The conference program can be accessed by clicking here.

This event is co-sponsored by CCGES. For more information, please contact: Prof. Jim Vernon at jvernon@yorku.ca

Location: Harry Crowe Room, 109 Atkinson College

For this talk, Prof. Robert Gould (Carleton University, Ottawa) will analyze some of the most prominent legal and political discourses which have surrounded the Head Scarf debate in Germany. In the German context, this issue achieved prominence with the September 2003 decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in the case of Fereshta Ludin, a German of Afghan origin, who appealed the administrative decision in Baden-Württemberg to deny her a permanent teaching position because of her insistence on wearing a headscarf while in the classroom. Using significant representative examples of overlapping discourses arising from the case, Prof. Gould will argue that these discourses demonstrate the nature of the struggle among those charged by society with defining the nation and the state in a time of change: on the one hand a liberal constitution interpreted by the majority justices as neutral and inclusive of all religions; but on the other hand an exclusionary discourse employed by the dissenting justices, based on the mutually exclusive and hostile categories of “Native” and “Alien”, which have become more potent in the post 9/11 world.

This talk is part of “Germany in the World: The Nation Transcended in the Age of Globalization”, a CCGES lecture series which gives North American and European scholars from a variety of academic fields a platform to contribute to the ongoing discussions regarding trans-nationalism and globalization by presenting their current research, most of which, but not all, will be related to Germany. Financial support for the series has been generously provided by the Standing Committee for German as a Foreign Language (StADaF).

Robert Gould is the Associate Director of the Centre for European Studies and an Adjunct Research Professor in the Institute of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. His current investigations of the discourses of immigration and identity in election manifestos, parties’ official position papers, and statements to legislatures emerged from teaching on the language of politics and nationalism in the German-speaking area of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Time: 1:30 to 3:00 pm
Location: 230 York Lanes

Thomas Medicus is a Berlin author and journalist who has done research on the subject of the “family novel” and the ways history is reflected in such works. At this event, he will read – in English – from his recent book In den Augen meines Großvaters (In My Grandfather’s Eyes), a geographical and historical journey in the search for his grandfather, the Wehrmacht general Wilhelm Crisolli, who was killed by partisans in Italy in 1944.

Dr. Thomas Medicus is an author, journalist and historian is in Toronto as the Second Munk-Goethe Writer-in-Residence. Born in 1953, he studied German, Political Science and Art History in Marburg/Lahn, finishing his PhD dissertation in 1982. He has worked as a freelance journalist and editor for several German newspapers, was a guest researcher at Hamburg’s “Institut für Sozialforschung” and its department “The Society in the Federal Republic of Germany” in 2001 and 2006 and is now a Berlin-based freelance arts editor based for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Time: 12:30 – 2:00 pm
Location: 230 York Lanes

Along with the Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy Network, CCGES is pleased to co-present Dr. David Soskice and his talk “Explaining Patterns of Corporate Governance” at Osgoode Hall Law School on March 8, 2007.

Dr. Soskice is Research Professor in the Political Science Dept at Duke University, School Centennial Professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics, and Research Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB).

As Director of the WZB, he developed a research programme on Varieties of Capitalism. This research is collected in the volume co-edited with Peter A Hall (Harvard), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford Univ Press, 2001). His current research is on the co-evolution of capitalist systems and their political and legal representation over the last two centuries (two initial papers from this with Torben Iversen (Harvard) have been published in the American Political Science Review, 2001 and 2006). He also works on the political economy of macroeconomics (papers with Iversen, Quarterly Journal of Economics 2000 and Annual Review of Political Science 2006), and has just published Macroeconomics: Imperfections, Institutions Policies (OUP, 2006) with Wendy Carlin (UCL).

Dr. Soskice is on the advisory board of the CLPE Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Network at Osgoode Hall Law School. This semester he is Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard.

Time: 5:00-7:00 pm
Location: Room 410, Osgoode Hall Law School

The history of the German Empire between 1871 and 1914 has served not only as a prime example of the radicalization of the idea of the nation, but also has been written, even by its fiercest critics, solely from the perspective of the nation-state. In his talk, Prof. Conrad will challenge the traditional view of historians that German hypernationalism since the turn of the 20th century is to be explained primarily by domestic political, socio-economic, and cultural developments. Instead, he contends that Germany’s exposure to and active participation in processes of globalization contributed greatly to the radicalization of German nationalism. The peculiarities of German nationalism thus can be explained as a reaction to increased global connectivity.

Sebastian Conrad is Junior Professor for Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin. His fields of research include modern German and Japanese history, theory and history of historiography, and the history of globalization. Among his numerous publications are two monographs: Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (2006) and Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan 1945-1960 (1999). Edited books include: Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s – 1930s (2007), Geschichtswissenschaft in Japan (2006), Transnationale Geschichte (2006), Das Kaiserreich transnational (2004), Die Nation schreiben. Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (2002). Recently Prof. Conrad was awarded the prestigious Philip Morris research prize.

This lecture is presented as the second in a series entitled “Germany in the World: The Nation Transcended in the Age of Globalization”. This series will run through the 2007-08 academic year and is intended to offer a platform to North American and European experts from a variety of academic fields (including economics, political science, history, urban and cultural studies and sociology) to contribute to the ongoing discussions regarding transnationalism and globalization by presenting their current research, most of which, but not all, is related to Germany.

Financial support for the lecture series has been generously provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Time: 2:00 – 3:30 pm
Location: 230R York Lanes

Please RSVP to ccges@yorku.ca