• Politics of Development and Social Change
• Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation
• Politics and Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention, and ›Responsibility to Protect‹
• The Future of Multilateralism, Regional and Global
• Human Rights and Human Security
• People Movement
• Great Powers in the Region
• Terrorism
• Regional Security
• Political Economy
• International History
• International Political Theory
• Arms Control and Disarmament
• Security Communities
• Inter-Civilizational Encounters
• Environmental Politics
• Energy Security
• International Relations Theory
• Historical Sociology
• Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Asia-Pacific and Beyond

The aim of this conference is to address questions and issues exploring to what degree Pancasila, as the founding ethos of Indonesia, continues to be relevant in a global and modern Indonesian society. To what degree can Pancasila and its followers address the various challenges of the centrifugal forces of globalization and modernity?

• Narrative and linguistics
• Linguistic borders and translation
• Narrative and myth
• Storytelling in rituals, customs, and fetishism
• Storytelling and visual/performing arts and music
• Oral tradition and contemporary chronicle
• Postmodernity and its narratives
• Voice and reflexivity in oral and written texts
• Colonial and postcolonial narratives
• Globalization and indigenous cultures
• Story, Dialogue and Discourse
• Memory and truth-telling
• Testimonial Narratives
• Memory and Written Record
• Text, Context and Intertext in Storytelling and Performance
• Children's Stories – Language, Authority and Silence

• Notions of futurity, messianism, and the à venir (›to come‹)
• Modernism and the first era of globalization
• Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime
• The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake of catastrophic events
• Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic or intellectual ›risks‹ taken by experimental artists and thinkers
• Disaster films
• Ecocriticism and climate change
• Future ruins
• The fate of the archive
• ›Nuclear Criticism‹ and its possible revival post-9/11
• (Post-)apocalyptic visions
• Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures
• The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory

A philosophy which cares for difference suggests the need for a approach which protects, promotes and interrelates human diversity and creativity. That is, in order for these multiple and diverse humane factors to make their rich contribution to social well being in these times of global interaction they must be able to be seen not as conflictual, but as complementary and relational. In turn, this calls for a new paradigm in which they are understood as existing within a larger, integrating whole in which the diverse realities are essentially related, not merely physically, but in terms that engage the human search for meaning and purpose. These are the keys to the respect for nature and for one another on which a truly global human comity can be built. But philosophy never ceases with mere facts; it looks further for the principles which reveal all as intelligible or true and as life giving or good. This calls for a renewed understanding of »the unity of all under heaven« both for its inherent relationality and for the implications of its source and goal for the meaning and purpose of all. Here we reach the classical issue of the one and the many, now in terms of the global whole.

• Justification of international punishment
• Collective responsibility
• Just war theory
• International corrective justice

• Climate change: justice and climate change, ecological debt, future generations and climate change
• Genetic engineering, genetic testing, cloning, abortion and wrongful life, property rights in genetic material, xenotransplantation
• War: new wars v. old wars, new forms of warfare, wars over natural resources, mercenarism, terrorism, torture, the ethics of peacekeeping
• Electronic technologies: privacy and the internet, surveillance technologies, democracy and the internet, data security
• Migration and citizenship: border controls, refugee quotas, religious toleration in an age of terror
• Concepts and conceptions of rights, freedom and justice in the face of those changes
• Business ethics in a globalised world

• Childhood and youth: crime, refugees, health, family, caregiving, politics, technology, employment
• Liberty and human trafficking: slavery, genocide, social impact
• Education: policy, history, culture, primary/secondary/tertiary level issues
• Multiculturalism, diversity, interculturalism: processes, inter-relationships, immigration, race, legal issues, ethnicity, language/literacy, cultural customs, global interconnections
• Anthropology, sociology, economics of culture: funding, policy, legal ramifications, social impact
• Aboriginal issues: traditional knowledge, treaty rights, post colonialism, land use framework, health, environmental management, government policies

This seminar proposes to bring together college teachers in the humanities and social sciences to discuss the challenges of maintaining political liberty in a society in which the diversity of religious worldviews makes it difficult to point to a common morality.

• Markets and Human Development
• Governance and Human Development

• rights to interpret the past and tell stories about it
• handling the sacred
• the concept and ethics of birthright
• local versus national versus international rights over sites, antiquities and artefacts
• roles and responsibilities of museums
• duties/rights of international intervention to defend antiquities
• study and custodianship of human remains
• looting and the antiquities trade
• the economic exploitation of sites and resources
• duties of preservation for future generations
• the use of destructive research techniques
• the roles of codes of ethics and of legal frameworks

• Defining and Grasping the Concept of Diasporas
• Migration, Settlement and Identity
• Culture, Belonging and Collective Imaginations
• Instructions and Design

• Enhancing theoretical frameworks from social, cultural, political, economic, religious and theological perspectives
• Evaluating the dynamics and resources of peace-building in the light of case studies from conflict zones including Korean Peninsula, Balkans, Middle East, Africa and South Asia
• Facilitating engagement between theory and practice in dealing with refugees and displaced persons by bringing academics and practitioners together
• Suggesting practical, multi-disciplinary approaches for politicians, policy makers, community leaders, NGOs, national and international organisations

Refugees and Migration · HIV / AIDS · Comparative Migration Studies · Hip Hop and Culture · African Art · Anti-Privatization of Utilities · Immigration and Homelessness · Water Rights · Food Production · Global Labor Exploitation · Peace Studies · Issues for Women and Families · Global Critical Race Theory · Global Economics · TNCs and Global Ethics · International Human Rights · Pan-Africanism · Acting Locally/Thinking Globally · Global Economic Crises · World Bank/IMF · African Environmentalism

The shift in feminist theory from understanding gender as state to gender as process has been accompanied by an increasing sense of the need for dialogue about the ways in which gender is articulated, embodied and enacted within and across different cultural, social, political and economic locations. Such dialogue may operate within regions, prompted, for instance, by engagement with diverse migrant groups, or across regions, e.g. in the examining of questions of modernity in India, Japan, Turkey or Iran compared to the UK. How do East and West engage with each other as power balances are shifting, and what role does gender play in this engagement? How is gender (re)figured in the east and in the west as a function of changes in these localities, and in the relations between them?

• War and the everyday
• Heritage politics, cultural production and aesthetics
• Postcolonial memorial complexes
• Pitfalls of indigenous reworkings
• New networks and mobilities in the postcolonial city
• Forced migrations and the biopolitics of statehood
• Spirituality and the religious idiom
• Nationalism and its neo-liberal moulds

• Roots national philosophies in transmodernism
• Negotiating the importance of the national cultures and philosophies in a glocalized world
• Noica after Noica – workshop to celebrate the centenary of Constantin Noica

• Environmental ethics
• Sustainability
• Environmental education

The region of civilisational interactions from Central Asia to Eastern Europe and from Southern Russia to Northern Iran has been one of the focal geographical points in world history. Though the main stress of the conference will be on cultures, histories (including archaeology, etc.), languages and the literatures of this vast area, presentations on modern political and regional issues, as well as the human ecology topics are also welcomed.

The term »global discontent« sums up many of the challenges of our times. Globalization, while old in origins, has come to dominate our lives during the last couple of decades. Internationalization as a phenomenon has been with us for a long time. But globalization as a process is of more recent vintage. It refers not only to the speed with which information, money and goods travel around the world but also to the reorganization of the world economically and politically in ways that were not possible before. Finally, globalization has become an ideology. Its proponents perceive the world through this cognitive framework and mobilize it in their efforts to shape how the world system operates and where it should be going. The broad framework of globalization offers opportunities to participate in a grand intellectual enterprise to analyze, criticize and evaluate the prevalent phenomenon of our times whether students of international relations, comparative politics, political economy, political thought, public policy, political change and development, politics of the environment, gender politics, ethnic politics, urban politics, local government, politics of resistance or of reaction.

• Media Democracy and Governance
• Media and Youth in Democracy
• Media, Conflict and Crises
• New Media and Digital Technology
• Media and Development
• Media Law and Regulation
• Media and Gender
• Media and Cultural Identity
• Media, Democracy and Human Rights
• Alternative and Community Media
• Media and Culture
• Asian Perspectives on Communication
• International Communication
• Broadcasting
• Media Industry Trends and Dynamics
• Media and Ethics

• Comparative partitions and reunifications
• The importance of partition study in the face of the declining nation-state and the postnational
• The reshaping of knowledge in the wake of a partition or a reunification (for instance, what impact does the loss of archives at partition have on a new nation's knowledge production?)
• The impact of partitions and reunifications on the discourse of diaspora
• The meaning of reunifications in the face of globalization
• The re-imagination of the nation-state and reunifications
• Race, ethnicity and religion in partitions and reunifications
• Gender, sexuality, identity and partitions and reunifications
• Indigenous populations and their relation to a segregated nation-space
• Memory, Trauma, and Forgetting

• Politics of Multiculturalism
• (Post-)Multicultural Representations
• Living Multiculturalism

This congress hopes to stimulate philosophical reflection and discussion on topics related to the central theme of dialogue among cultures. Topics on philosophy of culture, cultural diversity and universality, globalization, ethics of peace, social equality, justice, and harmony are welcome, as are non-western or other philosophical perspectives.

• Methodische Zugänge
• Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Anthropologie
• Ethik und Ethos
• Ästhetik und Aisthesis

• Alexander von Humboldt
• Travels Between Europe and Latin America (15th through 21st centuries)
• Travelling in Dictatorships: Colonialism, Caudillismo, Fascism, Communism
• Travel and Science: Measuring, Collecting, Imagining the World
• Contemporary Travel Writing
• Emigration and Exile
• Travelling, Gender, Sexuality
• Travel Cultures, Practices and Economies: Discoveries, Expeditions, Tourism
• Global Environments: Travels and Ecology
• Narrating Voyages: the Scholar-Traveller
• Theories of Mobility and Travel Literature

• Art and Education
• Arts Agendas
• Supporting the Arts
• Art in Communities
• Constructing Art Worlds
• Audiences
• Analysing Artforms
• Meaning and Representation
• Festivals
• Art and Human Rights
• Public Art and Public Policy

The central theme focuses on the cultural transmutations and interrelationships between Western and Eastern scientific, especially mathematical, disciplinary matrices. Besides historical and philosophical papers on mathematics, speakers will also present papers on the history and philosophy of science broadly construed.

Who does not have Asia on his or her mind nowadays? It seems as if in a split second Asia has taken center stage. Is it a miracle or sheer hard work? Now that Asia is in the limelight the world is fast becoming aware of its varied culture, its rich environment and its polyglot background. Asia is everywhere. Its material and spiritual produce have become part and parcel of a global cultural pulse which pushes the frontiers of the human and natural sciences further into unchartered territories.

The conference invites proposals who aim to »shift the geography of reason« by exploring critical, theoretical, and creative questions about or relating to the Caribbean, its Diaspora, and the »global south« more generally, including the South in the North. We particularly welcome North-South and South-South intersections and/or dialogues. The theme for this meeting deals with migrations and diaspora. While proposals dealing with the broader organizing theme (»shifting the geography of reason«) will be welcome, the organizers are especially interested in presentations and panels that highlight questions about space, traveling, national and transnational communities, gender and sexuality, and issues of race and identity across migrations and diasporas not only in the Caribbean, but globally.

• Film and Media Studies in Asia
• Creative Writing in the Expression of Asian Values and Identities
• New Approaches to Reading and Teaching Literatures in English
• Defining and Redefining International English
• Linguistic and Cultural Diversities in Asian Societies
• The Impact of Religion in Changing Social Values
• New Social and Cultural Discourses in English Language Education
• Translation and Interpretation Studies in Asian Contexts
• Comparative Cultural Studies
• The Impact of New Media Technologies on Intercultural Communication
• Second and Multiple Language Acquisition in Bilingual and Multi-lingual Societies

• intercultural conflict management and world peace
• management and world peace
• intercultural training and world peace
• acculturation and world peace
• intercultural education and world peace
• world peace and intercultural communication
• indigenous cultural concepts of peace

Justice issues emerge in the debate over climate change policy on many levels. First, it must be determined what role each global actor will play in any coordinated effort to mitigate climate change. Second, it has to be decided the degree to which a nation's historical emissions ought to be considered. Third, it must be determined to what degree (if any) future people ought to be taken into consideration when establishing climate change policy. Fourth, it must be determined what types of entities have viable justice claims. Finally, we must determine what level of responsibility individual actors have in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

• Alternative/multiple modernities and globalization
• Anti-globalization: bottom-up challenges?
• The rise of the global non-West
• teaching globalization: challenging students
• Global fragments – fragmented globalizations
• The challenge of Transnational Studies
• My global self: globalization and subjectivity
• The limits of globalization theory
• One world – multiple worlds
• Globalization in one country
• The challenge of cosmopolitanism
• Rethinking global/local relations
• Towards a more critical global studies

• How can egalitarian utopias still be successfull?
• How can the philosophies of international distributive justice be re-adjusted to once again be relevant in the new context?
• How can the durability of social, economic, legal, and political inequalities of the early 21st century be explained?
• How can the different types of inequalities be conceptualized beyond a purely quantitative approach?
• How to re-evaluate the action of international organizations such as the World Bank and the WTO, or national politics of development assistance, and measure them against their actual capacity to somewhat level social and economic inequalities?
• How to conceive of more equal global structures of security and ecology?
• How to politically and legally analyse the role of informal actors or the new financial actors in relation to poverty in the world?
• How to theorize of the new constellations, disorders, and instabilities in world capitalism?

Theme of the conference is the Islamic resurgence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries from the perspective of three key concepts: myth, memory and emotion. Myth is used here especially in Roland Barthes' sense as a form of meta-language in which given symbolical signs are appropriated and stripped of their original contexts, history, and significances only to be infused with new and »mystifying« conceptual content. Examples of myths could be the new significances ascribed to Saladin and the Crusades, Jerusalem and Karbala, the hijâb and the siwâq. This connects to memory (remembering and forgetting), either collective (such as different – liberal, radical, Sufi – »remembrance« of the legacy of al-salaf, of the Ottoman Empire, of the »orthodox« Sultan Awrangzeb, etc.) or private (inspired by childhood experiences, persecution of relatives, etc). Finally, emotion refers to the social and psychological mechanisms which motivate people to adopt religious attitudes, join Islamic organizations and movements of various types and shades, and sometimes even be prepared to sacrifice their lives on the path of God.

• Libraries, democratization process and promotion of sustainable good governance in Africa
• Freedom of access to information, censorship to information, Internet monitoring, and good governance
• Information privacy and confidentiality
• Libraries, human rights and democracy
• Advocacy and smart partnerships between libraries and government in national development
• Information for poverty alleviation and social justice
• Libraries, social equality and economic growth
• Social inclusion/exclusion, democracy and good governance
• Digital divide and achievement of democracy
• E-governance/e-government and libraries in Africa
• Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and good governance
• Universal access to information and disadvantaged groups
• Information literacy and democracy
• Local content, knowledge management/services, and good governance
• Intellectual property rights and democracy
• Information services and community/national development
• Learning organizations, democracy and good governance

States' extraterritorial obligations (ETOs) are a major issue in international human rights law. The conference will present and analyse the work of the ETO Consortium, a collaborative project of civil society organisations and academic institutions. The project addresses conceptual and practical application of ETOs pertaining to economic, social and cultural human rights, with a view to developing authoritative principles on these matters in 2010. Conference participation will include civil society organisations, human rights experts from academia, representatives from the UN and others interested. The programme will feature speakers on ETOs in relationship to key themes in times of globalisation, including poverty, trade and development.

• What are the mechanisms through which social or national identities foster cohesion (e.g. trust and solidarity) and inclusion, and what are the mechanisms through which they foster conflict and exclusion?
• To what extent does the empirical evidence support various political claims about the importance of e.g. shared national identities as a precondition for solidarity and peaceful community life?
• Which kinds of community are (most) conducive to integration and stability, e.g. is citizenship enough?
• How is immigration related to social cohesion and levels of social spending?
• Why have social cohesion discourses gained such prominence in contemporary liberal societies?
• What do normative ideals such as liberty and equality imply with respect to a) immigration policies that aim at protecting/fostering social cohesion, and b) what we may legitimately expect from minorities and majorities with respect to conforming to a shared identity?
• Do multicultural policies undermine social cohesion?

The conference will examine the role of policy in determining the outcomes of immigration and the presence of immigrants in, as well as their contribution to different societies. It will consider the intended societal outcomes, the most effective ways to achieve these outcomes, and the influences that government policy and political leadership can bring to bear against a background of historical tradition and societal norms. In addition, it will consider these factors within the context of globalization, high mobility, and shifting mobility patterns, and the constraints that they and other factors exert on the efficacy of policy interventions.

The concept of harmony has figured prominently in both eastern and western philosophical traditions, and can be interpreted to describe the developmental goals of many societies. Unlike the more often invoked concept of »globalization«, »global harmony« captures many of our shared ideals concerning the relationships among countries, cultures, and legal systems, as well as between human kind and nature. By proposing to examine the role of the rule of law in promoting global harmony, the organizers hope not only to give greater voice to traditions and contemporary thinking in non-western cultures, but also to suggest new dimensions of collaboration among eastern and western scholars.

• How is power structured and brought to bear on people through space and place?
• How does power operate locally, nationally and globally and in both its soft and hard forms?
• How does it operate through urban planning, architecture, housing policy, immigration policy and national borders?
• How does it work to discipline and exclude some, while insulating others from the excesses of inequality and degradation?
• How are space and place utilised as a means of dividing people into »us« and »them«?
• How and in whose interests do these divisions function as they pit against each other not only people who live in different parts of the world but also those who live just a few metres apart?
• What might an analysis of politics through questions of space and place indicate about how power, injustice and inequality could be better understood and more effectively contested?

The conference intends to inquire into the sense/common-sense (or non-sense) of contemporary literary and cultural studies, whether European, American, Afro-American, Asian, Asian-American, Australian, Caribbean, New Zealander and others, the presentation of which will be most welcome.

• Is cosmopolitan global governance a-political?
• Is cosmopolitan global governance cloaking ideological or imperial power structures?
• Do human rights discourses lead to a depoliticization of world politics?
• Is there still a role for sovereign nation-states in the new world order?
• Does global democracy rule out national self-determination?
• Is the concept of sovereignty outdated? Can or should it acquire a different meaning?
• Should we move from global governance to global government?
• What forms of political opposition are possible on the world level?
• Would an evolution towards a multi-polar world order consisting of regional power blocs be desirable?
• Are representative forms of government on the global level desirable? Are they possible?

A careful re-examination of the normative arguments on the international use of force put forward by some of the most distinguished modern European political thinkers – ranging from natural-law theorists like Vitoria and Grotius to influential liberals such as Locke, Kant and J.S. Mill – could help us to consider the ethical implications of present-day military interventions in a refreshing new light. After all, those classical thinkers were grappling with several of the ethical dilemmas that we are facing today, be it with regard to humanitarian intervention, preventive or preemptive military action to neutralize looming dangers, or more ambitious imperial projects intended to »civilize« foreign peoples.

The conference aims to bring together experts in cross-cultural communication studies with a focus on recognition of the changing communicative environment in which we live and work, with the hope that new ideas and opportunities for collaboration will result. As an interdisciplinary conference on human communication across cultures, the suggested paper topics cover a wide range of communication related themes.

• Populations at risk: Surviving and responding to protection threats
• Concepts of protection
• The politics of protection
• Protection, security and the roles of military and armed actors
• National and regional responsibilities to protect
• Protection in practice

• Transformations of Self
• Boundaries, Communities and Nations
• Economies, Institutions and Migrants
• Art and Representations
• Self (inevitably) linked to Other

• Challenging Old Concepts of Self and Other
• Nations, Nationhood and Nationalisms
• Institutions, Organizations and Social Movements
• Persons, Personhood and the Inter-Personal
• Media and Artistic Representations
• Transnational Cultural Interlacing of Contemporary Life
• New Concepts, New Forms of Inclusion

Conference submissions will address the origins, evolution, and implications of citizenship in the African Diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean Islands, Latin America, and the United States. Scholars from all disciplines are invited to present research on African and African American life, history, thought, and culture from all parts of the Diaspora. As contemporary landscapes shift in national and international politics, we look forward to these important and necessary discussions about complex issues of citizenship – past, present, and future – for people of African descent.