Open Rapporteur Positions

This seminar was founded to study the most compelling questions of the day, which then related to the war in Southeast Asia, its causes, and consequences. Today the seminar continues to examine vital current issues from the perspective of critical and social theory with an emphasis on their economic, political, and philosophical dimensions and roots in political economic structures. It focuses particularly, though not exclusively, on the relationship between political economy and the transformation of the natural world, addressing pressing issues like climate change, the rights of nature, and resource extraction, while also attending to the ways that nature and society are represented in core concepts of political economy like scarcity, growth, and property.

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This seminar provides a forum for the scholarly exchange of information among key representatives of the chemical dependency research, treatment, prevention, and policy development communities. It seeks to address the important and complex questions relating to the root causes of chemical dependency and abuse, to examine and evaluate epidemiological studies, to determine the effectiveness of various treatment and prevention strategies, and to discuss the wisdom and value of current international, national, and local policies. Membership is comprised of prominent researchers, established leaders in the treatment and prevention fields, and government policymakers. Speakers in the seminar are drawn from the membership itself and by invitation from other institutions.

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This seminar is concerned with the contemporary political economy of Southeast Asia, and in particular with its international dimensions. The agenda includes current problems of economic and political change in the countries of the region, as well as issues in relations with the United States, Japan, China, and Russia. The seminar membership includes policymakers from the public and private sectors, as well as scholars, and the group as a whole has a strong policy orientation.

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The University Seminar in World Philology (USWP) aims to unite humanistic and social-scientific scholars across a range of departments and schools around the discipline-based study of texts. Philology, defined over the course of its history as everything from text criticism to “slow reading” to “all erudition in language,” is at base the practice of making sense of texts. This history includes modern European projects explicitly called philology, as well as those belonging to older and more diverse textual traditions around the world. The USWP seeks to learn about these histories, simultaneously aware of the sordid colonial past of modern European philologies and philology-derived disciplines, and also of the elitism that characterized their precolonial antecedents the world over. The project of the USWP proposes to confront these inheritances openly as we move forward. The USWP aims to bring together faculty from humanities and humanistic social science departments at Columbia and Barnard, as well as from other colleges and universities in the New York area.

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