Conferences
Each year, the Center sponsors numerous public lectures, designed to provide in-depth analysis and discussion of a range of concepts in critical political economy, development studies, and related fields. Drawing on the expertise of scholars, including foreign academics, the series introduces students, researchers and the faculty to pressing issues and theoretical perspectives.
Recent Conferences
- US Economic Policy Towards Asia (August 2009)
- Barack Obama and the Filipino American (June 2009)
- Indonesia’s 2009 Election Campaign and What it Reveals: Looming Crisis of National Leadership and Governance (March 2009)
- Filipino Marriage Migration to Australia (June 2006)
- Seeds of Violence or Buds of Peace: World Faiths as Resources for Peace Education (March 2006)
Recent Conference Series
TWSC 30th Anniversary Lecture Series on Social Movements in the South
Recent political developments are posing challenges and opportunities to social movements worldwide. An evolving system of multilayered governance in the pursuit of global democracy has enmeshed national communities in networks of multiple, overlapping political processes. The ascendancy of neoliberalism has reconfigured the once predominant role of states, diffusing authority to other institutions and associations. Indeed, the terrain for contentious collective claims-making has been transformed. While social movements have become institutionalized in contemporary politics and a permanent feature of modern democracies, in the South, citizens continue to grapple with periodic threats to popular sovereignty for democracy remains fragile and arrested development and inequality persist. As part of the year-long celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Third World Studies Center, this series seeks to interrogate the relations of contention and collective action to democracy in contemporary history. It focuses especially on movements in the South, using a variety of cases of recent national and cross-border mobilization and protest. For more information, please contact the coordinator of the series.
Daniel Boone Schirmer Memorial Lecture Series on Marxism in the Philippines
The Third World Studies Center has always been associated with Marxist theorizing. This concern is motivated, among other things, by the question of such perspective’s value as framework for the analysis of Philippine political economy and its relevance to political praxis. The TWSC returns to this concern once again as the Philippine state and society confront different contemporary challenges such as the severity of the current economic crisis, the resurrection of the politics of polarization, the continuing difficulties of the Philippines as it rides the wave of globalization, and the absence of any forward looking analysis and prognoses that point to possibilities out of the impasse. Marxism in the Philippines is also an occasion for scholars and activists to re-examine Marxism (and its Filipino variant) in the light of the growing importance of competing perspectives. For more information, please contact the coordinator of the series.