Disussion with Sanjay Reddy and Jeffrey Wasserstrom – The New School – February 13, 2008. Sanjay Reddy discussed the global implications of India’s changing international economic position. Jeffrey Wasserstrom focused on a cultural analysis of the current situation in China, at a time when the forces of economic and cultural globalization have been transforming patterns of urban life in myriad ways.

Participant bios:

Sanjay Reddy is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. He also teaches in Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He earned a PhD in Economics and an AB in Applied Mathematics with Physics from Harvard, and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He received fellowships from (among others) Harvard University and Princeton University. His areas of research include development economics, international economics, and economics and philosophy. He has researched for development agencies and international institutions, including the G-24 group of developing countries, Oxfam, UNICEF, UNDP, and World Bank. He has published widely, and is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Development, Ethics and International Affairs, and the European Journal of Development Research. Dr. Reddy’s published articles includeGlobalisation, Labour Markets, and Social Outcomes in Developing Countreis (2006); International Trade: What Does Justice Demand? (2006) and Promoting Poorer Countries’ Interests (2006). He most recently wrote International Debt: The Constructice Implications of Some Moral Mathematics(2007).

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He received a Master’s in East Asian Studies from Harvard and his doctorate in History from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a specialist in modern Chinese history. He publishes widely in academic venues and also contributed reviews and commentaries to general interest periodicals, such as Newsweek, The Nation, The TLS, The New Left Review, andLos Angeles Times. He has edited, co-edited, or co-authored five books including Human Rights and Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000 and 2007 editions). He is currently completing work on Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, which will appear in Routledge’s series on Asia’s World Cities. Dr. Wasserstrom is the author of Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), and, most recently, China’s Brave New World–And Other Tales for Global TImes (Indiana Univ. Press, 2007). In this book a scholar poses such questions as what it really means to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing as he journeys from nine-teenth century China into the future in this examination of China’s place in the current world order, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, Budapest, and beyond.