Plenary Speakers

The Global Studies Conference will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversation Sessions

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Veronica Davidov

Dr. Veronica Davidov is a cultural anthropologist specializing in issues of globalization and sustainable development and their impact on indigenous cultures. She holds an M.A. in Anthropology from University of California, Los Angeles (2000) and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University (2008). She also completed the graduate program in Culture and Media at New York University (2004), and joined the Faculty of Arts and Cultures at Maastricht University in the fall of 2008 as a lecturer.

Her broad theoretical interests include production of normative and contested discourses of nature and human-environment relations, the impact of globalization and development on indigenous sovereignty, the ways in which indigenous communities claim environmental sovereignty through legal channels, indigneous ethnoecology, and fantasies of alterity. Her dissertation fieldwork was completed in Ecuador, focusing on ecotourism in the lowland Kichwa villages of the Napo and Pastaza provinces.

Dr. Davidov is trained in visual anthropology and frequently uses visual methods in her ethnographic work. She is also an editor of Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, a bilingual international peer-reviewed journal of empirical social research, published by the Centre for Independent Sociological Research in St. Petersburg.

Roland Robertson

Roland Robertson is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA; Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex; and Distinguished Guest Professor of Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He was until very recently Professor of Sociology and Global Society at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Professor Robertson was the recipient of the first Distinguished Career Award from the section on Global and Transnational Sociology of the American Sociological Association, 2010. He began his academic career at the University of Leeds, and subsequently held appointments at the University of Essex, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of York (where he was Head of the Department of Sociology from 1970 to 1974). He returned to Pittsburgh in 1974 and remained there until his move to Aberdeen in 1999. He holds, or has held, visiting positions in sociology, pedagogy and religious studies at universities in various countries, including the USA, England, Brazil, Italy, Austria, Sweden, China (Hong Kong) and Turkey.

Robertson has published extensively in the sociology of globalization, culture, religion and sport. Among his most influential publications are The Sociological Interpretation of Religion (1970), Meaning and Change (1978) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992) and a large number of other books and articles. He has also edited or co-edited various volumes, including the Encyclopedia of Globalization (2007) and Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology (2003).

His work has been translated from English into about twenty languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Croat, Turkish, Italian, French, Polish, Russian, Danish, Korean, Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian.

Professor Robertson has served on many editorial boards of professional journals, including Sociological Analysis (now Sociology of Religion); Citizenship Studies; Journal of International Communication; Review of Religious Research; International Political Sociology; Globalizations; Theory, Culture & Society; Journal of Mathematical Sociology; and the Journal of Social Science.

He has been President of the Global Studies Association, President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and a member of the executive councils of other professional associations, including the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the American Society for the Study of Religion.

Professor Robertson’s current writing includes the following: an edited volume on glocalization; an edited volume on cosmopolitanism; an edited volume on theories of world society; a book on the decline of democracy and the rise of the new totalitarianism; and a book on globalization and cosmology. He is also assembling collections of his many items of unpublished work. His most recent publication is European Cosmopolitanism in Question (co-author and co-editor), 2012.

John Urry

BA, MA (economics), PhD (sociology), University of Cambridge. Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University; RSA Fellow; Founding Academician and member of Council, Academy of Social Sciences; Chair Sociology RAE Panel (1996, 2001); Honorary Doctorate, Roskilde; editor of International Library of Sociology (Routledge); co-editor of Mobilities; member of Science and Engineering Review of DfT.

Director of the Lancaster Centre for Mobilities Research with recent funding from EPSRC (Travel Time Use); ESRC (Low carbon innovation in China; UK Transport Research Centre); Forestry Commission; DfT; and Foresight Programme. Published c35 books and special issues, c70 refereed articles and c100 chapters. Recent books include Automobilities (2005), Mobilities, Networks, Geographies (2006), Mobilities (2007), Aeromobilities (2009), After the Car (2009), Mobile Lives (2010), Mobile Methods (2010), The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011), Climate Change and Society (2011).