ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

   We stand at a unique moment in history when human rights, social justice, and concern for the environment inform the agenda of both multinational corporations and social movements. Paradoxically, the open and competitive market, long considered a perpetrator of human and environmental abuses, is now viewed as a frontier for respecting, protecting and serving "the greater common good." While activists and non-profit organizations have historically been the outlet for such causes, over the past decade, for-profit corporations have sought to reinvent themselves as champions of social welfare and the environment. New agencies, institutions and standards-making bodies are surging to the foreground to mediate between social, environmental and economic imperatives. The blurring of boundaries between markets and movements, for-profit and non-profit, has created new possibilities and problems which we will explore through a junior scholar workshop titled Global Goods: Changing Perspectives on Trade, Human Rights and the Environment. In this workshop, we seek to understand the rise of so called "responsible capitalism" through research conducted on the production and consumption of what we call "global goods."