1. Genetic Modification (GM)
2. Cooperative and Sustainable Development
3. Environmental Education and Intellectual Health
4. Citizenship, Technological Innovation and Sustainability

• Teoría, enfoques y métodos de la religión
• Las dimensiones del hecho religioso
• Las dimensiones simbólicas de las religiones y las etnicidades
• Los cambios religiosos
• La evangelización de América Latina
• La herencia de la evangelización: el catolicismo latinoamericano
• El pluralismo católico
• El complejo mundo evangélico
• Viejas y nuevas religiones autóctonas
• Viejas y nuevas religiones orientales
• Las religioes surgidas en el contexto norteamericano
• La Nueva Era, los espiritismos, esoterismos y las utopías tecnológicas
• Historia de las religioes y de las iglesias latinoamericanas
• Religiones, sistemas míticos y ›literaturas‹
• Politicas públicas y derechos y libertades religiosas
• Educación y religión
• Religión y cuestiones de género

• The contemporary war on terrorism
• Its attendant anti-terrorist security policies
• The nature of Muslim-non-Muslim relations
• The status of Islam, in the countries of diaspora or in the Muslim world
• The relation of Islam to ›the West‹ or to terrorism
• The implications of these representations for diverse Muslim communities

• Metaphysics and Culture
• Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Metaphysics and the Arts
• Metaphysics and Ethics
• Metaphysics and Mystical Experience
• Metaphysics and Education
• Metaphysics and Empirical Science
• Metaphysics and Law
• Metaphysics and Personhood

• Bodies: sexuality and deviance
• Beliefs: conversion, secularism and multi-culturalism
• Aesthetics and Materialities: enclosures and marking of boundaries; humans, things and differentiation
• Security: from political institutions to regimes of insurance
• Culture: ethnicity, citizenship and nationality

• Global Apartheid, Perpetual War: Bodies and Biopolitics
• Migrations of Texts: Sites of Production and Reception
• Crossing Borders in Literature and Visual Arts
• The Challenges of Translation, Transculturalism, Tricontinentalism
• Travel-Writing, Trade-Routes and Slave-Routes
• International Reading Publics and the Creation of a South African Canon

• Cuestiones generales relativas a las unidades supranacionales (culturas, civilizaciones, bloques, etc.)
• Cuestiones relativas al alcance de las unidades estatales nacionales políticas existentes (Estados unitarios, federales, confederales, autonomías, estados libres asociados, territorios indígenas, Naciones políticas, naciones fraccionarias, estados multinacionales, etc.)
• Diversos modelos para formular la unidad del continente iberoamericano
• Cuestiones abiertas en torno a unidades subcontinentales (Cono Sur, Caribe, Centroamérica, etc.) o intercontinentales (OEA, Cumbres Iberoamericanas, etc.)
• Cuestiones abiertas de especial importancia política: culturas animistas-chamanistas, indigenismo, supersticiones, religiones; lingüísticas, tecnológicas, económicas, etc.

• Childhood and Youth: history, health, crime, substance abuse, religion
• Education: primary, secondary, tertiary, administration, policies, funding, curriculum
• Terror and Terrorism: theory, culture, definition, religion, media, politics, language, preparedness
• Diversity: immigration, national policies, international objectives, displacement, war
• Indigeneous Issues: rights, poverty, family

• Los valores de la integración latinoamericana en un mundo globalizado
• Pensamiento iberoamericano del siglo XX ante la condición humana
• Historia de las ideas en América Latina y España
• Temas y corrientes contemporáneas del pensamiento filosófico y educativo en Iberoamérica
• El pensamiento marxista ante los problemas de la contemporaneidad
• La proyección del ideal social de la Revolución Cubana

• The systematic study of forms of popular collective consciousness generating movements of liberation or movements supporting oppressive ideas.
• Political practices oriented towards the development of control by oppressive groups and generating social changes introducing inequality and authoritarianism; as well as practices oriented to equality, and fostering the development of democratic control.
• Expressions of political ideology, political alienation and de-alienation of common-sense and everyday experiences, of collective memory, as well as of public policies.
• Studies of both population and leaders, of social movements and of individuals and groups, from the perspective of their liberationist or oppressive orientation.
• Political organizations and institutions fostering liberation or forms of oppression, their historic development, their social identity, their use of power, and their activities and effects.
• The uses of power and their consequences for liberation and oppression.

• Production, communication and adaptation of knowledge
• Changing ›sites‹ of knowledge
• Knowledge, development and shaping the future
• Transmission of knowledge
• Environmental Changes and Environmental Knowledge
• Generation and Transfer of Religion-Knowledge
• Knowledge and Action in the Context of Disease and Poverty
• International Science/Scholarship Cooperation and International Knowledge Exchange
• African studies in Europe: A by-product of the (post)colonial experience?

Die Tagung sucht im Spannungsfeld zwischen einer autonom gewordenen Rationalität und einer rational sich explizierenden Spiritualität nach Wegen der Vermittlung. Die leitende Überlegung lautet: Sowenig eine rational argumentierende Philosophie das Phänomen des Spirituellen ausblenden kann (und sei es, dass es als ›ihr gänzlich Anderes‹ bestimmt wird), so wenig können Positionen der Spiritualität oder Religiosität ohne rationale Explikationsgrundlage bestehen: Beide Konzepte stehen im Tagungsthema darum auch nicht isoliert zur Diskussion, sondern werden bezogen auf ihr je ausgegrenztes ›Anderes‹ hin geöffnet und zur Sprache gebracht.
Die gemeinsame Aufgabenstellung lautet: Wie können Positionen, denen Rationalität als letzter Horizont der Weltbeschreibung gilt, die Tauglichkeit der in diesem Konflikt in Gebrauch genommenen Rationalitätsstandards erweisen, um der Herausforderung der wiedererwachenden Spiritualität/Religiosität Rechnung zu tragen? Und wie können Positionen, denen die Spiritualität, das Sakrale oder der jeweilige Transzendenzbezug ein Letztes ist, zu Formen der Verständigung finden, die sie nicht dogmatisch voreinander separiert, sondern ihr Anliegen auch für die anderen verständlich und nachvollziehbar zu artikulieren vermag?

• Antropología
• Arqueología
• Lingüística y Literatura
• Historia y Arte
• Movimientos étnico-sociales y Derechos humanos
• Estudios económicos, sociales y político-jurídicos
• Pensamiento, Filosofía y Educación
• Ciencia, Técnica y Medio Ambiente

• Development Ethics – Theory and Practice
• Accountability: Good Governance, Empowerment, Exclusion
• Responsibility and Globalization
• Fostering Integrity and Accountability in Development and Governance
• Peace and Conflict in the Developing World
• The Teaching of Development Ethics and Ethics in Public Management – Sharing Experience, Widening and Strengthening the Network

1. Greek philosophical thought and its conceptions of values in relation to the contemporary situation
2. Traditional views concerning the role of the virtues in relation to political practices and justice
3. Philosophy of values in the modern and contemporary world (notion and content of values, ontology and metaphysics of values, kinds of values, new values and the dialectic of values)
4. Economic values, competition and the problem of justice in the global era
5. Theoretical conceptions of justice, old and new, within the process of globalization in our global era
6. Axiological reconstructions and differentiations and the multiplicity of the forms of life on the global framework today: the desirability, efficacy, utility of global ethics and the features that characterize it
7. Power, values and the common good of humanity understood as wellbeing and the relevance of justice (nature and values, social, ethical standards and political articulation of power and justice)

Das Thema "Einheit in der Vielheit" soll einen Schwerpunkt des Kongresses bilden. Um Einheit und Vielheit, Monaden und Körper bewegen sich nach Leibniz' eigener Aussage seine fundamentalen Überlegungen. Wie die Perzeption der Ausdruck der Vielheit in der Einheit ist, so sind Vollkommenheit und Harmonie als identitas in varietate bestimmt. In der Perspektivität der Monaden, im Umgang mit anderen Kulturen (insbesondere der chinesischen) und in der mühevollen Arbeit an der Reunion der Konfessionen entwickelt Leibniz eine Konzeption von Einheit und Vielheit, die auf ihre Relevanz für die aktuelle Diskussion um Toleranz und ihre Grenzen zu befragen ist. Wenn Leibniz, wie es in der augenblicklichen Forschung anklingt, über ein Bündel von Rationalitätskonzeptionen verfügte, so ist doch die Frage nach ihrer Einheit unabweisbar.

We live in an age of mass production of narratives. The prophecy of the European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prescribing a paradigm for the creation of narrative, has become a reality. The result of the mass production of narratives is the leveling of all narratives, posing a challenge to authority. One ›grand narrative‹ after another is discarded, leaving the European mind longing for a unifying narrative that crystallizes the European identity. The conference invites scholars from various disciplines such as History, Politics, Literature, Arts, Philosophy, and Religion to examine the European Identity and the multiplicity of narratives in the age of globalization.

• Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity
• Qualitative Aspects of Consciousness
• Phenomenology of Consciousness
• Theories of Action and Agency
• Time Consciousness and Memory
• Self-Consciousness and Language
• Consciousness, Knowledge and Reality
• Social and Political Dimensions of Consciousness
• Ethics, Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation
• Technology and Consciousness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Consciousness of Self and Other
• Imagination, Dreaming and Altered States of Consciousness
• Consciousness and Cognition
• Physicalist/Reductive vs. Non-Physical/Non-Reductive Accounts of Consciousness
• Atomistic and Holistic Aspects of Consciousness
• Race, Gender and Ethnicity
• Post-modern Selfhood
• Relativism and Absolutism
• Cultural Relativism
• Culture and Meaning
• Singularity of Culture
• Tradition and Modernity
• Culture: Descriptive and Normative Approach
• Values, Customs and Culture
• Culture and Hermeneutics
• Text and Interpretation
• Globalization of Culture
• Sociology of Knowledge

• Gender and Social Transformation
• Transformation of Gender Roles
• Gender and Language in Africa
• Gender and Economic Transformation
• Gender, Crime, Law, and Justice
• Gender, War and Peace-making
• Trans-Atlantic Encounters and Transformation
• Migration\Displacement Experience
• Children and Migration Experience
• Globalization of Poverty
• Trans-Atlantic Relations
• Policy Implications of Gender and Globalization

• Advertising
• Business communication across cultures
• Communication accommodation
• Communication and globalization
• Communication education
• Computer mediated communication
• Conflict and negotiation
• Crisis management
• Cross-cultural adaptation
• Cultural and linguistic diversity
• Cultural identity and globalization
• Digital communication
• Ethnicity and communication
• Group/organizational communication across cultures
• Health communication across cultures
• Information technology and culture
• Interpersonal/intercultural communication
• Intercultural/global communication competence
• Language and cultural education
• Language attitude
• Language change and language stability
• Language policy
• Media and culture
• Media literacy
• Rhetoric studies
• Risk communication across cultures
• Translation theory
• Verbal/nonverbal communication across cultures

• Unity and Plurality in Europe: Religion and Civil Society
• The »Muslim Question« in Europe
• Religion and Public Life

• Nation(s)
• Identity/ies
• Europe
• Minorities, Regions
• Religion and Denomination
• Tradition and Modernity
• Media

• Ecological Restoration
• Nature, Culture and Artifact
• Environmental Justice
• Animals and Speciesism
• Ecofeminism
• The Land Ethic
• Environmental Citizenship
• Economy and Ecology
• Risk and Technology
• Ecology and Utopia
• Environmental Movements
• Environmental History
• Climate Change and Disasters
• Literature and Ecology

• Ética, derecho y ciudadanía. Los límites de la biopolítica
• Ética, cultura e identidad. Políticas de la lengua
• Ética y estética. Cuerpo e imagen en el arte contemporáneo
• Ética, religión y cultura. Polifonía cultural y religiosa

The relationship between freedom and social justice has long been a fundamental issue in economic and political thought. Understanding this relationship requires studying the connections among freedom, equality, human diversity, democracy, human development, poverty and welfare. This conference sets out to explore the broad theme of freedom and justice, including the contribution of the capability approach to its understanding. Fundamental issues to be addressed include the nature of social justice, the political implications of expanding freedom and justice, the mechanisms of political inclusion and exclusion, poverty and development, the cultural embeddedness of individual freedom and its consequences for the realization of social justice, and potential tensions among different kinds of freedoms.

• Citizenship: New Paradigms and Challenges
• Security, Violence and Peace
• Democracy, democratisation: Prospects for Civil Society

• Human Rights and International Justice
• Freedom of Expression
• Democracy and Recognition
• Kantian Justifications of Political Norms
• The Problem of Pluralism for Theories of Justice
• The Concept of Politics: What is Dead and Alive in the Classical Definition?
• Anarchist Political Theory
• Rhetoric and Political Theory
• The Origins of International Relations Theory
• The Future of Political Theory
• Power, Legitimacy and the Political in Contemporary Political Theory
• The Various Forms of Cosmopolitanism in Political Theory
• Philosophy and Public Policy
• Ideology and British Political Parties
• Marxism
• The Cultural Preconditions of Democracy
• Roundtable on Andrew Vincent's »The Nature of Political Theory«
• Green Politics
• British Idealism and Political Thought
• Deliberative Democracy

• Transnationalism
• Diaspora
• Multiculturalism
• Research, policy and praxis

The main objective of this conference is not just to chronicle the situation and bring out new streams of reflection within the three disciplines of political science, philosophy, and law. More importantly, the ultimate goal is to compare the disciplinary perspectives, and, to the extent possible, »crossbreed« them. Faced with the considerable impending challenges of the phenomenon of war, disciplinary compartementalization proves, indeed, unproductive.

The conference aims to discuss in which way Creation is understood by three monotheistic religions will be considered. The conference is open to both members and nonmembers of the Forum, an open group of people interested in exploring the relationship between established scientific knowledge and religious faith. The Forum welcomes those of any religion or none.

The conference includes papers on Levinas's phenomenology and ethics; his Talmudic studies; comparisons between Levinas's work and Chinese approaches to ontology, ethics, politics, the self and the other; and the application of Levinas's thought to contemporary problems of ethics and society. Renmin University Press plans to publish a volume of conference papers in Chinese in order to extend the influence of the conference to a wider Chinese intellectual public.

• Does climate change shed light on the foundational dynamics of reality structures?
• Does it indicate a looming bankruptcy of traditional conceptions of human-nature interplays?
• Does it indicate the need for utilizing nonwestern philosophical approaches, and if so, how?
• Does the imperative of sustainable development entail a new metaphysical groundwork for morals?
• How will human-made climate change affect academic philosophy – and how can philosophy contribute positively to the global science and policy of climate change?

• Human awareness of the passage of time; changing attitudes to what H.G. Wells called 'the shape of things to come'. What are the possible bases for thinking about the future?
• Expressions of these attitudes in contemporary culture – portrayals in art, cinema, literature, radio, science fiction, theatre, tv
• The psychological basis of fear of the future. Why millennial hopes are matched by millennial fears
• The concept of a new age. Utopian thinkers; Dystopian visions. The connection with political movements. What do new agers want? Hedonism and the simple life. The fear of longevity. The fear of loneliness
• Hopelessness, despair, indifference and resignation. The meaning of life
• The science of the future. Prediction, risk and disaster management
• The phenomenology of hope. What is this phenomenon that we call hope? How does it live and seemingly thrive in difficult times? How is it sustained? How is it invoked? Is there any difference between those who seem to be more hopeful than others?
• Does hope and the act of hoping/or the predisposition to hope differ from culture to culture? What are those variances and what accounts for them? How is hope differently instantiated among cultures? What are those instantiations?
• The notion of open and closed futures
• The role and place of religion and religious movements
• Risk, possibility and hope
• Envisaging possible futures. The question of choice. Cultivating hope. To boldly go

This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields, in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline. Papers are invited on any philosophical issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as ethics, justice, culture, identity, feminism, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology.

• Decolonisation
• Conquests and beginnings
• Settlers and expatriates
• Colonial societies
• Theories of colonialism and postcolonialism
• Colonial diasporas and legacies
• Colonial narratives

The early medieval period was a time of movement and change, but also of continuity. Religions in their various forms were spreading, through conquest and conversion, and political powers shifted and altered. Society and culture underwent changes as the two elements – victor and vanquished – interacted, and old practices and traditions mingled with new.

Given the historical importance of global forces in the region, contemporary scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean have recently eschewed grand narratives and broad generalizations, retreating to ever-narrower scholarly specializations. While we do not call for readopting discarded frameworks, we do call for taking stock and making sense of the current complexities, a task that requires seeing the big picture and paying attention to multiple voices and perspectives. What are the relationships between local, regional, national and global levels in Latin America and the Caribbean? How should scholars understand the current interactions in light of past experience and future possibilities? How do the cultural, social, economic, and political spheres interact on these different levels?

• The socio-political context of the social sciences in the past, present and future: interactions with the nation-state, the Cold War and globalisation
• Truth and democracy: (a)symmetries between political theory and philosophy of science
• Models of science = models of democracy = models of rationality
• Orthodoxy and heterodoxy in social science (can they be understood in terms of majority and minorities in democratic theory - and the Westminster vs. consensus model of democracy?)
• Consensus vs. dissensus in social scientific disciplines and in democracy
• The ends, means and/or usefulness of the social sciences in democracies
• Social scientific knowledge produced by universities, consultancy firms, think tanks, governmental agencies, etc: a comparison
• The democratisation of science, a democratic science policy (republican, cosmopolitan, pluralist, etc.)
• Interdisciplinarity, the division of labour between disciplines, monopolies, oligopolies, etc.
• Scientific pluralism, unity vs. disunity of the social sciences
• Forms of pluralism: explanatory, theoretical, methodological, metaphysical, value, cultural, … pluralism

• Theoretical and methodological framework for the research and understanding of globalization, nationalism and ethnic conflict
• The development of national identity and the challenges of globalization
• Origins, elements and forms of ethno-nationalism at the end of 20th and the beginning of 21st century
• Anatomy and genesis of ethnic conflicts: national, regional and global aspects
• Political, religious and national extremism, violence and terrorism
• Globalization, ethnic conflicts and organized crime, with special emphasis on illegal migration
• Conflict prevention and dealing with consequences of conflict
• Lessons learned from EU and UN peace missions
• Human rights and democracy at preventing, resolving and dealing with the consequences of conflict, including supporting measures facilitating peaceful conciliation of group interests
• Support and assistance to the victims of violation of human rights during the conflicts
• Promotion and protection of minority rights
• Measures to combat racism and xenophobia, and to protect minorities and indigenous peoples
• Lessons learnt from the state-building experience in former Yugoslavia
• Post-conflict multiethnic states in the Balkans
• Nationalism and the challenge of democratization; Is post-communism still a relevant category for the study of nationalism?

Certain renderings of media globalization posit a disappearing nation-state superseded by global corporate operations and global cultural practices and identities. Hybridity, cultural proximity, glocalization, cultural imperialism, transnational media consolidation, and other concepts often dance with the role of nation, state, or culture, but seldom consider their complex, material interactions. We are left with important theoretical and practical questions: How have identifiable global media practices transformed specific national identities and social interests? What is the role of the state in regulating or deregulating media and cultural practices – and in whose interest does the nation-state function? Which cultural practices exist within or transcend nations and their states? Whose interests predominate in global media practices and how do these interests and practices represent the multiple nationalities, nations, and cultures of the world? Other difficult questions arise as we try to comprehend, explain, and develop real options for media and cultural practice in a rapidly changing world. The conference focuses on these and other issues of nation, state, and culture in the age of globalization.

The theme is to be interpreted broadly and from the disciplines of philosophy, theology, social science, literature and the arts. Contributions may examine specific claims of truth seeking and truth telling or may engage issues such as fundamentalism, relativism and nihilism. Reflection on contemporary issues such as terror and the political uses of fear will be welcomed.