Stanford University

Is "Eastern Europe" Disappearing?

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"Eastern Europe" is a concept many political scientists, area studies scholars, and lay people have been using over the years almost by default. But what does "Eastern Europe" mean geo-poltically, culturally, and historically? It is increasingly difficult to define where "Eastern Europe" may or may not be: since the fall of the Soviet Union and the break-up of the Soviet bloc, the term is one that carries a nuance of belonging to the list of losers of globalization, rather than the winners. My contention is that the very notion of "Eastern Europe" is slowly, but surely disappearing. The question that emerges is what are the viable alternatives for talking about and defining this region as it enters into negotiations or joins the EU. What place, if any, does the "East" have in the political agenda of European governments, elites, and the general populace?

Klaus Segbers is Professor of Political Science at Freie Universitat in Berlin. He is the Program Director of the Center for Global Politics and directs a number of the Friei Universitat's innovative graduate studies programs, including East European Studies Online, International Relations Online, German Studies Russia, and Global Politics Summer School China. Segbers conducts research on a range of topics involving contemporary Europe: Germany's foreign relations with Eastern European countries, EU enlargement, the impact of globalization on world cities, elections in Russia, comparative analysis of institutional changes in Russia and China, and an analysis of area studies as practiced in academic settings. Segers is a visiting scholar at the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at Stanford University for Winter 2008.

Encina Hall West, Room 208

Klaus Segbers Professor of Political Science at the Freie Universitat, Berlin, and Visiting Scholar Speaker the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES)
Seminars

2008 Year Ahead Part I: Japanese Society and Culture

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Where is Japanese society and culture headed in the New Year? What social trends may shape Japan's future? From the latest pop culture developments to the changing Japanese attitude toward women and families, our panelists will provide an up-to-date view of Japanese society today and beyond.

Mariko Fujiwara is research director of Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (HILL). She is also a partner in the consultancy Business Futures Network (London), executive director of Mobile Marketing Inc., and serves on ministerial councils including the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Ministry of Finance, and the Supreme Court. She has published reports on Japanese consumers, Japan's post-war baby boom generation, second baby boom generation, changing roles of women and families, Japan's aging population and emerging trends among senior citizens.

Roland Kelts is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S., published in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He is a lecturer at the University of Tokyo, a columnist for The Daily Yomiyuri and an editor of the New York-based literary journal, A Public Space. His first novel, Access, will be published next year. His articles, essays, and stories have been published in Zoetrope; Playboy; Salon; DoubleTake; The Village Voice; Newsday; Cosmopolitan; Vogue; The Japan Times; among others.

Please visit events at www.usajapan.org or call 415-986-4383 for reservation.
2008 Year Ahead is made possible by the generous support of Union Bank of California

Delancey Screening Room
600 Embarcadero Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

Mariko Fujiwara Research Director Speaker Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living
Roland Kelts author and journalist Speaker
Conferences

The Shape of Things to Come: A Global Perspective on Regional Innovation Indicators

In the pursuit to assess high-tech regions' performance in and capability for innovation and entrepreneurship, a bewildering variety of data is published, including:

  • employment
  • total corporate sales
  • wages
  • venture capital funding
  • new company formation and growth of small firms
  • R&D spending
  • patents, and many more

However, on the basis of such heterogeneous indicators, it can be difficult or even impossible to compare regions. Some of this is inevitable given different perceived data needs in each region. However, perhaps a common core of data might be supplied.

To this end, the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is bringing together scholars and researchers from the United States, Europe and Asia to present data from their own regions that would help with comparisons between regions and linkages among them, and to make the case for what they consider the most useful set of indicators.

There will be four workshop sessions: the first will be devoted to discussing a framework for looking at entrepreneurship and innovation regional indicators, and the remaining three will take a regional focus, proposing indicators closely related to innovative regions in the United States, Europe and Asia.

This event is part of the "The Shape of Things to Come" conference at the Fisher Conference Center at Stanford University, January 17-18, 2007.

» Presentations/Papers from the event

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Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

Workshops

Savings, Sustainability and Equity

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Kirsten finished her PhD at Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2007. Her dissertation was entitled: Sustainability of Comprehensive Wealth – A practical and normative assessment. In a truely interdisciplinary manner, she combined economics, ethics, and engineering to improve and assess a macroeconomic sustainability indicator. She is currently a Teaching Fellow with Stanford’s Public Policy Program and a Research Associate at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She teaches classes at the intersection of policy analysis and ethics, leads a seminar on comparative research design, and convenes a weekly environmental ethics working group. Her research interests lie in combining quantitative data with normative argument, to this end, she is co-Investigator on a Woods Institute for Environment grant working with PIs Kenneth Arrow and Debra Satz.

Prior to entering Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2003 Kirsten worked at the World Bank for five years. Her work at the World Bank focused on the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects, remediation of industrial sites, carbon finance, compliance of projects with the World Bank’s environmental and social policies and corporate environmental strategy development. Her projects spanned the globe, including India, Kazakhstan, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. She is comfortable holding conversations over a beer or two in French, Spanish and Dutch. For two years, she served as an elected official of the World Bank’s Staff Association board, representing 8,500 staff to management on myriad issues. She won numerous awards at the World Bank and from community groups for her professional achievements and volunteer work.

Kirsten is an environmental engineer trained first at the University of Virginia (BS ‘96) and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands (MS ’98). More recently, she completed an MS in Applied Environmental Economics from Imperial College of London (’05).

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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Kirsten Oleson Public Policy Speaker Stanford University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

John Hagel and Henry Chesbrough deliver keynote addresses at "The Shape of Things to Come" conference

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"The Shape of Things to Come," a conference presented by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship on January 17-18, 2008, featured keynotes by John Hagel, co-author of The Only Sustainable Edge and Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, and Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and author of Open Innovation.

The keynotes bookended Thursday's forum, "New Patterns and Paradigms in Global Innovation Networks," and were a prelude to Friday's academic workshop, "A Global Perspective on Regional Innovation Indicators." Hagel's talk focused on the need for a more explicit taxonomy of innovative collaboration and discussed the "huge need to define pragmatic migration paths"--routes that the average manager and company can take to reach the opportunities that normally are only accessible to cutting-edge companies.

The forum closed with a presentation by Dr. Henry Chesbrough, who provided an overview on the globalization of innovation in the Chinese semiconductor industry, which he sees as split into a "globally oriented, globally competitive" industry segment and a domestically-oriented segment with "backward technologies" and lacking access to capital. The question, he explained, is how China will shift its resources, now entrenched in the latter, to the former, competitive segment.

Chesbrough finished with a discussion of intellectual property rights (IPR) in China, looking at flows of knowledge and current IPR challenges; he mentioned some surprising developments--the rise of businesses to "promote the legal exchange of IP" and the growth of a domestic constituency for stronger IPR--and discussed future implications for IPR in China.

In between the keynotes, the forum featured sessions on innovation in internet services in China, the role of venture capital as a network builder, and discussions on two rapidly moving industries: cleantech and thin film transistor LCD displays.

Conference materials, including presentations and audio files, will be made available on the SPRIE website.

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City of Angels: Barcelona and its cemeteries (1819-1919)

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The creation of new, walled, cemeteries in many European cities in the first decade of the nineteenth-century was the result of the confluence of specific social and economic processes brought by industrialization. The new cemeteries are both public and private spaces of the new bourgeois city. Urban, modern cemeteries are said to be a critical symbolic adjunct to the city.

The lecture looks at some aspects of Barcelona's modernization (1819-1919) from the privileged point of view of the cemeteries the city built during those same years.

This seminar is jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University.

German Studies Library
Pigott Hall, Building 260, Room 252
Stanford University

Elisa Marti-Lopez Associate Professor of Spanish Literature Speaker Northwestern University
Seminars

BP's chief scientist discusses secure, sustainable energy in Drell Lecture

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Steven E. Koonin, chief scientist for BP in London, gave an address titled "Energy, Environment, Security: Can We Have It All?" at 4 p.m. Monday, Feb. 4, in the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center.

The talk, free and open to the public, was this year's Drell Lecture, hosted by Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

In 2004, Koonin joined BP, one of the world's largest energy companies, as group chief scientist. He is responsible for the company's long-range technology plans and activities, particularly those "beyond petroleum." His purview also includes BP's major university research programs around the world, and he provides technical advice to BP's senior executives.

The annual Drell Lecture, named for CISAC co-founder Sidney Drell, professor emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and endowed by Albert and Cicely Wheelon, traditionally addresses a current, critical national or international security issue with important scientific or technical dimensions. Previous Drell lecturers have included New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker; the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, a Harvard professor; Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency; physician Margaret Hamburg; astronaut and Stanford alumna Sally Ride; and physicist Freeman Dyson.

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Steven E. Koonin, chief scientist for BP in London. | Rod Searcey
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Los Trabajos de la Literatura

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Bernardo Atxaga (José Irazu Garmendia, Asteasu, Guipúzcoa, 1951) pertenece al grupo de escritores que empezó a publicar en lengua vasca a principios de los años setenta. Se graduó en Ciencias Económicas en la Facultad de Bilbao (1973). Posteriormente, realizó estudios de Filosofía en la Universidad de Barcelona (1980-1983).

Publicó su primer libro, la novela corta Ziutateaz, en 1976. Le siguió, en 1978, el libro de poemas Etiopia. A partir de entonces ha publicado con asiduidad, cultivando diversos géneros. Entre sus obras más importantes pueden citarse las siguientes: Obabakoak (1988); Gizona bere bakardadean (1993) -publicada en castellano con el título de El hombre solo (1994)-; Zeru horiek (1995), Esos cielos (1996)-; Poemas & Híbridos (1990); Groenlandiako lezioa (1998), Lista de locos (1998); Soinujolearen semea (2003), El hijo del acordeonista (2004).

En el ámbito de la literatura infantil y juvenil, cabe destacar los siguientes títulos: Behi euskaldun baten memoriak (1991), Memorias de una vaca (1992) Sara izeneko gizona (1996), Un espía llamado Sara (1996); Xola eta lehoiak, Shola y los leones(1995); Bambulo (1998).

Ha publicado artículos y textos literarios en diversas publicaciones de todo el mundo: El País, El Mundo, El Correo, The New York Times, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, El Paseante, Matador, Vuelta, Die Horen, Lichtungen, Lyrikkklubbss Bibliotek, Linea d ómbra, La Main du Singe, Le Serpent à Plumes, La Femelle du Requin, Tabacaria, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London, Revue Labyrint, Threepenny Review etc.

Premio de la Crítica en diversas ocasiones; Premio Euskadi, Premio Nacional de Literatura, Prix Millepages, finalista en dos ocasiones en European Literary Award, Premio Cesare Pavese etc.

Su obra ha sido traducida y publicada en 30 lenguas.

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Bernardo Atxaga belongs to a group of writers who began to publish in the Basque language at the beginning of the 1970's. He graduated with a degree in Economics from the Facultad de Bilbao in 1973. Later, he completed his studies in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (1980 - 1983). He published his first book, the short novel Ziutateaz, in 1976, followed by Etiopia, a book of poems, in 1978. Since then, he has published prolifically and developed a varity of styles. Among his most important works are: Obabakoak (1988); Gizona bere bakardadean (1993) -published in Castilian and titled El hombre solo (1994)-; Zeru horiek (1995), Esos cielos (1996)-; Poemas & Híbridos (1990); Groenlandiako lezioa (1998), Lista de locos (1998); Soinujolearen semea (2003), and El hijo del acordeonista (2004).

In the world of emerging young literature, the following titles of Mr. Atxaga are worth noting: Behi euskaldun baten memoriak (1991), Memorias de una vaca (1992) Sara izeneko gizona (1996), Un espía llamado Sara (1996); Xola eta lehoiak, Shola y los leones (1995); Bambulo (1998).

He has published articles and literary texts in many publications around the world, including: El País, El Mundo, El Correo, The New York Times, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, El Paseante, Matador, Vuelta, Die Horen, Lichtungen, Lyrikkklubbss Bibliotek, Linea d ómbra, La Main du Singe, Le Serpent à Plumes, La Femelle du Requin, Tabacaria, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London, Revue Labyrint, Threepenny Review etc.

Atxaga has won many awards including the Premio de la Critica on many occasions, the Premio Euskadi, Premio Nacional de Literatura, Prix Millpages, and he was a finalist on two occasions for the European Literary Award.

His works have been translated and published in 30 languages.

 

German Studies Library
Building 260, Room 252 (Pigott Hall)
Stanford University

Bernardo Atxaga Author Speaker
Seminars

Asian Alternatives: What the West Can Learn - 2008 Shorenstein Journalism Award

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This annual award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. This year’s recipient is Ian Buruma.

Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands, and educated at Leyden University and Nihon University, Tokyo. He is a journalist, author, and Luce Professor at Bard College, New York. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and many publications in Europe and the US. His latest books are Occidentalism (with Avishai Margalit) and Murder in Amsterdam.

Buruma’s talk will explore how for many centuries Westerners have looked East for answers to the problems in their own societies. How valid were these answers? What are people looking for today, when China and Japan look like attractive models? Is there anything we can learn?

Related panel discussion:
Death of the Foreign Correspondent: An Exaggerated Demise?

Bechtel Conference Center

Ian Buruma Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism Speaker Bard College
Conferences
Shorenstein Journalism Award
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