International scholars to explore global modernities

LOS ANGELES - April 30, 2013 - PRLog -- Featuring more than 25 scholars from around the world, the 2013 Conference on Global Modernities at Cal State L.A. will include panels and lectures that emphasize the experiences, critical examinations, and artistic expressions that have been recorded by scholars, artists and writers with innovative perspectives on global modernities.

Taking place Friday and Saturday, May 3-4, the free scholarly forum will broadly focus on topics ranging from global demography to biodiversity, and to political and social movements in different parts of the world.

The conference opens on Friday, May 3, at 9 a.m. with sessions to continue until 6 p.m., followed by a featured lecture at 6 p.m. titled “Global Modernity and Local Condition: Debates about China,” by Sheldon Lu of University of California, Davis. Dinner is scheduled for 7:30-9 p.m.

The Saturday program will run from 9 a.m. to 5:50 p.m., followed by a keynote presentation from 6-7:15 p.m. by William Patzert, oceanographer and research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, CA, entitled “Climate Change, 7 Billion People and 5 Billion Cell Phones: The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be.” A dinner banquet follows until 9 p.m. The cost of the four meals is $110, which includes tax and service charge.  The deadline to purchase meals is Monday, April 22.

“Through the conference, we hope to rethink and imagine a world that has become increasingly interdependent, posing new questions, conditions and possibilities for a better understanding of the ways in which modernity—global and manifold in scope—is shaping our modes of communication, the emergence of local identities, and a financial crisis in an unprecedented global scale,” explained Professor Roberto Cantú, the conference organizer.

The two-day conference will also feature the following sessions: “Human Rights:  The Dialogue between Western Liberalism and Islam,” “’The Menace of the Under Man’: Eugenic Discourse and the Construction of the West,” “Give a Man a Fish: The New Politics of Distribution in South Africa (and Beyond),” and “Global Modernities: Coherence and Contradiction in Rural Mexico.”

This conference is sponsored by Cal State L.A.’s Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series, the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Natural and Social Sciences, the Department of Chicano Studies, the Department of English, the Barry Munitz Fund, and the CSULA Emeriti Association.

For conference information and schedule: http://www.calstatela.edu/univ/ppa/newsrel/modernity-conf... (http://eastwestconferenceatcalstatela.blogspot.com/)