CHIASMOS: The University of Chicago International and Area Studies Multimedia Outreach Source [video]

A talk by Larry Bennett, Political Science Department, DePaul University. Chicago is one of seven finalists seeking the designation as host city for the 2016 summer Olympic Games. Eight years in advance of the Games, several major components of the Chicago proposal have been worked out and have drawn the attention of local residents and the media. Many other parts of the Chicago Olympic plan remain unspecified at this time. Among the uncertainties associated with the Chicago Olympic bid, and if Chicago wins the contest to host the 2016 Games, with the Games themselves, are the following: How will the Games be financed? What kind of overall economic boost can Chicago anticipate from hosting the 2016 Olympics? Are the city's neighborhoods where major Olympic facilities will be located--notably the mid-South Side Washington Park area, and the near-South Side lakefront--likely to benefit in any fundamental, long-term way from the Games?

A talk by Oscar Chacón, Executive Director of the National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities (NALACC). From the Katz Center for Mexican Studies.

A talk by Ayesha Siddiqa, Islamabad-based independent political and defence analyst and author. Pakistan has emerged as a strategic ally of the US in the 'war on terror'. It is the third largest receiver of US aid in the world, but it also serves as a breeding ground for fundamentalist groups. How long can the relationship between the US and Pakistan continue? This book shows how Pakistan is an unusual ally for the US in that it is a military state, controlled by its army. The Pakistan military not only defines policy - it is entrenched in the corporate sector and controls the country's largest companies. So Pakistan's economic base, its companies and its main assets, are in the hands of a tiny minority of senior army officials. This merging of the military and corporate sectors has powerful consequences. Ayesha Siddiqa's book, "Military Inc." analyses the internal and external dynamics of this gradual power-building and its larger impact that it is having on Pakistan's relationship with the United States and the wider world. From the World Beyond the Headlines Series. Co-Sponsored by the South Asia Language and Area Center and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies.

A presentation by Ricardo Paes de Barros, University of Chicago Tinker Visiting Professor, and Researcher at the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), a public foundation linked to the Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management. This lecture stems from a 2006 IPEA report on the "Recent Fall in Income Inequality in Brazil". This report sought to consolidate the recent and dramatic decline in income inequality in Brazil, evaluate its impact and relevance, identify its main determinants, and finally to draft public policy recommendations so that the decline in income inequality could continue, or even increase, in coming years. Sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies.

Keynote Address at the 2008 China Symposium by Sun Zhe, professor of the Institute for International Studies and Director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Professor Sun identifies three new "partnership paradoxes" in U.S.-China relations: Trade, Taiwan and Democracy. (1) China and the U.S. today are traversing an economic glacier of mutual interdependence and they have to depend on each other much more than either would probably choose; (2) Taiwan has become the most critical issue that constitutes an interlocking web of misperceptions which may lead to a potentially explosive relationship between the U.S. and China; and (3) The Chinese model of development has attracted the world's attention and has led to questions such as whether democracy "made in China" is also possible. In dealing with these new partnership paradoxes, the U.S. and China should seek consensus and to define principles and work out proper policies. From the World Beyond the Headlines Series. Part of a day-long symposium presented by the US-China Peoples Friendship Association (USCPFA) Chicago chapter. Co-Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

A talk by Amita Baviskar, Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. As an embodied public sphere, city streets are sites for multiple exchanges between differently located people and things. This talk focuses on cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws as they navigate Delhi's roads, and on the people who own, use and seek to control them. All three have been the subject of strenuous efforts at regulation by courts, citizens' groups and traders' associations. Professor Bavkiskar interprets these conflicts as instances of bourgeois environmentalism, the (mainly) middle-class pursuit of urban order, hygiene and safety, and ecological conservation. She argues that collective action in the "public interest" by "citizens" concerned about congestion and the collapse of civic infrastructure constitutes a public that excludes the city's poorer sections. The talk examines state attempts to regulate the traffic between cars, cows and rickshaws, and concludes by arguing that complex interdependencies avert imminent collision and enable "the republic of the street" to survive. From the Program on the Global Environment.

A talk by Sergio Aguayo, professor of political science at the Colegio de Mexico. Aguayo has been one of Mexico's leading public intellectuals and human rights advocates for the past three decades. He has been a professor of political science at the Colegio de Mexico since 1977 and was a founder of the Mexican Academy for Human Rights, the electoral reform organization Alianza Civica, and other civil society initiatives. His weekly newspaper column appears in 17 papers across Mexico and the U.S. and he makes regular appearances as a commentator on Mexican television. A past Tinker Visiting Professor at the University, Aguayo most recently visited Chicago in 2006, when an NGO he founded to monitor transparency issues (Fundar) received a major award from the MacArthur Foundation. Co-Sponsored by The Katz Center for Mexican Studies.

Author and psychologist Michael Shermer explains how evolution shaped the modern economy-and why people are so irrational about money. How did we make the leap from ancient hunter-gatherers to modern consumers and traders? Why do people get so emotional and irrational about bottom-line financial and business decisions? Is the capitalist marketplace a sort of Darwinian organism, evolved through natural selection as the fittest way to satisfy our needs?

A talk by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing's bookstore, the "Librairie Avant-Garde", where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault's philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing? Is it possible that Aldous Huxley wrote a novel even more useful than Orwell's 1984 for making sense of post-Tiananmen China...or post-9/11 America? In these often playful, always enlightening "tales", Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom poses these and other questions as he journeys from 19th-century China into the future, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, and Budapest. He argues that simplistic views of China and Americanization found in most soundbite-driven media reports serve us poorly as we try to understand China's place in the current world order...or our own.

A talk by journalist and author Steven LeVine. Pipeline politics became a modern day version of the 19th Century's Great Game, in which Britain and Russia had employed cunning and bluff to gain supremacy over the lands of the Caucasus and Central Asia. “The Oil and Glory” is the story of how, at the dawn of the 21st century, the game was played once more across the harsh environs of the Caspian Sea. Co-sponsor: Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies.