Recent events
Health Inequities in the United States: An Ecosocial Perspective

NANCY KRIEGER is Professor of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, Associate Director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health, and Co-Director of the HSPH Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. Dr. Krieger is a social epidemiologist, with a background in biochemistry, philosophy of science, and the history of public health, combined with 25 years of experience as an activist in issues involving social justice, science, and health. Her work focuses on three aspects of social inequalities in health: (a) etiologic studies on the determinants of health inequities, (b) methods for improving monitoring of social inequalities in health, and (c) development of theoretical frameworks, including ecosocial theory, to guide work on understanding and addressing health disparities. Examples of her empirical work include: research on racism, discrimination and health, including blood pressure and birth outcomes; socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in breast cancer; and research on appropriate measures of social class (individual, household, and neighborhood), especially for population-based monitoring of social inequalities in health and also for studying women, gender, class, and health. Other work concerns history and politics of epidemiology and public health, including study and critique of theories that epidemiologists and others use to explain population patterns of health, disease, and well-being. Professor Krieger is editor of Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives (Baywood Press, 2004) and co-editor, with Glen Margo, of AIDS: The Politics of Survival (Baywood Publishers, 1994), and, with Elizabeth Fee, of Women’s Health, Politics, and Power: Essays on Sex/Gender, Medicine, and Public Health (Baywood Publishers, 1994). In 1994 she co-founded, and still chairs, the Spirit of 1848 Caucus of the American Public Health Association, which is concerned with the links between social justice and public health.
LECTURE REFERENCES
April 15: "The Elephants in the Room:Social Justice, Public Health, and Health Inequities"
READINGS
Conversations with Pierre Bourdieu

Michael Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world -- Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia -- through participant observation. In his different projects he has tried to cast light -- from the standpoint of the workplace -- on the nature of postcolonialism, on the organization of consent to capitalism, on the peculiar forms of working class consciousness and work organization in state socialism, and on the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism. During the 1990s he studied post Soviet decline as “economic involution”: how the Russian economy was driven by the expansion of a range of intermediary organizations operating in the sphere of exchange (trade, finance, barter, new forms of money), and how the productive economy recentered on households and especially women. No longer able to work in factories, most recently he has turned to the study of his own workplace – the university – to consider the way sociology itself is produced and then disseminated to diverse publics. Over the course of his research and teaching, he has developed theoretically driven methodologies that allow broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research and case studies. These methodologies are represented in Global Ethnography a book coauthored with 9 graduate students, which shows how globalization can be studied "from below" through participation in the lives of those who experience it. Throughout his sociological career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st. centuries.
LECTURE POWERPOINTS
READINGS (note that that these are works in progress, discussion papers rather than finished products.)
Poverty, Opportunity, and Place

Co-sponsored by the UW Institute for Research on Poverty and the Global Studies Program
Cynthia "Mil" Duncan returned to the University of New Hampshire in the spring of 2004 as founding director of the Carsey Institute. Widely recognized for her research on rural poverty and changing rural communities, Duncan was a sociologist at UNH for 11 years before leaving to become director of the Ford Foundation’s Community and Resource Development Unit in 2000. At the Ford Foundation she was responsible for a team of national and international leaders in the community development, youth, and environmental fields. Duncan was the associate director of the Rural Economic Policy Program at the Aspen Institute prior to her former work at the University.
In 1999, Duncan published Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, which received the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best book in Community and Urban Sociology. Duncan is the author of numerous book chapters and refereed articles. She received her PhD from the University of Kentucky in sociology and is a recipient of the University of Kentucky Department of Sociology Thomas R. Ford Distinguished Alumni Award. Duncan has a BA from Stanford University.
Toward an Intellectual History of "Ordinary Americans"

Co-sponsored by the UW Global Studies Program
Sarah E. Igo (Ph.D. History, Princeton University) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. An intellectual and cultural historian of the twentieth-century United States, she has gravitated toward questions related to the history and sociology of knowledge. Her first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007) explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation. Igo was the recipient of the 2006 President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association and has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Igo is currently at work on a cultural history of modern privacy, examined through legal statutes, technological innovations, professional codes, and re-imaginings of domestic life. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2001.
Conference on Private Military Contractors in Latin America
The A.E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change
The Privatization of Security and Human Rights in The Americas: Perspectives from the Global South
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., Madison, Wisconsin
January 31-February 2, 2008
Listen to audio recordings here
Co-Sponsored by: Politics and Society, the NAVE fund, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS), Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE), Global Studies, the Global Legal Studies Center, Wisconsin International Law Society (WILS), the Wisconsin Human Rights Initiative, and Community Action on Latin America (CALA).
Papers
Madison Group Research Network on PMSCs Statement of Purpose
Red Investigativa Madison sobre EPMs Declaración de Objetivos
Gualdemar Jiménez (powerpoint)
Registration
The conference is free and open to the public. Registration is requested (though not required), which can be done by sending an email to pmc2008@havenscenter.org with your name and affiliation (optional) or call Kate McCoy at 608-262-1420.
Contents
Space, Power, and Poverty in the Twenty-first Century City

NICOLE P. MARWELL is Associate Professor of Sociology and Latina/o Studies at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2000, and is a faculty affiliate of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Center for Urban Research and Policy, Center on Organizational Innovation, and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Dr. Marwell is also a member of the Editorial Board of the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology, and directs the Workshop on Nonprofit Organizations in Economy and Society at Columbia.
Does Anyone Really Want Peace in the Middle East?

Olive Branch Productions
Co-sponsored by the UW Middle East Studies Program and the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project
There are no suggested readings for Joan Mandell's visit. Instead, we have made three of her films available online for streaming (no downloads). The films are only available on computers within the UW campus network, and you'll need to use the username "soc994" and password "walsh" to be able to see them. To watch the films in a computer lab on campus, you might 1) bring headphones with you 2) bring a campus ID with you and borrow headphones from the lab's help desk or 3) use the computer lab in Van Hise that has headphones at each terminal.
Here are the links for the films:
- Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family, 1948-1984 (1984, 82min)
- Voices In Exile: Immigrants and the First Amendment (1997, 30min)
- I, Too, Sing America (2002, 2min)
- Tales from Arab Detroit (1995, 45min) (Not yet posted--will be available by Friday November 2nd)
JOAN MANDELL is the director of Olive Branch Productions, based in Detroit, Michigan, where she is a documentary producer, curator and educator. Her film and video career spans two decades and includes films for PBS, UNIFEM (United Nation's Women's Organization) and international broadcast. Her award-winning films, Tales from Arab Detroit, Gaza Ghetto, and Voices in Exile are widely taught on US college campuses. As a university educator, Joan Mandell has taught film and video production, international film history and media literacy at the University of California/Irvine, the College for Contemporary Studies, Detroit and to college students traveling around the world through the Semester-at-Sea program. Joan Mandell has lived and worked in the Middle East for nearly a third of her adult life. She was an instructor of English as a second language at Birzeit University, editor at Al Fajr newsweekly and a Fulbright Scholar to the West Bank/Palestine. She served on the editorial board of Middle East Report for two decades and has been an active member of the New Day Films cooperative for 12 years. Joan Mandell was a Felton Scholar in Media Literacy and an Affiliated Scholar at the von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies at UCLA. She earned an MFA in Theater, Film and Television at UCLA.
Axis of Hope: Latin America on the March

Novelist, historian, journalist and film-maker
Ali will discuss his latest book, Pirates of the Carribean: Axis of Hope. A revolution is moving across Latin America. Since 1998, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela has brought Hugo Chávez to world attention as the foremost challenger of the neoliberal consensus and American foreign policy. Tariq Ali shows how Chávez's views have polarized Latin America and examines the aggression directed against his administration. Pirates of the Carribean offers a guide through a continent that is once again on the march (http://www.tariqali.org/).
Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and co-sponsored by the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change, Tariq Ali's visit is made possible by the U. W. Madison Centerfor Humanities as part of their week-long series of events on "Legacies of Al Andalus: Islam, Judaism, & the West," October 16-20, 2007
TARIQ ALI was born in Lahore in 1943. He was educated at Oxford University, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union debating club and became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Active in the New Left of the 1960s, he has long been associated with the New Left Review, of which he is currently a board member and editor. During the 1960s, he also owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso. Ali's fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000) and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). His non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s. A book of essays, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, was published in 2002. Tariq Ali's latest works include Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005), and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author. The Leopard and the Fox (2007) is the script of a three-part TV series commissioned by the BBC and later withdrawn, and includes the background to the story.
The Day that Changed Madison: The "Dow Riot" forty years on

On October 18, 1967, a peaceful student sit-in against the makers of napalm, "liquid fire" used extensively by US forces against guerillas and civilians alike in Vietnam, prompted a police assault, then a melee with thousands of students joining the side of the peaceniks. The political atmosphere changed at an unprecedented speed. The Madison campus moved into the forefront of peace, anti-conscription and "Student Power" activity nationally.
Otherwise far-sighted administrators, seeking to protect the University itself from controversy and crisis, butted heads with students and faculty increasingly concerned with corporate takeovers of campus life and decision-making. The two sides, in agreement on many issues including the greatness of the university, found themselves badly divided. Local conservatives, meanwhile, faced challenges unknown since the Depression and the breakup of the Progressive Party for Cold War consensus.
The student strike -- unofficially honored by many faculty members while bitterly opposed by others -- and the resulting dialogue also emphatically reshaped Madison politics: Paul Soglin, a student activist, emerged with a strong community following, projecting him into the mayorality six years later, his administration a symbol of the larger changes locally in policing, gender equality, day care, ecology and related issues. Most notably, Madison had regained its national standing as an antiwar center, a standing lost since the days of Robert M. LaFollette, and which it has never forfeited in the years since.
Three days of lectures and a forum will address the issues of the Dow Days. Among the participants will be several on hand at the events, noted community activists involved in earlier campus protest against the Dow Chemical Company, and a leading figure of peace and social change from the 1960s to the present. Audience participation will follow the presentations of all events.
PAUL BUHLE is Senior Lecturer at Brown University and author/editor of nearly thirty books, including History and the New Left, Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-70, The Tragedy of Empire: William Appleman Williams, Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Immigrant Left in the United States, The New Left Revisited, and From the Lower Eastside to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. A former member of Students for a Democratic Society, Buhle founded the journal Radical America. He is a regular contributor to TIKKUN and CNS (an environmental journal), as well as a wide variety of other publications.
TOM HAYDEN was co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society in 1961, and author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement. During the 1960s, Hayden was a Freedom Rider in the Deep South and a community organizer in Newark, and later a vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War. After helping lead street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, where he was beaten, gassed and arrested twice, Hayden was indicted in 1969 with seven others on conspiracy and incitement charges. After five years of trials, appeals, and retrials, he was acquitted of all charges. Hayden was elected to the California state assembly in 1982, and the state senate ten years later, serving eighteen years in all. After forty years of activism, politics and writing, Hayden remains a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation.
Russian politics in historic context

BORIS KAGARLITSKY is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements in Moscow, Russia. Boris' latest books are Russia Under Yeltsin And Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (TNI/Pluto 2002) and New Realism, New Barbarism: The Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto 1999). He won the Deutscher Memorial Prize for his book, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State (Verso 1988). He writes regularly for The Moscow Times and Eurasian Home. Previously, he was a student of art criticism and was imprisoned for two years for 'anti-Soviet' activities related to his editorship of a samizdat journal, Leviy Povorot. Boris was co-ordinator of the Moscow People's Front between '88 and '90, and also advised the Workers' Committee of Prokpievsk and Karaganda during this period. He was a deputy to the Moscow City Soviet between 1990-93, during which time he was a member of the executive of the Socialist Party of Russia, co-founder of the Party of Labour, and advisor to the Chairperson of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.


