George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the 2005.

Betrayed
"In early 2007, George Packer published an article in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the Americans in Iraq, with little or no U.S. protection or security. The article drew national attention to the humanitarian crisis and moral scandal. Betrayed, based on Mr. Packer's interviews in Baghdad, tells the story of three young Iraqis - two men and one woman - motivated to risk everything by America's promise of freedom. Betrayed explores the complex relationships among the Iraqis themselves, and with their American supervisor, struggling to find purpose while a country collapses around them." (coultureproject.org, where Betrayed had it's world premiere in January 2008.)

The play is directed by Rush Rehm, an actor, director, and professor of drama and of classics who publishes in the areas of Greek tragedy and contemporary politics. Along with courses on ancient theater and culture, he teaches courses on contemporary politics, the media, and U.S. imperialism. Rehm also directs and acts professionally, serving as Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater (SST). An activist in the peace and justice movements, Rehm is involved in anti-war and anti-imperialist actions, and in solidarity campaigns with Palestine, Cuba, East Timor, and Central America.

On Thursday, May 19, Packer will be in conversation with Tobias Wolff (English, Stanford) and Debra Satz (Philosophy, Stanford).

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website

Susie Linfield is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press). She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays on politics and culture have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times, Dissent, the Nation, Guernica, Bookforum, Salmagundi, and the Boston Review. For six years she was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and she was formerly an editor at American Film, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post.

This is part of the Stanford seminar series on Science, Technology, and Society.

Hugh Gusterson
Born in the UK, Hugh Gusterson took a B.A. in history at Cambridge University in 1980, a Masters degree in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, and a PhD in anthropology at Stanford University in 1992.  Somewhere in between he worked for a couple of social change organizations.  He was a professor at MIT from 1992-2006, when he came to George Mason University.  He has done fieldwork in the United States and Russia, where he has studied the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists.  He also writes about militarism and about science more generally, and has a strong interest in professional ethics.  He is the author of Nuclear Rites (UC Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb (Minnesota, 2004) and co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity (Minnesota, 1999) and Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (UC Press, 2005).  As well as writing for scholarly journals, he has a regular online column for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and has published in numerous newspapers and magazines.

Co-sponsored by STS and CISAC.

Abstract
Social science interpretations of the meltdown emphasize system characteristics such as complexity and coupling, and/or culture as in neo-institutional theories.  Examining regulatory changes, regulatory agents, elected representatives, firms and the many warnings, I argue that the role of human agents has been greatly neglected. Building on earlier work on "executive failure" I offer an agentic interpretation that is missing from both of the social science interpretations. Structure (systems) and culture (neo institutional theory) are valuable but incomplete.

Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting professor at CISAC in the winter and spring terms. Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), and Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton, 1999). His recent articles include "Modeling Firms in the Global Economy," Theory and Society, 2009, v 38:3, May, 217-243, "Organizations and Global Warming," in Constance Lever-Tracy, ed. Handbook of Society and Climate change (Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), "Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity," Sociological Inquiry 78:2, May 2008 162-73; "Conservative Radicalism," Organization 15:2 2008 271-77; "Disasters Evermore? Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters," Social Research 75:3 Fall, 2008. His recent membership on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software led to his current work on cyber security. He is also writing on the economic meltdown, but his major interest now is the institutional/organizational aspects of global warming. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.

Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve, and he also showed that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. Prior to that, he served as a weather officer in the U.S. Air Corps (1942-46), and a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-49). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a BS from City College, an MA and PhD from Columbia University, and holds approximately 20 honorary degrees.

Presented by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

• Sessions from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm open ONLY to Stanford Faculty and Students
• The 4:30 pm session is OPEN TO PUBLIC

Stanford Faculty and Students who RSVP will receive workshop papers when the papers become available.

RSVP at link or by email to abbasiprogram@stanford.edu

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE:

9:00 - 10:30 am: Border Crossings
Moderator: Parna Sengupta, Introduction to Humanities Program, Stanford University

• Amin Tarzi, Middle East Studies, Marine Corps University
  “Yaghistan Revisited: The Struggle for Domination of Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands”
• James Caron, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
  “Divisive Hegemonies and Interlinked Publics: Case Studies of Religious Scholarship and Social Awareness in Afghanistan and the North West Frontier Province, 1930-2008”
• Jamal Elias, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
  “Identity, Modernity and Meaning in Pukhtun Truck Decoration”

10:30 -11 am: Coffee Break

11 am- 12:30 pm: Molding Minds and Bodies
Moderator: Steve Stedman, Center for Security and International Cooperation, Stanford University

• Tahir Andrabi, Economics, Pomona College
  “Religious Schooling in Pakistan and its Relation to Other Schooling Options: A Disaggregated Analysis”
• Farzana Shaikh, Asia Programme, Royal Institute of International Affairs
  “Will the ‘right’ kind of Islam save Pakistan?: The Sufi Antidote”
• Fariba Nawa, Journalist, Fremont
  “Opium Nation”

2:00- 4:00 pm: Nations, Tribes, and Others
Moderator: Aishwary Kumar, Department of History, Stanford University

• Gilles Dorronsoro, The Carnegie Endowment
  “Religious, Political and Tribal Networks in the Afghan War”
• Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Department of History, James Madison University
  “Epistemological Quandaries of the Afghan Nation: Mobility, Territoriality and The Other”
• Thomas Ruttig, Afghanistan Analysts Network
  “How Tribal Are the Taleban?”
• Lutz Rzehak, Humboldt University
  “How to Become a Baloch? The Dynamics of Ethnic Identities in Afghanistan”

4:00- 4:30 pm: Coffee Break

4:30-6:00 pm: Public Session: The Global Politics of Afghanistan and Pakistan
Moderators:

• Shahzad Bashir, Religious Studies, Stanford University
• Robert Crews, Department of History, Stanford University

[Co-sponsored with CISAC, Center for South Asia, Department of History, CREEES]

For more information, please see http://islamicstudies.stanford.edu or contact the program office at abbasiprogram@stanford.edu