The Visiting Scholars Program

The major ongoing activity of the Havens Center is the Visiting Scholars Program, which brings distinguished scholars from around the world to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Visiting scholars spend the better part of a week in residence at the Havens Center, delivering lectures, conducting seminars, and meeting with students, faculty, and the interested public. The Visiting Scholars Program enriches the campus and community in several ways. Scholars speak with expertise on a wide range of topics, very often presenting the findings of recently conducted original research. Many of the lectures have subsequently been published as articles or book chapters. The lectures themselves are taped and placed here on our website, thereby making them available to a world-wide audience. In addition, scholars assign selected readings related to their lecture topics, which the Center also makes available on its website.

UW students can also earn academic credit in Sociology 994 (Colloquium in Critical Sociology) for attending Havens Center lectures and seminars. In addition, during the spring semester of each year, the Center offers an integrated series of lectures linked to a graduate seminar, usually taught by a member of the Center's Steering Committee. Havens Center lectures and seminars are also sites of cross-disciplinary discussion among faculty and students and a context in which people from the broader community can participate in intellectually stimulating programs with academics. Many of these scholars have also generously given guest lectures in classes, conducted radio and television interviews, consulted with local scholars about their research, and entered into collaborative projects.

The Real Utopias Project

Attending to the creative tension between practical reforms and utopian alternatives, Havens Center director Erik Olin Wright has organized the Real Utopias Project, a series of working conferences dedicated to exploring a wide range of proposals and models for radical social change. Rather than focusing on either grand, abstract visions of a new social order or piecemeal reforms, the basic organizing principal of the project is to combine serious normative discussions of the underlying principles of different emancipatory visions with a pragmatic analysis of the institutional designs required to make those visions a reality. Each conference in the series is organized around a provocative, innovative manuscript advancing a proposal for radical, yet realizable social change. A group of scholars from around the world is invited to write essays engaging the ideas of this manuscript. The essays, which have ranged from detailed critiques of the argument advanced in the original manuscript to additional proposals for refining or modifying institutional designs, are circulated among participants and discussed at the conference. After the conference, the papers are revised in light of these discussions and the author(s) of the original manuscript write a concluding essay. The collection of papers is then published in the Real Utopias Project Series by Verso publishers, London. To date, three volumes have been published:

• Associations and Democratic Governance (1992) by Joel Rogers and Joshua Cohen (1992); Equal Shares by John Roemer (1996);
• Recasting Egalitarianism by Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis (1999).
• A fourth volume, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, by Erik Olin Wright and Archon Fong, is forthcoming.

The Midwest Social Forum

The Midwest Social Forum (MWSF) is an annual gathering that seeks to contribute to social movement building by providing grassroots organizations, community activists, educators, students, and others committed to social justice the opportunity to come together to exchange experiences and information, strengthen alliances and networks, and devise strategies for progressive social, economic, and political change. The MWSF builds on both regional and global traditions and sources of inspiration. It has its origins in the Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference, which was founded in 1983 by the Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and later renamed RadFest in the late 1990s. In 2003, the title Midwest Social Forum was added, inspired by the World Social Forum and the similar principles on which it was established, most importantly its commitment to diversity, democracy, and politically non-sectarian dialogue and deliberation, and to making a better, more just world possible (see WSF Charter of Principles here). Reflecting its growing identification and connection with the broader Social Forum phenomenon, in September 2005, the MWSF organizing committee voted to drop the name RadFest and go solely by the title Midwest Social Forum. The committee also decided to move the Forum to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in order to accommodate the Forum’s accelerated growth and increasing logistical, programmatic, and other needs. The growth and expansion of the MWSF is illustrative of the growing importance of the Social Forum movement more generally, which has spread to the regional, national, and even local level in many parts of the world. The World Social Forum itself has increased from 20,000 participants in 2001 to 155,000 in 2005. Moreover, for the first time, in January 2006, a Social Forum of the Americas will be held in Caracas, Venezuela, and in 2007, a United States Social Forum will be held in Atlanta, Georgia. And the Midwest Social Forum is now poised to make yet another significant leap forward, the first of many more to come.

The Madison Dialogue

The Madison Dialogue is a project that grew out of a major Havens Center conference on “The New Latin American Left” held in the spring of 2004. The Dialogue is an ongoing collaboration and discussion among the principal participants at the conference, which included social and political leaders and academics from ten Latin American countries, as well as Africa, Asia, and Europe. The initial post-conference objective is to produce an edited volume based on the papers presented at the conference. A second meeting is being planned for the World Social Forum in January 2005 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the book is to be presented. Together with the Transnational Institute (TNI), the Center will also serve as a consultant for a similar project that is being planned on the New European Left. The Participatory Democracy Project The aim of the Participatory Democracy project is to promote the concept and practice of participatory democracy at the local level, not only in Madison but also nationally and internationally. One of the principal means for doing this is the Center’s participation in the Transnational Institute’s Participatory Democracy Working Group. The Havens Center has also established a connection to the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy, a global network of over 100 cities devoted to promoting democratic participation at the municipal level.

The Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship Award

This Award is given to a scholar with a distinguished and extensive record of scholarly achievement in the critical tradition of social thought. The first recipient of the Award was Frances Fox-Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York. Her lecture, “Elections and Protest Movements in the Struggle for Democracy,” took place on November 11, 2004. See video here. The 2006 award will be presented to Howard Zinn in Spring, 2006. The Havens Center Associate Program This program is intended for academics and activists who are strongly affiliated with the Havens Center’s activities and committed to advancing its mission.

Past Conferences

• Symposium for Stephen Bunker (doc)
• Local Democracy conference
• National Conference on Media Reform
• New Latin American Left: Origins and Future Trajectory

Other Activities and Co-sponsored Events

The Havens Center also engages in a variety of additional activities on a more or less regular basis. It regularly brings speakers, including non-academics, to deliver lectures on a wide variety of topics of interest to both the campus community and the broader public. Very often, these lectures are organized in cooperation with other campus programs and community organizations. Recent examples include As’ad AbuKhalil, Ali Abunimah, Belquis Ahmadi, Tariq Ali, Maria Helena Moreira Alves, Gilbert Ashkar, Alejandro Bendaña, Chris Candland, Vivek Chibber, Dan Clawson, Laila Farah, Robert Fisk, Bill Fletcher, Robert García, Malcolm Gladwell, Amira Hass, Cheri Honkala, Ching Kwan Lee, Robert Jay Lifton, Sameena Nazir, Humberto Nunes, John Pock, Robert Pollin, Ann Powers, Guenther Roth, Leslie Salzinger, Jane Slaughter, Gregory Tewksbury, and Edward Webster.

The Havens Center has also been actively involved with community groups, social movements, and non-profits in Madison and beyond, co-sponsoring conferences, workshops, and community events. Examples include Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, the Student Labor Action Coalition, the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua, the Madison Area Peace Coalition, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Madison-Rafah Sister-City Project, the Wisconsin Community Fund, the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, the Madison Institute, Campus Ministry, the Colombia Support Network, and the South Central Federation of Labor.