Arjun Appadurai
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Introduced by Arpana Inman, assistant professor of counseling psychology Department of Education and Human Services Interviewed by Elizabeth Vann, assistant professor of anthropology |
The John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences and senior advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City
Web Site: http://www.appadurai.com
Title of Presentation: American Universities in the Context of Global Civil Society
Arjun Appadurai serves as senior advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also holds a distinguished professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Until recently, Appadurai was the provost and vice president for academic affairs at The New School. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, professor of anthropology, and director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai, India.
Appadurai was born and educated in Bombay. He graduated from St. Xavier's High School and took his intermediate arts degree from Elphinstone College before coming to the United States. He earned his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1967, and his M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1976) from the University of Chicago.
During his academic career, he held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris,the University of Delhi, the University of Michigan, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and New York University. He serves on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including “Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger” (Duke 2006),and “Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,”(Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997).
He is one of the founding editors, along with Carol A. Breckenridge, of the journal Public Culture and was the founding director of the Chicago Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago (1992-1998), during which time he held the Richard J. and Barbara E. Franke Professorship. He is one of the founders of the Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization, a transnational consortium devoted to the study of global politics and culture.
Appadurai has held numerous fellowships and scholarships and has received several scholarly honors, including residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He also held an individual research fellowship from the Open Society Institute in New York. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.
He has served on numerous national and international advisory bodies, including the advisory council of the Smithsonian Institute, and the governing boards of The Amsterdam School for Social Science Research and the Social Science Research Council in New York. He has also served as a consultant or advisor to a wide range of public and private organizations, including many major foundations (Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller); UNESCO; UNDP; WIDER (World Institute for Development Economics Research); the World Bank; the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.
Introduced by Arpana G. Inman
Arpana G. Inman received her Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Temple University. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the counseling psychology program at Lehigh University. She has presented and published nationally and internationally, in the areas of South Asian identity (ethnicity, race, gender and generational status), Asian American coping and mental health, international counseling and psychology and multicultural competencies in supervision and training.
She is involved with the South Asian community at a local and national level and is a co-founder of SAPNA (South Asian Psychological Networking Association), which runs a website and listserv for South Asian Concerns.
Her interests in local and global issues has also manifested in a commitment to social justice. In keeping with this, Inman recently worked with hurricane survivors in the Gulf Coast, and is a member of local and national crisis intervention teams dealing with trauma and other disasters.
Inman is the recipient of the 2006 Minority Junior Faculty Research Award, the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award and the 2002 Jeffrey S. Tanaka Memorial Dissertation Award in Psychology, APA Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs (CEMA).
She currently serves on the editorial boards of The Counseling Psychologist, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Psychotherapy, and the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. Additionally, she has held numerous leadership positions, including co-chair for the division on women, AAPA (2002-2003), vice president for the Asian American Psychological Association (2003-2005) and vice president for the Asian American Pacific Islander Special Interest Group within the Association of Multicultural Counseling and Development in ACA (2003-2007).
Interviewed by Elizabeth Vann
Elizabeth Vann is a cultural anthropologist whose areas of ethnographic interest include global capitalism, consumerism, and competing cultural standards of intellectual property and authenticity in Vietnam and the US. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia in 2003, and took her position as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lehigh that same year. She is currently working on a book about the intersection of global brands, transnational production, and local consumption practices in Vietnam. Based on more than a year of field research in Ho Chi Minh City, this study examines familiar elements of the global economy-production outsourcing, the circuitous, transnational movement of goods, and corporate branding and marketing strategies-from the vantage point of middle-class Vietnamese consumers. It offers insight into how global capitalism is being configured “on the ground” in a country which has only recently rejoined the international market economy after decades of relative political, economic, and social isolation. Vann's research on Vietnam's market economy has also appeared in several anthropological journals, including Ethnos and American Anthropologist. Her upcoming research projects include a study of art forgery and the international art market in Hanoi, and an exploration of popular understandings of the relationship between tangible and intellectual property in the US. Vann teaches courses on globalization, global capitalism, and emerging property regimes at Lehigh and is active in the University's Global Citizenship Program.
