Human Rights and the Global Economy
25th Social Research Conference, November 9-10, 2011
Human rights have become a mediating language for discussions of social justice and the global economy. The dynamism of the global economy is at once creating and destroying opportunities for people, shaping lives and livelihoods. Yet, while the language of human rights developed alongside capitalism, human rights and economics have followed separate trajectories in both theory and practice.
This conference is intended to contribute to a nascent conversation between the discourses of human rights and economics. While notions of human rights help frame the issues, "rights talk" is often criticized as mere rhetoric that contributes little to a better understanding of the processes involved. This symposium explores the role human rights can and does play in an evolving global economy. It brings together theorists and practitioners from both fields who are concerned with equity and social justice in many dimensions: the rules (trade, intellectual property, carbon emissions and climate change), the actors (corporations, multinational organizations), and the tools (the international human rights system). Scholars, activists, and members of the public are invited to explore exciting initiatives in this nascent field. Contemporary crises of climate change, financial market volatility, and increasing inequality add to the urgency of seeking connections between human rights and the global economy.
This conference is the 25th in the Social Research conference series and celebrates the tenth anniversary of the New School graduate program in International Affairs. The conference was organized as a collaboration among professors Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (International Affairs, The New School for Public Engagement), Miriam Ticktin (Anthropology, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts), Nehal Bhuta (International Affairs, The New School for Public Engagement), and Arien Mack, Alfred and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, editor of Social Research since 1970, and founder of the conference series in 1988. Social Research: An International Quarterly is the flagship journal of The New School for Social Research.
The conference is made possible with generous support from the Climate Change Narratives, Rights and the Poor Project at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway.
To order the related issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly
PROGRAM
Wednesday, November 9
Session 1: TRADE AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Human Rights and Trade Agreements Andrew Lang, Senior Lecturer in Law, Department of Law, London School of Economics
Trade and Labor Standards Sanjay Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research
Access to Medicines Manjari Mahajan, Assistant Professor of International Affairs, The New School for Public Engagement
Moderator: Nehal Bhuta, Assistant Professor of International Affairs, The New School for Public Engagement
Session 2: GLOBAL POVERTY AND THE OBLIGATIONS OF RICH COUNTRIES
Do We Have Legal Obligations to Strangers? Margot E. Salomon, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and the Law Department, London School of Economics and Political Science
Shifting Ideas and Politics of the Right to Development Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs, The New School for Public Engagement
What Responsibilities Flow from Having Benefited from Global Injustice? Christian Barry, Deputy Director, Research School of the Social Sciences (RSSS), Australian National University
Why Culture Matters in International Institutions: The Marginality of Human Rights at the World Bank Galit A. Sarfaty, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator: Philip G. Alston, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Session 3: KEYNOTE ADDRESS: THE ROLE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SHAPING INTERNATIONAL REGIMES
Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food; Visiting Professor, Columbia University (2011-2012)
Moderator: David E. Van Zandt, President of The New School
Thursday, November 10
Session 4: HUMAN RIGHTS, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND GLOBAL JUSTICE
Climate Change Lawfare Siri Gloppen, Research Director, Chr. Michelsens Institute (CMI), Bergen, Norway; Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen Asuncion Lera St. Clair, Research Director, Centre for International Climate and the Environmental Research (CICERO), Oslo, Norway; Associated Senior Researcher, Chr. Michelsens Institute (CMI)
Rights Mobilization in South Africa in the Context of Acute Environmental Harm Jackie Dugard, Executive Director and co-founder, Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), South Africa; co-author with Jennifer MacLeod and Anna Alcaro
Climate Rights and Obligations for Emerging States: The Cases of Brazil and South Africa Kathryn Hochstetler, CIGI Chair of Governance in the Americas and Professor, Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA); Professor of Political Science, Waterloo University, Ontario, Canada
Moderator: David Scobey, Executive Dean, The New School for Public Engagement
Session 5: CORPORATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS OBLIGATIONS
Business and Human Rights: A Transformative Agenda Chris Jochnick, Director of Private Sector Department, Oxfam America, Boston
Do Codes of Conduct Protect Workers? The Pitfalls of Private Regulation at Work Gay Seidman, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Coffee, Certification and the Incorrigibility of Capitalism
Chris London, Assistant Professor, Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at the New School for Public Engagement
Moderator: Miriam Ticktin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, The New School for Social Research
BIOGRAPHIES
Speakers, Panelists, and Moderators
Philip Alston, is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. Alston's teaching focuses primarily on international law and international human rights law. He co-chairs the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Alston received degrees in Law and in Economics in his home country (Australia) and a JSD from Berkeley. During the 1980s he taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and at Harvard Law School. He then became Professor of Law and Foundation Director of the Center for International and Public Law at the Australian National University, a post he held until 1995. From 1996 to 2001 he was Professor of International Law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy, where he was also Head of Department and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law. In the field of international law, Alston was editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Lawfrom 1996 through 2007 and was previously co-editor of the Australian Yearbook of International Law. He was a United Nations official, working in Geneva on human rights issues from 1978 to 1984. He has worked as a consultant to the ILO, the UNDP Human Development Report, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNESCO, OECD, UNICEF, and many other inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations. Other posts he has held include Chief-of-Staff to a Cabinet Minister in Australia in the Whitlam Government (1974-75), and Discrimination Commissioner for the Australian Capital Territory for three years. In the human rights area, Alston was UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions from 2004 to 2010 and undertook fact-finding missions to: Sri Lanka, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, Israel, Lebanon, Albania, Kenya, Brazil, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, the United States, Albania and Ecuador. He was a member of the Group of Experts on Darfur appointed in 2007 by the UN Human Rights Council, and was Special Adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Millennium Development Goals. He chaired the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights for eight years until 1998, and at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights he was elected to chair the first meeting of the Presidents and Chairs of all of the international human rights courts and committees (including the European and American Human Rights Courts and the African Commission). He was UNICEF's legal adviser throughout the period of the drafting of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and directed a major project funded by the European Commission, which resulted in the publication of a Human Rights Agenda for the European Union for the Year 2000 and a volume of essays on that theme. In 2010-11 he was a member of the Independent International Commission investigating human rights violations in Kyrgyzstan.
Christian Barry is Deputy Director of the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) and is a senior lecturer in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University. His research focuses on ethical theory and international justice. His recent publications include a book with Sanjay Reddy, International Trade and Labour Standards: A Proposal for Linkage (Columbia, 2008), and articles in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Review of International Studies, Journal of Political Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics.
Nehal Bhuta is a core faculty member and assistant professor in the New School graduate program in International Affairs. He has previously worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice and at the Federal Court of Australia. His research interests are in international law, political theory, human rights law, and the laws of war. Between 2007 and 2009, he was assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship, a Hauser Global Scholarship, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Grant, and the Regione Toscana Premio Giorgio La Pira. For a list of publications and some full text, visit his personal Web page.
Jackie Dugard is the executive director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). Prior to co-founding SERI (in January 2010), Jackie was a senior researcher at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg between 2004 and 2009. Jackie's areas of expertise are socio-economic rights, socio-legal studies and access to basic services and justice for the poor. Jackie has a BA (Hons) in African Politics and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand; an MPhil in the Sociology and Politics of Development and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge; and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex. Jackie sits on SERI's Board of Directors.
Olivier De Schutter (LLM, Harvard University; PhD, University of Louvain) has been the UN special rapporteur on the right to food since May 2008. He is a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain and the College of Europe (Natolin). He is also a member of the Global Law School faculty at New York University and a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 2002-2006, he chaired the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights, a high-level group of experts which advised the European Union institutions on fundamental rights issues. He has acted on a number of occasions as expert for the Council of Europe and for the European Union. Since 2004, and until his appointment as the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, he has been the General Secretary of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) on the issue of globalization and human rights. His publications are in the area of international human rights and fundamental rights in the EU, with a particular emphasis on economic and social rights and on the relationship between human rights and governance. His most recent book is International Human Rights Law (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr is professor of International Affairs at The New School. She is a development economist working in the multidisciplinary framework of capabilities and human development. Her current work focuses on international development agendas and human rights perspectives, the nexus of armed conflict and poverty, and global technology. Prior to coming to the New School, she was a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government where she worked on the book on the political economy of agricultural biotechnology. From 1995 to 2004, she was director of the UNDP Human Development Reports. Created by Mahbub ul Haq to advocate policy options that expand human choices and freedom, this annual publication that tracks global poverty and development has been an influential source on policy challenges for politicians, governments, NGOs, media, and researchers. The 10 reports Sakiko led covered a broad range of themes, from globalization to new technologies, democracy, human rights and cultural diversity. She has had a long career in international development, starting at the World Bank where she worked on agriculture in the Middle East, and moving on to UNDP where her assignments included managing programs in East and West Africa, and leading policy initiatives for aid effectiveness and capacity development. Her publications, in addition to the Human Development Reports, include: The Gene Revolution: GM Crops and Unequal Development (main contributor and editor); Readings in Human Development (edited with Shivakumar); Rethinking Technical Cooperation – Reforms for capacity building in Africa (with Elliot Berg); Capacity for Development (edited with C. Lopes and K. Malik), and numerous papers and book chapters on issues of poverty, gender, human rights, technology. She founded and is editor of the Journal of Human Development, and is on the editorial board of Feminist Economics. She is also on the board of several NGOs that advocate human rights and technology for development. Sakiko received her BA from Cambridge University, MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and MA from the University of Sussex (UK).
Siri Gloppen is Research Director at the Chr. Michelsens Institute (CMI), Bergen and Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen. Gloppen's research focuses on the intersection between law and politics and her work spans legal mobilization and the role of courts in social transformation, democratization and institutionalization of accountability structures, constitution-making, election processes, human rights, transitional justice and reconciliation. Her main empirical focus is southern and eastern Africa. She established the CMI's Courts in Transition research program, which in the past decade has investigated the role of courts in political and social transformation, with a particular focus on the global south. Her comparative research projects, involving local scholars in the countries as well as international experts, include "The accountability function of courts in new democracies," "The poor and the judiciary," and "Litigating the right to health: Can court enforced health rights improve health policy?" Her newest (co-written) book is Courts and Power in Latin America and Africa (Palgrave Macmillan). Gloppen is also the new head of the Rafto Prize Committee.
Kathryn Hochstetler is CIGI Chair of Governance in the Americas in the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. Previously, she taught in the Political Science departments of the University of New Mexico and Colorado State University. She has also held research positions at the Centre for Brazilian Studies at Oxford University and the Instituto de Desarrollo Economico y Social (Institute for Economic and Social Development) in Buenos Aires. Her PhD is from the University of Minnesota, in Political Science. Dr. Hochstetler has published widely on topics such as civil society and social movements, environmental politics, and presidentialism, with an empirical focus on South America or United Nations conferences. She has published three books: Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Duke University Press, 2007, with Margaret E. Keck); Advances in International Environmental Politics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, co-edited with Michele Betsill and Dimitris Stevis); and Sovereignty, Democracy and Global Civil Society: State-Society Relations at UN World Conferences (SUNY University Press, 2005, with Ann Marie Clark and Elisabeth Jay Friedman). Her current research includes a study (with SSHRC funding 2011-2014) of the positions Brazil and South Africa are taking in global climate change negotiations, as well as their implementation of their commitments through energy projects at home. This research is part of her broader interests in the emerging powers and the ways their national development strategies shape their participation in the global political economy and regional politics.
Chris Jochnick leads Oxfam America's work on business and development including shareholder engagement, value chain assessments, and collaborative advocacy initiatives. He has initiated a variety of innovative partnerships with Fortune 500 corporations. Jochnick is the co-founder and former director of two nonprofit organizations devoted to economic and social rights. He has worked for more than 18 years on issues of human rights and corporate accountability, including seven years in Latin America supporting grassroots campaigns around extractive industries, sovereign debt, and trade agreements. Prior to joining Oxfam, Jochnick worked as a corporate attorney with the Wall Street law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, where he advised companies on environmental and social responsibilities. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former fellow of the Echoing Green and MacArthur foundations. He teaches a class in business and human rights at Harvard Law School. Jochnick has been interviewed by NPR, the New York Times, and various trade publications.
Andrew Lang is a senior lecturer in Law, teaching public international law with a specialty in international economic law. He is a co-founder of the Society of International Economic Law. He sits on the Editorial Committee of the Modern Law Review, the Editorial Boards of the Journal of International Economic Law and the Law and Development Review, and is a Book Review Editor for the International and Comparative Law Quarterly. He has taught on Harvard's Institute for Global Law and Policy, the World Trade Institute's Masters of International Law and Economics (MILE) program, the University of Barcelona's IELPO course, as well as the IIEM Academy of International Trade Law in Macau. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown University Law Center, Visiting Faculty at the University of Michigan, and an International Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sydney.Professor Lang's current research is focussed on a number of themes around global economic governance, including the relationship between law and expert knowledge, international law and economics, and sociological approaches to the study of international economic law. He has a continuing research focus on the WTO’s SPS Agreement, including the particular issues raised under that agreement by Russia’s accession to the WTO.
Colin Picker, of the Society of International Economic Law. He sits on the editorial boards of the Modern Law Review,Journal of International Economic Law, and Law and Development Review, and is a book review editor for the International and Comparative Law Quarterly. He has taught in the World Trade Institute's master of International law and economics (MILE) program, the University of Barcelona's IELPO course, as well as the IIEM Academy of International Trade Law in Macau. Andrew's current research focuses on a number of themes of global economic governance, including the relationship between law and expert knowledge, sociological approaches to the study of the trade regime, and questions around trade in services. His 2007 article, "Reflecting on Linkage" received the MLR Wedderburn Prize for the best article published in the 2007 volume of the MLR. He is also completing a British Academy funded project to write a social history of the trade and human rights debate and has acted as a consultant to the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights on questions around the relevance of trade agreements to the special rapporteur's mandate.
Asuncion Lera St. Clair is a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsens Institute (CMI), Bergen, a professor of sociology at the University of Bergen, and scientific director of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP), a program of the International Social Science Council (ISSC). She is a philosopher and sociologist focusing on ethics in general, and poverty, climate change and human rights, in particular, and her research interests are focused on critical poverty studies, development and climate change ethics; human rights and global justice; social theory and sociology of knowledge; ethics and political philosophy; and multilateral organizations. St. Clair is also lead author of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is appointed to co-author chapter 1 ("Point of Departure") of the Working Group II Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Her research projects include Climate Change Discourse, Rights and the Poor: Scientific Knowledge,International Political Discourse, and Local Voices. She is also working with the Critical Global Poverty Studies Group on their project, Reframing Poverty: What Role for the Middle Classes. Her recent books include, Climate Change, Ethics and Human Security with Karen O'Brien and Berit Kristoffersen (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Development Ethics: A Reader with Des Gasper (Ashgate, 2010); and Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: What Role for Multilateral Organizations with Desmond McNeill (Routledge 2009).
Chris London is assistant professor of practice in the New School graduate program in international affairs, a position he has held since July 2010. He has a PhD in development sociology from Cornell University. His graduate research focused on the design and conduct of technical change in farming systems in tropical countries, that of Colombian coffee in particular, but also on the theory and processes of participatory democracy. Since 2000 he has held a variety of NGO positions: Coffee program director for the Consumer's Choice Council, where he promoted third-party certification and labeling of coffee; executive director of Educate the Children, a unique integrated community development program in rural Nepal; and director of the North American Congress on Latin America, a nonprofit dedicated to critical analysis of U.S. policy toward Latin America and of Latin American political economy. At The New School, his work is focused on examining and teaching the tools of the trade in international social change work.
Manjari Mahajan is an Assistant Professor at the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs. Her research interests are in global health, science and technology studies, environmental politics, and development. She has conducted research on the AIDS epidemics in South Africa and India, global intellectual property regimes, and the politics of agricultural biotechnology. She is currently working on a book titled “Global Health and the Logic of Emergencies: Science and Citizenship in the AIDS Epidemics of India and South Africa.” She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University, a MSc in Science Policy from Sussex University, and a BA from Harvard University. Before joining the New School, she had a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Sanjay G. Reddy is an Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. His areas of work include development economics, international economics, and economics and philosophy. Professor Reddy possesses a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, an M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. in applied mathematics with physics from Harvard University. He has held fellowships from the Center for Ethics and the Professions, the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University, and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Most recently he received a research grant from the inaugural grants program of Institute for New Economic Thinking. He has conducted extensive research for development agencies and international institutions, including the G-24 (group of developing countries), ILO, Oxfam, UNDESA (Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN Secretariat), UNICEF, UNDP, UNU-WIDER (World Institute for Development Economics Research), UNRISD (UN Research Institute for Social Development), and the World Bank. He has been a member of the advisory panel of the UNDP's Human Development Report, and of the UN Statistics Division's Steering Committee on Poverty Statistics and is a member of the advisory board of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. He has been or is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Development, Ethics & International Affairs, the European Journal of Development Research, Humanity, the Review of Income and Wealth, and the Journal of Globalization and Development. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities and is Editor of the New School India China Institute working paper series. His work has been translated into Catalan, French, German, and Portuguese.
Margot E. Salomon is a senior lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and the Law Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research addresses the legal dimensions of world poverty, development and international law, and human rights and economics. Dr. Salomon has been a consultant to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on extreme poverty and human rights and served as an advisor to the UN High-Level Task Force on the Right to Development from 2004-2009. She sits on the executive board of the Association of Human Rights Institutes, is a member of the International Law Association's Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a distinguished research associate of the North-South Institute in Ottawa, Canada. At the LSE, Margot coordinates a cross-departmental faculty research group on Globalisation, Poverty and Responsibility. She holds a PhD in international law from the LSE and an LLM from University College London. Publications include "Deprivation, Causation, and the Law of International Cooperation" in M. Langford et al (eds), Global Justice, State Duties: The Extra-Territorial Scope of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012); "Why Should it Matter that Others Have More: Poverty, Inequality and the Potential of International Human Rights Law," Proceedings of the Oxford University Conference on International Law and Global Justice, 37 Review of International Studies 5 (2011); "Poverty, Privilege and International Law: The Millennium Development Goals and the Guise of Humanitarianism," 51 German Yearbook of International Law (2008-9); Global Responsibility for Human Rights: World Poverty and the Development of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Galit A. Sarfaty is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago, a JD from Yale Law School, and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard College. Her research interests include international law, regulatory governance, organizational culture, human rights, and the legal profession. She is currently writing about the role of indicators in regulatory governance based on a case study on corporate sustainability reporting. Her book, Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank, will be published by Stanford University Press next spring. Her recent publications include “Why Culture Matters in International Institutions: The Marginality of Human Rights at the World Bank,” American Journal of International Law (2009); “Measuring Justice: Internal Conflict over the World Bank’s Empirical Approach to Human Rights,” in Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (Kamari Clarke & Mark Goodale eds., Cambridge University Press, 2009); and “International Norm Diffusion in the Pimicikamak Cree Nation: A Model of Legal Mediation,” Harvard International Law Journal (2007). Prior to joining the Wharton faculty, she was a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession (2007-2009), a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program (2006-2008), and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2006-2007). She also served as a consultant at the World Bank from 2002-2006.
Olivier De Schutter has been United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food since May 2008. He is a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain and at the College of Europe (Natolin) and a member of the Global Law School faculty at New York University and a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 2002-2006, he chaired the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights, a high-level group of experts which advised the European Union institutions on fundamental rights issues. He has acted on a number of occasions as expert for the Council of Europe and for the European Union. Since 2004, and until his appointment as the UN special rapporteur, he has been the General Secretary of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) on the issue of globalization and human rights. His publications are in the area of international human rights and fundamental rights in the EU, with a particular emphasis on economic and social rights and on the relationship between human rights and governance. His most recent book is International Human Rights Law (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).
Gay Seidman is Martindale-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has focused on issues of labor in developing regions, especially in Southern Africa and Latin America; publications include Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism (Russell Sage 2007). She is currently serving as Director of African Studies and chair of the Development Studies program at UW-Madison.
David Scobey became executive dean of what is now The New School for Public Engagement in 2010. He is a national leader in developing innovative methods to engage institutions of higher education with communities outside the academy. He was previously director of the Harward Center at Bates College in Maine, established to bring together community-based learning and research, co-curricular work, and environmental stewardship. He is the founder and former director of the University of Michigan's Arts of Citizenship program, an initiative to integrate civic engagement and the liberal arts. He serves on the boards of Project Pericles, an organization that encourages universities to include civic engagement as an element of undergraduate education, and Bringing Theory to Practice, a project that links education as a public good with civic engagement and concern for the well-being of individual students. David's scholarship explores politics, culture, and space in 19th-century America and New York City in particular. He taught for 16 years at the University of Michigan, where he earned tenure. He holds a PhD in American studies from Yale, where he also received his BA degree, and a diploma in social anthropology from Oxford, where he studied as Rhodes Scholar.
Miriam Ticktin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. Before coming to The New School, she was assistant professor in women's studies and anthropology at the University of Michigan, and also held a postdoctoral position in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. She received her BA in anthropology with minors in women's studies and European cultural studies from Princeton, MPhil in English literature from Oxford (where she was a Rhodes Scholar), a PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford, and a PhD in anthropology (done in co-tutelle with Stanford) from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research interests include anthropology of the human and humanitarianism; migration, camps and borders; sexual violence/violence against women; PTSD/trauma, psychiatric humanitarianism; anthropology of science, medicine, ethics; and her areas of focus are France, Europe and North Africa. Her book, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France was recently published with University of California Press (2011). She is also the co-editor (with Ilana Feldman) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010).
David E. Van Zandt is the eighth president of The New School. He is a sociologist, attorney, and visionary in higher education with a record of distinguished academic leadership spanning three decades. President Van Zandt came to The New School from Northwestern University School of Law, one of the top-rated law schools in the nation, where he was dean from 1995 until 2010. Under his leadership, Northwestern Law transformed its approaches to admissions, education, and social engagement. President Van Zandt, who holds a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics, continues to lecture and contribute to professional and scholarly journals. He is a past president of the American Law Deans Association and has published articles and written and presented papers on the regulation of international financial markets, the sociology of religion and deviance, social theory (in particular the microsociological aspects of law), the economics of common sense, and more recently legal education. As an expert in corporate law, international finance, and legal education, he has taught courses in International Financial Markets, Business Associations, Property, Practical Issues in Business Law, and Legal Realism.
