Keynote Speakers:

Katherine GIBSON (Australia)

Title of Speech:  After ¡¥the end of capitalism¡¦: what¡¦s next?

Katherine Gibson is Professor of Human Geography at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. She has a BSc (Hons) from the University of Sydney, Australia and an MA and PhD from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.

She is an economic geographer engaged in rethinking economic concepts in the light of feminist and poststructuralist theory. Her research interests have been shared over three decades with Professor Julie Graham from the University of Massachusetts, USA, with whom she shares a collective authorial presence as J.K. Gibson-Graham.
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Tony BENNETT (UK / Australia)

Title of Speech:  After Culture

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.  He will be moving to the University of Western Sydney in 2010 as Professor of Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research.   He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Recent publications Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism; New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris); The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (edited with John Frow) and Culture, Class Distinction (with Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright). 

Plenary Speakers:

Anne BALSAMO (United States)

Title of Speech:  Designing Culture: The Architecture and Performance of Innovation

Anne Balsamo's work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology.  This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer, and entrepreneur.  She is currently a Full Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications at University of Southern California.  She directs the Interactive Media Co-Design Lab that houses research projects on tangible culture, immersive media, and stereoscopic cinema.
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Josephine HO (Taiwan)

Title of Speech:  Shan-Zhai: Economic/Cultural Production through the Cracks of Globalization

Josephine Ho is Distinguished Professor of The Center for the Study of Sexualities, Department of English at National Central University, Chungli,Taiwan (http://sex.ncu.edu.tw ).  She founded and continues to head the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National Central University widely-known for both its activism and intellectual stamina.  She has been writing cultural criticism on a wide array of subjects, most notably gender/sexuality issues, since the early 1990s and has been working to promote the institutionalization of cultural studies in the academy.  She served as president of Cultural Studies Association, Taiwan 2005-2007.   

Kara KEELING (United States)

Title of Speech:  Black Futures and the Queer Times of Our Life

Kara Keeling¡¦s research has focused on African American film, representations of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema, critical theory, and cultural studies. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. She is co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and author of several articles that have appeared in the journals Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere. Her current research involves issues of temporality, media and black and queer cultural politics; digital media, globalization,
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Sandro MEZZADRA (Italy) 

Title of Speech: Bringing Capital Back In: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?

Sandro Mezzadra (1963) works as Associate Professor of ¡§History of Political Thought¡¨ at the Department of Politics, Institutions, History of the University of Bologna, where he teaches ¡§Colonial and Postcolonial Studies¡¨ and ¡§Frontiers of Citizenship¡¨. He has been ¡§eminent research fellow¡¨ at the Centre for Cultural Research of the University of Western Sydney, Australia (2006-2008).

His research work has focused on the classical modern European political philosophy (especially on Hobbes, Spinoza and Marx), on the history of political, social, and legal sciences in Germany between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth centuries (especially on the constitutional debates in the years of the Weimar Republic) and on several issues at stake in the development of contemporary political theory. 
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PUN Ngai (China) 

Vinod RAINA (India) 

Title of Speech: Cultural Diversity and Universal Knowledge: Education in Multicultural Contexts

Vinod Raina, a physicist by profession, resigned from Delhi University to devote full time to grassroots work.  He is one of the pioneers of the People¡¦s Science Movement in India that attempts to empower people to plan and implement their own developmental ideas and needs, so as to reverse the trickle-down paradigm of development. He is founding member of Eklavya, an NGO which has been advocating alternative education for more than two decades, whose curriculum was adopted in the state school educational system. Vinod has helped set up the All-India People¡¦s Science Network (AIPSN) and the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS). He is presently a member of the apex educational body of  the Government of India, the Central Advisory Board for Education (CABE).
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Andrew ROSS (United States)

Title of Speech: Urban Sustainability in the Age of Climate Justice

Andrew Ross is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times; Fast Boat to China--Lessons from Shanghai,   Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney¡¦s New Town.  He has also edited several books, including  No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, Anti-Americanism,  and The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. 

Catherine WALSH (Ecuador)