent left-progressive initiative, in part to convince those on the radical left to pursue what he considers more pragmatic alternatives. He has also worked on a leadership level with United for Peace and Justice and its local affiliates. After organizing for many years in New York City and Chicago, he now resides in Beaver County, PA, near Pittsburgh, where he was born and raised. Read more >>

Jerry Harris is a professor of history at DeVry University, Chicago and author of The Dialectics of Globalization, Political and Economic Conflict in a Transnational World. He is North American secretary of the Global Studies Association and his articles are often featured in Science & Society, Race and Class and Das Argument. Professor Harris has spoken widely on globalization including lectures in London, Prague, Bogota and Rajasthan. Watch his video, Globalization of Capitalism, on YouTube.

Paul James is Director of the Global Cities Institute (RMIT) and Director of the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme. He is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Globalism Research Centre (RMIT), an editor of Arena Journal, and on the Council of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has received a number of awards including the Japan-Australia Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Research Council Fellowship, and the Crisp Medal by the Australasian Political Studies Association for the best book in the field of political studies. Read more >>

Presentation (with Carl Davidson, Jackie Smith, & Jay Smith): The Occupy Movement

Lauren Langman is primarily a social theorist writing in the tradition of the Frankfurt School-especially their early concerns with character and culture, which currently inform questions of identity and hegemony in a global age. His theoretical writing examines the nature of self, subjectivity and modernity dealing with questions such as agency, or its lack, as alienation. His substantive research interests concern the dialects of political economy, culture and identity in such varied forms as Islamic fundamentalism, alternative globalization movements and the carnivalization of culture. Dr. Langman has widely published in these areas and has a forthcoming book on the Carnivalization of America. He is President of RC 36, Alienation Research and Theory of International Sociological Association; he is on the editorial boards of Social Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, and Critical Sociology. Read more >>

Martha McMahon has published in the areas of small-scale farming and local food, agri-food regulation, women organic farmers, ecological feminism, environment, motherhood and domestic violence. Her current research focus is on gender and environment, small-scale farming and local food. While attending to social processes such as globalization, international trade and regulatory regimes, she describes her approach to sociology as critically reflective symbolic interactionism. Read more >>

Karena (Kara) Shaw is Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Studies, a member of the Cultural, Social and Political Thought Graduate Program and the Institute for Integrated Energy Systems. A political theorist by training, she is particularly interested in how contemporary environmental challenges are reshaping political space and possibility. She has published in the areas of feminist theory, indigenous politics, and environmental politics, and was co-director of The Clayoquot Project. Prior to coming to UVic she was a Teaching Fellow at Keele University in the UK. Read more >>

Presentation (with Carl Davidson, Lauren Langman, & Jay Smith): The Occupy Movement

Jackie Smith studies the connections between globalization and political mobilization. She is particularly interested in how social movements are shaped by global economic structures and institutions as well as how they affect global norms and political processes. Her current research focuses on the World Social Forum process and the larger global justice movement, and in particular how movements build coalitions across a variety of differences such as class, race, gender and national identity. Read more >>

Presentation (with Carl Davidson, Lauren Langman, & Jackie Smith): The Occupy Movement

Peter (Jay) Smith is a professor in political science and long-standing member of the Athabasca University faculty since becoming a member of staff in 1981. He has overseen much of the development of the political science curriculum and has written several undergraduate courses and supervised the development of several others. His research interests include the impact of new information and communication technologies on politics and governance, domestically and globally. In terms of the latter he is particularly interested in the use of the Internet to mobilize people and social movements, secular and religious, from around the world in opposition to neoliberal corporate globalization. Read more >>

Waziyatawin is a Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Cornell University in 2000 and earned tenure and an associate professorship in the history department at Arizona State University where she taught for seven years. Waziyatawin currently holds the Indigenous Peoples Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance Program at UVic. Her interests include projects centering on Indigenous decolonization strategies such as truth-telling and reparative justice, Indigenous women and resistance, the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, and the development of liberation ideology in Indigenous communities. Read more >> (After jump scroll down the page.)