Conferences and Workshops
Workshop: Trade unions, free trade and the problem of transnational solidarity
Tensions between Northern trade unions and labour movements in the Global South over free trade agreements are a key obstacle to the formation of transnational solidarity. On the one hand, trade unions in the North especially in manufacturing have supported free trade agreements. They hope that new export markets for products in their sectors will preserve jobs. On the other, trade unions in the Global South as well as social movements more generally oppose these free trade agreements, since they often imply deindustrialisation and the related loss of jobs for them.
CSSGJ will host a two-day workshop on Trade unions, free trade and the problem of transnational solidarity on 2 and 3 December 2011 to explore ways of how these obstacles to joint action can be overcome. Speakers include trade union researchers, social movement activists as well as labour academics. Samir Amin, the internationally renowned political economist, will be the keynote speaker. The workshop is supported with a research grant of £6960 by the British Academy as well as a grant of £1750 by the University of Nottingham priority group Integrating Global Society.
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CSSGJ Annual Lectures and Seminars 2010
Professor Siba Grovogui is a major figure in contemporary International Relations, International Law and Postcolonial Studies and was a senior judge in Guinea prior to becoming an academic. Undeterred by the snow, Professor Grovogui gave a stimulating lecture on international relations theories and the question of race politics. The audience numbers were impressive despite the atrocious weather.
i s a major figure in contemporary International Relations, International Law and Postcolonial Studies and was a senior judge in Guinea prior to becoming an academic. Undeterred by the snow, Professor Grovogui gave a stimulating lecture on international relations theories and the question of race politics. The audience numbers were impressive despite the atrocious weather.
The annual lecture was accompanied by a workshop on the international politics of race which included Robbie Shilliam, Laura Brace and Sarah Knock. Professor Grovogui also gave an informal talk to students the following day. This was followed by an engaging interview, in which Siba Grovogui discussed the experiences that fostered his interest in international relations, international law and race. Listen to the podcast
2009
Professor Philip McMichael, Cornell University spoke on Rethinking Social Justice in an Age of Crisis
2008
On Thursday, 27 November, Hilary Wainwright, Editor of Red Pepper Magazine gave this year’s Annual Lecture for the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) entitled ‘If Not Capitalism, What?’
Between 80 and 100 people attended this very engaging lecture. 40 minutes of presentation were followed by a further 40 minutes of intensive discussion about the possible ways forward for the left in Britain today. In her presentation, Hilary Wainwright assessed that the old neo-liberal order is in severe crisis and its leaders in a state of uncertainty and even confusion. But those struggling to help a new order to be born are not prepared. Preparedness involves organisation and popular mobilisation around proposals which defend people’s living standards and livelihoods against attempts to resolve the crisis at their expense. But it is also about grasping a moment when those with power are wobbling on their back foot, and being politically bold and institutionally imaginative to build the necessary self-confidence to construct the basis of a new order as we resist.
Seminars
Education and Social Change in Latin America
Sara Motta (CSSGJ Co-Director) participated in a joint event with Centre for Social Justice, Bishop Grosseteste, Lincoln and MERD, which was supported by a grant from Lipman Miliband Trust. The event took place on 1st - 2nd July, 2011 at the University of Nottingham.
Reinventing the University Workshops
Nottingham Critical Pedagogy and CSSGJ held a series of bi-weekly workshops during 2011 exploring how the crisis in Higher Education opens up the possibility of imagining and practising the 'Reinvention of the University' as a space for the realisation of community needs and desires.
Transnational Solidarity in Times of Global Restructuring: An Analysis of Positive and Negative factors of Co-operation across Borders
6th-7th November 2008
A workshop organized by Andreas Bieler at the University of Nottingham.
Labour has increasingly come under pressure as a result of globalisation and the related transnationalisation of production and expanding informalisation of work. Over two days, 28 labour academics, trade unionists and social movement activists discussed the possibilities for, but also obstacles to, transnational solidarity. Papers ranged from studies of competition between different national labour movements in the automobile industry in Europe to solidarity between consumers’ organisations and trade unions in the defence of the public sector. The potentially supportive role of new information technology was also highlighted. Ultimately, it was concluded that while transnational solidarity is anything but assured, there are a whole range of possible strategies forward towards solidarity between workers across borders.
Andreas Bieler (University of Nottingham)
Labour Pains : Could the financial crisis spell the beginning of the end for trade unions? In this podcast Professor of Political Economy, Andreas Bieler looks into the possible knock-on effects.
Duration: 12.19 mins |. Size 11.2 MB | Date: 27th October, 2008
Social Movements and/in the Post Colonial: dispossession, development and resistance in the global south Conference
24th - 25th of June 2008
The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice wishes to make a contribution to the development of empirically grounded, theoretically informed and politically enabling analyses of these processes and therefore invites proposals for papers for the conference Social Movements and/in the Postcolonial: Dispossession, Development and Resistance in the Global South. The two-day conference will be structured around the following two streams of discussion: Struggles over dispossession in the global South and Social movements and the politics of development.
Terror Arrests at Nottingham University: What Next?
5th June 2008
CSSGJ and the Centre for Research on Identities, Citizenship and Migration (Sociology & Social Policy) held a round table event to foster debate among staff and students on important questions arising from the recent Nottingham arrests under the antiterrorism legislation. The event provoked a lively debate and established a forum in which participants could generate ideas for future activism around these critical issues, as well as build on the academic freedom campaign that has already been initiated at the University.
Association for Legal and Social Philosophy Annual Conference
27th-29th March 2008
The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice hosted the ALSP Annual Conference 2008. The event, held on Jubilee Campus, was on the theme of ‘global justice’ and attracted approximately 90 delegates from around the world, including Australasia, North America, and continental Europe.
The conference panels covered a wide variety of pressing concerns related to global justice, with a particularly large number of panels on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and on human rights. Other panels examined such questions as climate change, global poverty, war and conflict, international criminal law, and indigenous rights. There were very successful plenary sessions on the ethics of climate change (Stephen Gardiner, University of Washington, Seattle), on political communities and egalitarian justice (Margaret Moore, Queen’s University, Ontario) and on the demands of global equality (Kok-Chor Tan, University of Pennsylvania). Our plenary speakers also took part in a closing round table on ‘future directions in global justice research’, where they were joined by our own Simon Tormey.
CSSGJ Film Screening: Taking Liberties
5th March, 2008
Co-organised with the Human Rights Law Centre. A screening of documentary, introduction and Q&A with director Chris Atkins at Broadway Cinema, Broad Street, Nottingham. TAKING LIBERTIES is a shocking but hilarious polemic documentary that charts the destruction of all your Basic Liberties under 10 Years of New Labour. TAKING LIBERTIES will reveal how the six central pillars of liberty have been systematically destroyed by New Labour, and the freedoms of the British people stolen from under their noses amidst a climate of fear created by the media and government itself.
CSSGJ Annual Lecture, Gerald Cohen, Oxford University
6th December 2007 - 'A truth in Conservatism'
Gerald A. Cohen is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College. He is a leading theorist of the school of ‘Analytical Marxism’, and his many publications include the books:
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Karl Marx’s Theory of History: a Defence (winner of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, and recently republished in a new edition)
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Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality
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If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
Asylum Monologues
25th October 2007
'Asylum Monologues' is a live performance of first-hand testimonies from asylum seekers and refugees about fleeing their country and arriving in the UK. Asylum Monologues has been touring the UK since it was launched at Amnesty International in June 2006 and is scripted by award-winning playwright and artistic director of Ice and Fire Theatre, Sonja Linden. Christine Bacon, the Director of Actors for Refugees, said: “As actors we can give faces and voices to the unseen and the voiceless. We try to redress some of the misconceptions about asylum seekers and refugees with more accurate information and with personal stories that will appeal to many audiences.”
The event is part of the One World Week, organised by the SU Social Justice and Environment and Equal Opportunities Committees.
[ View poster ]
Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour Workshop
12 October 2007, University of Nottingham
Globalisation and the related restructuring of the state currently comprise one of the most widely discussed issues in the social sciences, across disciplines that include political economy, historical sociology, state theory, European politics and political geography.
This one-day workshop brought together varied traditions within historical materialism to focus on conjecture about global restructuring and state theory, raised within the book Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour: Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives, co-authored by Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham and Adam David Morton (Palgrave, 2006).
The debate revolved around seven papers presented from speakers across Europe. The papers drew from a rich body of literature on state theory and global restructuring associated with the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the alternative reference point of open Marxism. There are plans to publish a special journal issue containing the papers and the rejoinders by Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld and Adam David Morton.
The workshop was recorded on video and audio MP3 and is available to view online along with photos of the event.
Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition
20-21st September 2007
A very successful two day international conference was held at the University of Nottingham, the theme of which was Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition. The conference was organized by Dr Tony Burns (School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham) and Dr. Simon Thompson (School of Politics, University of West of England). The conference constituted one of the launch events for the recently created Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham.
Funding was provided by The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, the Conference Fund of the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham, the School of politics, University of West of England , and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Delegates to the conference came from all over the world, including Canada, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and the United States, as well as the UK. The proceedings of the conference are to be published by Palgrave as a part of their new International Political Theory series, in a volume entitled Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition, edited jointly by Tony Burns and Simon Thompson, which will appear in 2009.
The conference was in part inspired by the recent debate between Professor Nancy Fraser and Professor Axel Honneth over the issue of ‘redistribution versus recognition’ in contemporary politics in their co-authored work, Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange? (London: Verso, 2003). The editors are delighted that Professor Fraser has agreed to contribute to the collection.