Committee on Globalization and Social Change

The Committee on Globalization and Social Change (CGSC) at The Graduate Center is an interdisciplinary working group composed of a core group of CUNY faculty interested in reflecting on globalization as an analytic category for understanding social change as well as on the intersecting social changes commonly associated with the category globalization.

Established in 2010 by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Committee is less interested in developing programmatic positions than in defining and exploring sets of questions about plural democracy, transnational solidarity, global justice, political subjectivity, and ethical responsibility that demand our attention in this moment of crisis and transition.

We have found it especially useful to think carefully about the adequacy of inherited concepts for grasping our rapidly changing present in order to determine whether they need to be revised in relation to the contemporary situation or whether aspects of globalization may be usefully illuminated by revisiting seemingly outmoded analytic categories. We are concerned with understanding globalization, social change, and political futures more fully from a variety of academic and non-academic perspectives. But we are equally concerned with exploring the impact of globalization on knowledge production and social theory themselves. Our attempt to engage the contemporary situation critically thus requires us to relate theories of global social processes to an understanding of social theory as itself global.

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