Program on Global Studies
(PoGS)

Program on Global Studies (PoGS) is an interdisciplinary research and education initiative at the University of California, Riverside

PoGS is co-Directed by Juliann Allison (Political Science) and Christopher Chase-Dunn (Sociology)

The Program on Global Studies is the UCR branch of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation(IGCC) , a multi-campus research unit of the University of California, with head offices at the University of California, San Diego.

PoGS Advisory Council

Chair: Stephen Cullenberg (Economics)

Michael Allen (Conservation Biology); Lynda Bell (History); Susan Carter (Economics); Feryal Cherif (Political Science; John Cioffi (Political Science) Carl Cranor (Philosophy); Norman Ellstrand (Botany); Christine Gailey (Women’s Studies); Anil Deolalikar (Economics);  Katya Guenther (Sociology); Bronwyn Leebaw (Political Science) ; Bai-Lian Li (Botany); Perry Link (Comparative Literature); Matthew Mahutga (Sociology); Toby Miller (Media and Cultural Studies); Susan Ossman (Anthropology); Thomas Patterson (Anthropology); David Pion-Berlin (Political Science); Ellen Reese (Sociology); Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez (Environmental Science); Ivan Strenski (Religious Studies); Richard Sutch, (Economics); Anne Sutherland (Anthropology); Marlene Zuk (Biology).

PoGS brings humanists together with biological, social and physical scientists at UCR for research and education on global issues. PoGS supports graduate research projects by providing funding for Research Assistantships and student conference participation.

A list of the speakers we have hosted in the past is available at https://irows.ucr.edu/pogs/speakersarch.htm

· Undergraduate Global Studies Major: A UCR-wide committee led by Anthropology Professor Susan Ossman has begun an interdisciplinary undergraduate major in Global Studies that will study global and regional processes from the point of view of the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences. This proposal has been approved by the UCR Academic Senate and about 25 undergraduates have declared for this new major.

· UCR School of Public Policy : Associate Dean Anil Deolalikar and an organizing committee are working on the establishment of a UCR School of Public Policy that will engage global policy issues. A new MA in public policy with an emphasis on global studies is in the works. This new school has been approved by the UC Regents.

· UC Center on Water, Health and Society. Proposed multicampus Center of Expertise within the UC School of Global Health

· Research Working Group on Transnational Social Movements. Sociology Professor Ellen Reese and PoGS co-director Chase-Dunn are the faculty sponsors of a research working group on transnational social movements. Surveys have been administered at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the WSF07 in Nairobi, Kenya and the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in June 2007.

· Eco-Indigenous Movements in the Global South. Professor Juliann Allison

(Political Science) and several UCR graduate students and undergraduates will attend the World Social Forum in Belem, Para, Brazil during the last week of January, 2009 to study the interaction of environmental and indigenous social movements.

· Mapping the Global Small World from UCR: Network Analysis and Geographical Information Systems. Professor Robert Hanneman (Sociology) and Hiroko Inoue (IROWS Research Associate). UCR has a diverse undergraduate student body made up of 220 international students and many others whose families are recent immigrants to the United States. But is the UCR student body closely connected with people from other countries? This question can be answered by studying the network ties that UC undergraduate students have with college students from other countries. The “small world” literature in sociology has shown that the whole population of Earth (6.5 billion people) compose a single interconnected network of personal ties, and so each person is connected to all the others through indirect links. On the average it only takes five indirect links to connect one person with all the others, because connections multiply exponentially with each “degree of separation”. But not all people are equally interconnected. For some it takes more indirect connections to reach to the far side of the world, while for others the number of indirect "degrees of separation" are fewer.

POGS 0809 Speakers Series

Andrew Jorgenson (North Carolina State University) “ Political-economic integration, industrial pollution and human health: a panel study of less developed countries, 1980-2000”

Presented to the UCR Workshop on Global Health, September 26, 2008. Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department

Carolina Bank-Munoz (Hunter College) “Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender, and Shop Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States” October 2 (co-sponsored with the Labor Studies Program).

David R. Wilcox (Museum of Northern Arizona) “Applicability of world-systems theory

to the North American Southwest” October 27. Co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department

Eric Vanhaute (Ghent University) “The end of the peasantry: a world-systems perspective”

November 25. Co-sponsored by the History Department.

Symposium on “Financial Crises and Globalization,” January 13, 2009

Mike Davis (UCR) "Suburban Dustbowls?:The Crisis in Inland California"

William I. Robinson (UC-Santa Barbara) “Global Crisis and Alternative Futures”

Gary Dymski (UCR) “From Financial Exploitation to Global Economic Meltdown”

Co-sponsored by the Economics Department and the UCR Public Policy Initiative.

Dr. Juliann Emmons Allison, Kathy Breece, Heather Conklin, Matt Kaneshiro, Jingjing Wang
 (UCR)
 "Report Back from the 2009 World Social Forum in Amazonia" March 4, 2009. Co-sponsored by the Political Science Department.