Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established in 1994, efforts to secure international agreement on climate policy have gained increasing attention, but compromise on the issues has not been easy to achieve.

For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise. Venezuela Speaks! is the real, bottom-up account of the country's bloodless uprising and reorganization. Co-editor Carlos Martinez will explain how the stories in Venezuela Speaks! offer a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez.

A talk by Whitney Cox, Lecturer in Sanskrit, School of Oriental and African Studies.

Imtiaz Gul is the Executive Director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. He is the author of three books on the ongoing security concerns in South Asia: The Unholy Nexus, The Al-Qaeda Connection, and The Most Dangerous Place. Gul addresses the longer term political and social consequences of the floods in Pakistan of July of this year.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Klimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

Raman Sukumar is the author of three books on the ecology and conservation of elephants, and the recipient of the International Cosmos Prize in 2006. He is presently completing a cultural history of the Asian elephant that will be published in late 2010. Using literary sources and artistic representation of elephants in painting and sculpture, Sukumar's talk traces the changing paradigms in the elephant-human relationship through history, and provides possible ecological explanations for the same.

Robert Glennon is a nationally-renowned water expert, and the author of Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It (2009). His previous books include the highly-acclaimed Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters (2002). Glennon is the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy in the Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. Glennon explores potential water futures for the U.S. — one driven by passivity, the other by foresight.

A talk by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College, University of Chicago and David Archer, Professor in the Department of Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago on the global climate crisis. As part of the quarterly Workshop on the Global Environment, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and geophysicist David Archer meet to discuss human-environmental relationships. Archer served as discussant of Chakrabaty's presentation titled "Between Globalization and Global Warming: The Long and the Short of Human History".

A talk by Kapil Raj, Directeur d'études at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Santiago Levy is Vice President for Sector and Knowledge at the Inter-American Development Bank and author of the book Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes: Social Policy, Informality and Economic Growth in Mexico. Mr. Levy speaks on the growth of Mexico’s informal economy.

A keynote address by David Hardiman, History, University of Warwick at the Seventh South Asia Graduate Student Conference. With the support of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) and The Center for Gender Studies (CGS).

Srimati Basu, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies University of Kentucky on "Impossible Translation: Beyond the Legal Body in Two South Asian Family Courts"

A talk by Debjani Ganguly, Head, Humanities Research Center, Australian National University. From the South Asia Seminar.

A talk by Robin Jeffrey, Director, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. From the South Asia Seminar.

Panel 3: Uday Singh Mehta, Amherst College; Arjun Appadurai, New York University; Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

Panel 2: Miranda Johnson, University of MIchigan; Bain Attwood, Monash University; Ajay Skaria, University of MInnesota. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

Panel 1: Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna; Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, University of London; Faisal Devji, St. Anthony's College, University of Oxford. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

A keynote address by Carlo Ginzburg, Scuola Normale di Pisa (partial recording). From the conference 'After Europe: Postcolonial Knowledge in the Age of Globalization'. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

A talk by Kate Brittlebank, Senior Lecturer, School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania. From the South Asia Seminar.

Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson is an Indologist and fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. His field is early medieval religion in India and Southeast Asia, focusing on the history of Saivism, its relations with the state, and its influence on Buddhism and Vaishnavism. In the last 26 years, Alexis Sanderson has published over 1,400 pages of articles covering Saiva, Vaishnava, and Buddhist Tantra in South and Southeast Asia.