In one and a half days of academic workshops, scholars from multiple disciplines and across the country and Europe discussed the issue of information incompleteness, and the role in this of the media, and possible media bias. Corporate performance and the media were also discussed.
Oksenberg Conference Room
Gay McDougall has been Executive Director of International Human Rights Law Group since 1994. IHRLG works on human rights programs and initiatives in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas. In 1999, Ms. McDougall was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the "genius award") for her innovative work in the area of international human rights. She has served as an independent expert on the United Nations treaty body overseeing the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, and served on the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, where she was a Special Rapporteur on the issue of systemic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during armed conflict. Prior to joining IHRLG, Ms. McDougal was an international member of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission. Lunch will be provided.
Oksenberg Conference Room
Daulah Islamiyya (Islamic sovereignty, or an Islamic state) is a declared objective of the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyya. In Malaysia, where parliamentary elections are expected to be held in April, both the Muslim-Malay party (UMNO) in the ruling coalition and the Islamist party (PAS) opposed to UMNO have offered rival visions of Malaysia as an Islamic state. Radical groups in Indonesia have proposed replacing the "Pancasila state" in their country with an Islamic state. So what exactly is an "Islamic state"? And why does it matter so much for politics -- radical or democratic -- in Muslim Southeast Asia? Dr. Martinez will review and explore the contexts, in theory and in practice, that can help us understand what this debate is about. Patricia Martinez, a Malaysian, is among the most highly regarded and widely published scholars working on Islam in Southeast Asia. She is based at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, where she is senior research fellow for Religion and Culture and Head of Intercultural Studies at the Asia-Europe Institute. Her writings relevant to her talk include "Islam, Constitutionalism and the Islamic State" (2004) and "The Islamic State or the State of Islam in Malaysia"(2001). A 2003 essay, "Deconstructing Jihad; Southeast Asian Contexts," is available at http://www.ntu.edu.sg/idss/new-publi.asp. Dr. Martinez has just returned to Stanford from speaking engagements in Australia.
Philippines Conference Room
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall E301
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Based on long-term research and regular research-focused visits to China, Dr. Scharping will sketch developments in Chinese birth control since the 1990s. He will also discuss the puzzle of recent Chinese birth figures and the astonishing results of the 2000 national census in China.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Last year the Convention on the Future of Europe proposed a draft EU constitution. The draft was to be approved at an Inter-Governmental Conference last December, but approval was postponed due to disagreements on voting rules in the Council of Ministers. This seminar evaluates the draft constitution. On February 25 Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, Vice-President of the Convention, will give a lecture about the prospects for its adoption. A separate announcement for that lecture will follow.
Encina Hall, East Wing, Ground Floor, E008
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.
Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.
Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.
Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.
Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.
Institute for International Studies
Encina Hall E116
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305-6055
Professor Van Gerven is currently a member of the faculty of law at the Leuven Center for a Common Law of Europe in Belgium. He is formerly Vice-Rector and Chairman of the Social Sciences Group of Leuven and formerly President of the Belgian Banking Commission. He has also served as Advocate General of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and on a committee of independent experts to examine fraud, nepotism, and mismanagement in the European Union Commission.
Jean-Luc Dehaene is one of the most prominent Belgian and European politicians. As Prime Minister in the 1990s he transformed his country into a federal state and prepared it for the Euro. He was President of the European Council in 1993 and more recently Vice-President of the EU's constitutional convention. He will talk about the prospects for the adoption of an EU constitution.
Bechtel Conference Center
Born in Shanghai in 1970, Mian Mian first began writing at the age of sixteen. She dropped out secondary school in Shanghai in 1987 and two years later went on her own to Shenzhen, a boomtown in the southern province of Guangdong. She spent five years there delving into society's seedier side before returning to Shanghai, where she continues to reside.
After Mian Mian came home to Shanghai, she started writing again, and by 1997 her short stories and novellas were appearing in Xiaoshuo Jie (Fiction World) and several other widely circulated Chinese literary magazines. The milieu depicted in Mian Mian's work is drawn from her life experience, and many of her fictional characters are also inspired by the subculture she moved in, a subculture peopled by aspiring singers, drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, gangsters, the mentally ill, slackers, and self-proclaimed artists. She became the first Chinese writer to describe drugs. Her style, characteristic of "cruel youth" and her simultaneously hip and introspective attitude toward self-reflection quickly attracted a large following of young readers. In July 1997, with the backing of the New Century Publishing House in Hong Kong, Mian Mian published her first collection of short stories, La La La. Mian Mian's first novel, Tang (Candy), was published simultaneously by Zhongguo Xiju Publishing House and the prestigious literary magazine Shouhuo (Harvest) in January 2000. This novel created a stir in China's literary world and quickly became a bestseller, with a large number of pirated copies produced and sold throughout the country. The publication of Candy was soon followed by the publication of two more collections of short stories, Every Good Child Deserves Candy (Huashan Publishers) and Acid Lover (Shanghai Sanlian Publishing House). In April 2000, the Chinese government banned Candy. Shortly thereafter, the rest of Mian Mian's books were also banned.
Candy has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese. La La La has been translated into German and Italian.
In addition to writing, Mian Mian is also a music promoter, and the only female dance party organizer in China. Following on her experience working as a DJ at Shanghai's Cotton Club in 1996, Mian Mian began bringing rock shows and DJs into clubs in a number of Chinese cities starting in 1997. She has planned numerous large-scale dance parties, where internationally renowned DJs have performed. Her most successful parties include two parties with Paul Oakenfold -- inShanghai in 1999 and at the Great Wall in 2003 -- as well as the Red Age Club party in Chengdu in 2002, a seven-day-long party where the biggest Chinese DJs performed.
In 2002, after the ban on her writing was removed, Mian Mian published Social Dance, a collection taken for the column she writes for the Hong Kong independent newspaper, Apple Daily. At that time, she also signed with the Modern Sky Record Company as her Chinese Agent. In 2003, Mian Mian started to write a column for several famous fashion magazines, marking a departure from her previous policy of shunning the mainstream media. The column focuses on personal issues, such as love relationships and ways of fighting depression. Mian Mian also wrote the screenplay and acted in the film Shanghai Panic which showed in a number of international film festivals.
This program is part of the Winter Colloquium Series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures."
Philippines Conference Room
This curriculum unit introduces students to the concept of political geography. Interactive activities introduce Europe's principal physical features, major cities, and climate. Special attention is devoted to the development of the European Union over time.
The BP Foundation has awarded a three-year, $1.95 million grant to Stanford University for a broad research program on modern energy markets. The foundation is funded by BP, formerly British Petroleum, one of the world's largest energy companies. The gift will support the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS). With the gift, BP joins the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, as one of the program's core sponsors.
"This new partnership with BP will allow the program to accelerate research in several areas, including the design and operation of market-based policies to address the threats of global warming," said program director %people2%. "In addition to BP Foundation support, we look forward to learning more from BP's own experience as an energy company, which touches on every aspect of our program's research."
The agreement reflects a commitment by BP and Stanford to complement technical research with similar work on the legal, political and institutional dimensions of how societies derive value from energy, he added.
"Stanford University is undertaking ground-breaking research with the potential to have a profound impact on the organization of modern energy markets and the conduct of environmental policy," said Greg Coleman, BP's group vice president for environment, health, safety and security. "We hope that this is just the first step in a relationship which will become broader and deeper."
The agreement with Stanford is the latest in a series of BP partnerships with universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and China representing a total commitment of more than $100 million, according to BP officials. The Stanford agreement is expected to complement work under way at Princeton University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, company officials added.
Founded in 2001, the SIIS Program on Energy and Sustainable Development focuses on the political, legal and institutional aspects of modern energy services, in collaboration with faculty from the Stanford School of Law and several university departments, including political science and economics. About half of the program's resources are devoted to research partnerships in key developing countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Program researchers have examined the emergence of a global business in natural gas, reforms of electric power markets and the supply of modern energy services to low-income rural households in developing countries.
The program is housed in the Center for Environmental Science and Policy - one of five major research centers at SIIS, the university's primary forum for interdisciplinary research on international issues and challenges.