On March 28, BCRW will gather a variety of scholars, activists, and writers for a two-day conferenceto discuss various approaches to reshaping our social infrastructure to most effectively support the public’s best interest. The conference will be the culmination in a series of events from the project For the Public Good, which began in 2011.
The first event introduced the concept of “public good,” examining a wide range of issues such as the environment, information media, and education. Hosted by a range of professors coming from schools such as Rutgers and CUNY, the panelists discussed how the recent global financial crisis led to the privatization of assets and services that were once public, thus harming the “public good.” In a blog post on Barnard’s website, Hilary Symington wrote, “the speakers all said…that the neo-liberal trickle-down system has failed, that the public good can no longer be entrusted to private companies, and that free-trade policies are not the answer.” Also in a blog post for Barnard’s website, BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh compared the conference to the success of the Occupy Wall Street movement, noting that “the privatization of formerly public goods like education, water, healthcare, libraries, the Internet and parks for the profit of individuals and transnational corporations has been, as panelist Nancy Holmstrom argued, an historic process of ‘political decisions and struggles,’ naturalized over time, and seemingly intractable…. she made central the need for reversing the current prioritization of neoliberal privatization over and against public goods.”
“It is not a good investment,” Illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green, from the MANSION by Henry Van Dyke, published by Harper&Brothers Publishers New York and London (1911), Retrieved from Flickr.com