The Workshop was held at the University of Sydney on 13-14 July 2010, as outlined in the attached flier prepared for the event (Attachment 1). ASSA Fellow Professor Linda Weiss opened the workshop, and welcomed the overseas visitors as well as local participants.
The Workshop brought together an international group of scholars of the state, global civil society, and international political economy, including early career and senior scholars from Australia, North America, and Europe, to examine the logics underlying the process of ‘public-private hybridisation’ of state-provided functions, businesses and services. This phenomenon has been attributed to the neoliberal turn in politics and economics. The workshop probed the idea that hybridisation represents a reorganised form of governmental rule and authority, both within and between states, that serves to maintain and even reassert state power in new ways that extends also to the international arena.
Previous workshops had been held in Paris and New York, with support from the France-Berkeley Fund and the International Studies Association (New York). The Sydney workshop thus formed part of an ongoing program of study strongly supported internationally. This ASSA workshop in Sydney was the third and final event, with primary support from the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and supplementary support from the School of Social and Political Sciences, and the Institute for Social Sciences, at the University of Sydney, together with travel support from the ISA. The international leaders of the project (‘The Public-Private Hybridization of the 21st Century State’) are Professor Ronnie D. Lipschutz (Politics, UC-Santa Cruz); Dr Beatrice Hibou (CNRS, Sciences Po-CERI, Paris) and Dr Shelley Hurt (Political Science, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo).
The event included a significant level of local participation, together with doctoral students and early career researchers, several of whom acted as discussants for papers presented. The participants in the Sydney event were as follows:
- Caner Bakir, Assistant Professor, Koc University, Turkey, visiting scholar University of Sydney (Discussant)
- Ulrich Brand, Professor, University of Vienna (paper discussed in absentia)
- Phil Cerny, Professor, Rutgers University
- * Will Clegg, PhD candidate, Oxford University, formerly University of Sydney (Discussant)
- * Rebecca Hester, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois
- Beatrice Hibou, Senior Research Fellow & Director of Research, CNRS, Sciences Po (paper discussed in absentia)
- * Shelley Hurt, Assistant Professor, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo
- * Sung-young Kim, Lecturer, University of Sydney (Discussant)
- Anna Leander, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School
- Ronnie Lipschutz, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
- * John Mikler, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney (Discussant)
- Susan Park, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney (Discussant)
- Herman Schwartz, Professor, University of Virginia
- Elizabeth Thurbon, Senior Lecturer, UNSW (Discussant)
- Ole Jacob Sending, Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (paper discussed in absentia)
- Iver Neumann, Professor, Oslo University (paper discussed in absentia)
- Linda Weiss, Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney
* Early Career Researchers