Perspectives on Globalization and Social Justice

Friday, April 8, 2005
Room E104
4 p.m.

Irving Epstein (Educational Studies): The Convention on the Rights of the Child: The Promise and Limitations of Multilateralism as a Means of Protecting Children

Kathleen Montgomery (Political Science): Leaving Children in the Dust: The Challenge of Child Welfare in Post-Communist Europe

Abigail Jahiel (Environmental Studies & Political Science): Growing Contradictions in the Chinese Countryside: In Pursuit of Sustainable Development or Class Stratification?

William Munro (Political Science): Whose Job is Social Justice? Pro-poor Privatization and the Rise of Grassroots Movements in the Global South

In this panel, we examine issues of globalization from the perspectives of public policy, international law, social practice, and grass-roots political organizing. It is our intention to represent the regional diversity in which the effects of and responses to globalization are articulated and it is our hope that various dimensions of globalization involving political, economic, social, and environmental factors will be explored. Any discussion of globalization necessarily involves analysis of world markets, the state and its citizenry, social classes, networks and institutions. Because notions of social justice are central to our understanding of all of these phenomena, it is logical that a larger discussion of globalization be focused upon those salient questions of social justice and their interrelationship to those globalizing tendencies. That will be a basis for discussion by the different panel members.