The University of California, Santa Barbara held an interdisciplinary global studies conference on a wide range of topics for scholars, both established and in the graduate stage, from the West Coast and beyond, under the general theme of crisis as salient feature of current global conditions. Crisis was understood at every level, from the economic and financial to the environmental to problems of legitimacy and human security, to name a few. The conference invited papers and panels that engaged with crisis from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences. Possible topics included (but were not limited to):
• Legitimacy crises of global/national institutions; crises of governance, the role of civil society
• Crises of hegemony, global rebalancing
• Whose/which crisis? Crisis and perspective (West and East, Global North and Global South)
• Crises of economic globalization/financialization/labor
• Immigration/human rights/security crises
• Biorisks and pandemics
• Energy/environmental crisis
• Forgetting/remembering histories of crisis
• The rhetorical and narrative dimensions of crisis
• Crises of religion/secularism/religious nationalism
• Identity(ies) crisis/cultures of crisis
Keynotes and plenary
Keynotes and other presentations by: Saskia Sassen, William I. Robinson, Craig Calhoun, Manfred Steger, Roland Robertson, Chris Chase-Dunn, Richard Falk, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Alison Brysk, Mark Juergensmeyer and others.
The conference also held a Graduate Professionalization Workshop and faculty panel run by Dr. Eve Darian-Smith, which helped acclimate a limited number of graduate students to the requirements of publication and finding employment in Global Studies and related fields. This workshop ran during the lunch period on February 24.
