Media Advisory: Trade Expert Lori Wallach Joins UAlbany to Launch Globalization Studies Major
One-day globalization conference kicks-off University's new major

Contact(s):  Catherine Herman (518) 956-8150

ALBANY, N.Y. (September 23, 2008)

What: Trade expert and author Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, joins the University at Albany to launch its undergraduate major in Globalization Studies, designed to prepare students for economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental interactions with people around the world. Wallach will discuss economic globalization as the keynote speaker for UAlbany's inaugural Globalization Studies conference, which marks the official launch of the University's new major.

Who:

• George Philip, interim president
• Edelgard Wulfert, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
• Fernando Leiva, director of Globalization Studies
• Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

When: Thursday, September 25, 2008

News conference
Assembly Hall, Campus Center
9 a.m.

Globalization Studies conference
Open to the public

9-10:30 a.m.: Press Conference, Inaugural Keynote Address (Assembly Hall)

• Keynote speaker, Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

10:40 a.m.-12:20 p.m.: Panel 1: Breaking Boundaries, Opening Pathways for New Ways of Learning (Assembly Hall)                                       

• Panelists: Ray Bromley, Office of International Education; Helmut Hirsch, Department of Biology; Michelle Smith, Department of Latin America, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies (LACS); and Tom�s Uroyan Noel, Department of English.

1:40-3:30 p.m.: Panel 2:  The Challenges of Engagement: Globalization and New Ways of Being in the World (Assembly Hall)

• Panelists: Virginia Eubanks, Department of Women's Studies; Jackie Hayes, LACS; Robert Summers, Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures (LLC).

3:45-6 p.m.: Global Justice and Sustainability Fair (Lecture Center Concourse)  
 
7-9 p.m.: Rethinking/Relinking: Our Present and Shared Futures (Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center)

• Albany premiere of the film Water First by Amy Hart, filmmaker in residence at New York Academy of Medicine.

Background: UAlbany's Globalization Studies major is designed to raise students' awareness of the global forces and processes that shape lives and to discuss reasons to engage in new ways of acquiring and applying knowledge. The new major reflects UAlbany's emphasis on expanding its students' world view and preparing them for the global working world. UAlbany's one-day Globalization Studies conference aims to spark an ongoing conversation on how the University at Albany understands the new forms of interconnectedness produced by globalizing processes and meets the challenges posed by them.

Lori Wallach has played an important role in fostering the growing debate about implications of different models of globalization on jobs, livelihoods and wages; the environment; public health and safety; equality and social justice and democratically accountable governance. She has served as a trade commentator on CNN, ABC, CNBC, C-SPAN. Wallach is the author of Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (The New Press, 2004).

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