In April 2019 the Western Political Science Association (WPSA) convened its annual meeting in San Diego, themed: The Politics of Climate Change. The Center on Global Justice partnered closely with Pi Sigma Alpha—the national Political Science Honors Society—and the UC San Diego Department of Political Science to invite Janet Napolitano, University of California President, to deliver the 2019 Pi Sigma Alpha Lecture, titled: Combatting Climate Change.

UC San Diego Pi Sigma Alpha students, Laura Zwicker and Charlotte Zelll joined Fonna Forman to introduce President Napolitano.

The Center on Global Justice welcomed Antanas Mockus to the border region to discuss the idea of “citizenship culture”. A long-time research partner of the Center on Global Justice, Mockus leads the Bogotá-based think tank Corpovisionarios, who is presently collaborating with the CGJ on a Ford Foundation-funded Bi-national Citizenship Culture Survey project to measure citizenship culture in the San Diego–Tijuana border region, and serve as a tool for cross-sector binational cooperation. Antanas Mockus is a philosopher, was former Rector of The National University of Colombia, served as Mayor of Bogotá during two terms (1995-8 and 2000-3) and ran as a presidential candidate in the national elections in Colombia in 2010.

During his visit to the region, we introduced Antanas to then Tijuana Mayor, Jorge Astiazaran, to discuss the findings of the Bi-national Citizenship Culture Survey.

Civic Imagination Series: Antanas Mockus

The Center on Global Justice partnered with The San Diego Foundation to welcome Robert Reich to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego to discuss his new Sundance Film Festival Award winning film, Inequality for All. Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor for President Clinton, UC Berkeley public policy professor, best-selling author, and editor. Reich’s visit was intended to raise public awareness about the new Blum Cross-Border Initiative, by University of California Regent Richard C. Blum.

Through the film screening and dialogue, Reich made a passionate argument on behalf of the middle class and demonstrated how America’s growing income gap threatens the viability of the American workforce and the foundation of democracy itself.

During his visit, Reich and Blum together toured the UCSD-EARTHLAB Community Station in San Ysidro.

Read more here about Reich’s visit to San Diego here.

The Civic Imagination Series welcomed New York Times Senior Architecture Critic, Michael Kimmelman to discuss the state of cities today.

Michael Kimmelman – On Cities

The Civic Imagination Series welcomed author Justin McGuirk to discuss his new book Radical Cities.

In 2015, the Civic Imagination Series welcomed our friend, the late Benjamin Barber, to discuss his new book If Mayors Ruled the World.  During his visit to the border region, we introduced Ben to then Tijuana Mayor, Jorge Astiazaran, who agreed to join the Global Parliament of Mayors, the governance body that Ben devoted the last years of his life to developing. See news story about Ben’s meeting with Astiazaran here.

The Civic Imagination Series welcomed renowned Paris-based architect and educator, Anne Lacaton, to discuss the practice of Lacaton & Vassal, who have been influential in rethinking the political economy of architecture in the contemporary city, where new strategies of adaptation and retrofit suggest a new role for design that is less about the new and more about the repurposed. Their work on housing on the periphery of Paris has advanced the debate on urban informality, design and everyday practices, and the social economic of housing.

The Center on Global Justice and the Center for Urban Ecologies welcomed Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU to discuss his recent book, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal.

The Center on Global Justice partnered with our friend, the late Marcel Hénaff, UC San Diego Professor of Literature, to welcome French President Lionel Jospin to discuss the future of Europe.

In April 2013 the CGJ organized a two-day campus-wide forum on energy and climate justice, in collaboration with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and five divisions across the campus.

On Day 1, we curated a high-profile televised conversation between SIO’s Ram Ramanathan (and his Project Surya research on short-lived climate pollutants) and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, and beloved global advocate for climate justice.

Day 1 ended with a lecture on Climate Justice by Mary Robinson, co-sponsored by the UCSD Extension, Helen Edison Lecture series.

Day 2 was a public forum that showcased the UC San Diego’s research and innovation on energy solutions, with four panels that discussed: short-lived pollutants like soot and black carbon; electricity generation and transmission; fuel and transport challenges, and the need for a bioregional approach in analyzing and adapting to climate change.  Participants included: Steve Mayfield, George Tynan, David Victor, Byron Washom, Wael Al-Delaimy, Keith Pezzoli, Ram Ramanathan, Carlos Coimbra, Mark Jacobsen, Steve Parish, Shirley Meng, Lynn Russell, Jen Burney, others.

Craig Calhoun is a renowned social scientist, best known for his work on social movements, and for his bold advocacy of public social science. The Center on Global Justice welcomed Calhoun to UC San Diego to lead a divisional conversation on the future of the social sciences in an age of privatization. From 1999-2012, Calhoun served as President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Before serving as Director of the London School of Economics, he was University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University, and Founding Director of NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

The Center on Global Justice welcomed Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to discuss the state of the Millennium Development Goals, including his work as United Nations Special Envoy on Global Education. His lecture was co-sponsored by the UCSD Extension, Helen Edison Lecture series.

Informal Market Worlds was an international research forum on informal markets that took place at UC San Diego on February 16-17 2012, as one of a series of conferences world-wide. The two-day event connected theoretical research on urban informality, transient land use and emergent forms of citizenship with a range of case studies from across the Americas and beyond.

The event was organized in partnership with Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mortenbock, directors of the research project Other Markets: Networked Ecologies in 21st Century Urban Transformation based at the School of Architecture, Vienna University of Technology, Austria.

The meetings produced a two-volume collection on informal markets—an Atlas, and a Reader, which was co-edited by Mooshammer and Mortenbock with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.

Elinor Ostrom was our special guest at the New Frontiers conference that launched the UCSD Center on Global Justice in the Division of Social Sciences. She participated in a closing conversation with Amartya Sen, moderated by Fonna Forman.

The CGJ’s research on female genital cutting was central to the United Kingdom’s decision in April, 2013 to fund a $45 million 5-year program to support the end of FGC. The program unfolds in three parts: funding abandonment programs, global communications, and original research. The two leading authorities on FGC in the world, Mackie at CGJ and Bettina Shell-Duncan at the University of Washington, joined with the Population Council in a research consortium that obtained a $10 million research grant, which commenced in February, 2016. One purpose of the UK DFID program is to build research capacities among African universities and research organizations. The consortium includes African research teams from Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. The CGJ’s role is generally to advise research design and analysis findings, to more actively design and help execute several particular efforts, and to produce several synthetic reports near the project’s end on both scientific and policy questions. Click here for more on Mackie’s research on FGC.

A volume of conference papers was published by the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol 16: 2 (2013): Amartya Sen and the Idea of Justice: Interdisciplinary engagements.

The Civic Imagination Series welcomed Richard Sennett, Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, to discuss his new book Together: The Rituals and Pleasures of Cooperation.

The Center on Global Justice and the Center for Urban Ecologies welcomed Eyal Weizman, architect and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and director Forensic Architecture based at Goldsmiths, University of London, to discuss his recent book, Dying to Speak.

Amartya Sen, Distinguished of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University; recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1998) delivered the keynote address, “Justice: Local and Global” at New Frontiers in Global Justice, the conference that launched the UCSD Center on Global Justice. His lecture, which drew an estimated audience of 800 people, was co-sponsored by the UCSD Extension, Helen Edison Lecture series.

The Center on Global Justice welcomed Molly Melching, director of Tostan, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) founded in Senegal, who spoke about its award-winning Community Empowerment Program. One notable result of the program is that 6000 communities in seven countries have abandoned female genital cutting, and early and forced marriage. The Program also inspires community-led successes in promoting grassroots democracy, enhancing economic opportunities, empowering women and girls, improving literacy and math skills, sustaining the environment, preventing and  treating malaria, promoting girls’ education, protecting maternal and child health, and protecting children’s rights.

Melching’s talk opened a two-day UCSD Global Justice Workshop on “Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program, Social Norms and Early Childhood Development,” which brought together over twenty-five researchers from UCSD and beyond in the fields of public health, education studies, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and development economics, in addition to several NGO-affiliated experts, to discuss these issues.