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Democracy
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Democracy
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(2007-08) Theme: Democracy and Citizenship in the 21st Century
Theme Overview
During academic years 2007-08 and 2008-09, the Wayne
Morse Center will explore aspects of the changing conception
of citizenship and the democratic process in the United States
and other countries. The Center's inquiry will examine evolving
theories of democracy and citizenship, from constitutional law
to voting rights. It seeks to examine the underlying features
and mechanisms of U.S. democracy, the debate over immigration
and citizenship, citizen engagement, and the law of democracy.
During 2007-08 the inquiry will delve into international topics
such as global citizenship, U.S. attempts to build and transplant “democracy,” and
the role of international social movements in building democratic
institutions. During 2008-09 the focus shifts to current issues
of politics and participation in the United States, immigration
and broader conceptions of citizenship.
Wayne Morse was a fierce defender of democratic principles and institutions,
and he argued that economic democracy and political democracy are closely linked.
He believed in the observance of international law as a means to peace, self-determination
for others, and non-aggression. He argued for strict constitutional adherence
to roles of the three branches of government to check executive power and ensure
Congressional participation in foreign policy matters. He also believed in the
efficacy of citizen participation in democracy and trusted people to constructively
participate as long as they had access to “the truth.” Finally, Wayne Morse was
generally skeptical of U.S. efforts to create democracies abroad and criticized
policies that supported authoritarian and undemocratic regimes. Morse was chair
of the Latin American Affairs subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
during the 1950s and 1960s, and he became increasingly critical of U.S. activities
in Latin America.
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Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics:
Arturo Escobar 2007-08
 Arturo
Escobar occupied the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics in 2007-08.
Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor
of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. He is also the former Director of the Institute of Latin American
Studies at UNC. Professor Escobar is a Colombian national and a U.S.
citizen. His research spans several areas in anthropology, including
international political ecology, social movement theory,
theories of development, and science and technology studies. His most
recent work focuses
on social movements and biodiversity and how places and regions
struggle for difference and diversity under globalization. Escobar's
work broadens our understanding of globalization and the processes
of modernity, highlighting the importance of place, colonialism and
alternatives to the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge and development.
View Escobar's curriculum vitae (90K PDF).
Escobar coordinated a project on the underlying nature of the democratic election of Left and Center-Left governments in several Latin American countries, and this was the subject of his public address on January 31, 2008.
Escobar's book, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press 1995), focused on how the industrialized regions of North America and Europe came to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Since the late 1990s, he has been part of a research group on Latin American social movements which has resulted in two well-known anthologies, including The Making of Social Movements in Latin America (1992), co-edited with Sonia Alvarez and Evelina Dagnino. Over the past ten years, he has worked closely with several ethnic and environmental NGOs and social movements in the Colombian Pacific and with the Rome-based Society for International Development (SID) on projects on globalization, culture, women, environment, and place.
Professor Escobar was in residence at the UO for the first three weeks of winter term, 2008. He cotaught an anthropology class with Professor Lynn Stephen on “Anthropologies of Development and Social Movements.” This course linked democratization of knowledge, democratization of development, and the transformation of anthropology.
Professor Escobar's public address, “Left Turn? Right Turn? Where is Latin America Going? Perspectives from Development, Implications for Democracy,” focused on recent political developments in Latin America and examined their underlying nature. It was held in the EMU Ballroom on the University of Oregon campus on January 31, 2008 at 7:00 p.m. This address was the opening keynote address of a major conference cosponsored by the Wayne Morse Center and the Latin American Studies Program on “Violence and Reconciliation in Latin America: Memory, Human Rights and Democracy.”
Read a description (52K PDF) of the conference.
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2007-08 Resident Scholars
Garrett Epps
Garrett
Epps, 2007-08 Wayne Morse Center Resident Scholar and Hollis
Professor of Law, conducted research into the birthright
citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment. Epps is
the author of Democracy Reborn: The
Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights
in Post-Civil War America. A former staff writer
for the Washington Post, he is the author of two novels
and numerous articles and books on constitutional law.
His book on Oregon's famous peyote case, To an
Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, was a
finalist for the American Bar Association Silver Gavel
Award in 2002. Epps convened a symposium on Immigration
and Citizenship held on January 25, 2008.
Gordon Lafer
Gordon
Lafer, Associate Professor at the Labor Education and
Research Center and the Department of Political Science,
researched issues of democracy at the workplace. Lafer
has studied the nature of union elections and advocates
for changes to U.S. labor law to improve workplace democracy.
Lafer gave a talk entitled...
“Enduring Feudalism?
The State of Federal Labor Law”
Monday, April 7, 2008
12:00 p.m. (noon)
Room 141 – Knight Law Center
This talk included discussion of the difference between employer and employee-free speech rights at the workplace, and it examined the legal rights of employees to participate as citizens in elections to public office compared with workplace elections for unionization.
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Visiting Distinguished Scholars
Richard Delgado
During spring, 2008, the Wayne Morse Center welcomed an alumni of the Wayne
Morse Chair of Law and Politics, Professor Richard
Delgado and his wife Jean
Stefancic as Visiting Distinguished Scholars.
Delgado is one of the leading commentators on race in
the United States in both academia and the media. His
books have won eight national book prizes, including
six Gustavus Myers Awards for outstanding book on human
rights in North America, the American Library Association's
Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
Delgado's most recent books include The Politics
of Fear and the Republican Ascendancy, with Manuel
Gonzalez, and Justice at War: Civil Liberties and
Civil Rights During Times of Crisis.
Delgado visited the UO with his wife, legal writer Jean Stefancic, from
the University of Pittsburgh where he holds the title of University Distinguished
Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow.
View Delgado's
curriculum vita (70K PDF)
Jean Stefancic
Jean Stefancic
is Research Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Scholar
at the University of Pittsburgh, where she writes
about civil rights, law reform, social change, and legal
scholarship. Her book, No Mercy: How Conservative
Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's
Social Agenda, published by Temple University Press
in 1996, won critical praise in the nonlegal as well as
legal community. She has written and co-authored
numerous articles and ten books, many with her husband
Richard Delgado. Their 1997 book, Critical White Studies:
Looking Behind the Mirror (Temple University Press)
won a Gustavus Myers award for outstanding book on human
rights in North American in 1998.
View Stefancic's
curriculum vita (33K PDF)
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Distinguished Speakers
Monday, November 19, 2007
Public Address —
Public Pulpits:
Religion in the Moral Argument of Public Life
Steven M. Tipton - Distinguished Speaker
Author and sociologist Steve Tipton delivered a public address on “Public Pulpits: Religion
in the Moral Argument of Public Life” on November 19,
2007, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 175 of the Knight Law Center. Based
on his forthcoming book, the address offered an overview of
faith in public life and the moral ambiguity of the American polity.
Steven M. Tipton teaches sociology, religion, and
ethics at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology,
where he is Professor of Sociology of Religion. A graduate of Harvard
University with a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and the Study of Religion
in l979, he is the author of Public Pulpits, a study of
national religious advocacy by the mainline churches in Washington,
and Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion
and Cultural Change. He co-authored with Robert Bellah et
al The Good Society and Habits of the Heart,
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A native of San Francisco, he has
worked in Harlem as a murder investigator for the New York State
Superior Court, and played semi-professional baseball in California.
Greg Grandin
 Noted author Greg Grandin visited the UO in winter, 2008, to compliment the visit of Arturo Escobar and delivered a keynote address at a major conference on “Violence
and Reconciliation in Latin America: Memory, Human Rights and
Democracy.” Grandin discussed the history of U.S. involvement in Latin America and the current “transition to democracy” in historical context at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, February 1, 2008 in the Fir Room, EMU on the UO campus.
Grandin is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at New York University. His latest book is Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (71K PDF review from The Texas Observer). Grandin is also the author of The Blood of Guatemala (Duke, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award for best book on Latin America; and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004.) He has served on the United Nations Truth Commission for Guatemala, and has published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Harper's, The Nation, the Boston Review, and the New York Times. He has most recently been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ryskamp Fellowship Program.
Read Greg Grandin's Abstract (20K
PDF).
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