by Yannick Vanderborght | Nov 14, 2012 | News
The “European Liberal Forum: Universal Basic Income: For a new social contract in Europe,” which took place at 11/12 October 2012 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was announced at BINews and now there is a video series available at YouTube, including talks by Guy Standing, Philippe Van Parijs, and many others. Many of the talks are in English:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa8WCjH6jK7gCbtkSGLh-thfq3ZSrUf3p
More information about the event:
https://www.inovum.si/ubi/
by Yannick Vanderborght | Oct 4, 2012 | News
The international conference “Universal basic income: for new social contract in Europe” will bring together leading theoreticians on UBI and social welfare state, as well as their main opponents, to offer an open window for an international discussion and sharing of global experience on this topic in Slovenia. Feature speakers include, Philippe Van Parijs, author of Real Freedom for All, Joze Mencinger, a Professor at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Guy Standing, author of The Precariat, and Klaus Sambor, Secretary General of the European Sustainable Development NGO.
For more information, go to: https://www.inovum.si/ubi/.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Aug 30, 2012 | News
International Conference: “Universal Basic Income: For a New Social Contract in Europe”
We live in a time when the circumstances in the global economic and political market make it necessary to examine new models not only of the welfare state, but the entire concept of labour in postmodern society. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is just such an idea, which offers questions, answers, suggestions and solutions that do not dependent on an individual’s work requirements, but place the individual, equality and freedom at the very heart of understanding the state.
The international conference “Universal Basic Income: For a New Social Contract in Europe”, which will take place between 11 and 12 October at the Ljubljana (Slovenia) Exhibition and Convention Centre, will be an excellent opportunity to exchange opinions about the challenges of the postmodern world and hold an important discussion on the possibility of introducing UBI in Slovenia.
The conference will bring together leading theoreticians on UBI and the social welfare state and open the space for an international discussion and an exchange of global experiences on this topic. Among the keynote speakers will be: Prof. Philippe Van Parijs, world’s authority on UBI; Prof. Guy Standing, co-founder of BIEN, and Klaus Sambor, BIEN Austria. Slovenian experts and academicians will also present their views, among them Prof. Jože Mencinger and Dr Igor Pribac.
The international meeting is organised by the Novum Institute (Slovenia) and the European Liberal Forum with the support of Projekt: Polska. It is funded by the European Parliament.
Attendance at the conference is free of charge; participants can register online (there is a limited number of seats). You can find the draft programme at https://www.inovum.si/ubi/. For all other information, please contact the organizers at info@inovum.si.
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 29, 2012 | News
“Pathways to a Basic Income,” Munich, Germany, September 14-16, 2012
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the parent organization of USBIG, will hold its 14th biennial Congress in Munich Germany on September 14-16, 2012. It will have an additional “host-nation” day on September 13. According to the conference website, “Every other year researchers, scholars, policy makers and politicians from different parts of the world get together to discuss alternatives that could lead to the promotion and implementation of an elementary principle of social justice: the guarantee of a monetary income. Ideas, experiences and new designs for public policies will be addressed by specialists and several guests for three days.” The 14th BIEN Congress will take place at the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus in the Munich suburb of Ottobrunn.
Plenary speakers include the following people: Mylondo Baptiste is a French philosopher and political scientist. He is the founder of the nonprofit association “Conso-age.” Bruna Augusto Pereira is cofounder of the non-governmental organization ReCivitas, which runs a unique project paying a basic income to every resident of the Brazilian village Quatinga Velho. Claus Offe is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany. Gotz W. Werner is a German entrepreneur and founder of the drugstore chain, “dm.” He is a prominent basic income advocate in Europe. Guy Standing is an economist and professor at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath in Great Britain. Min Geum studied law in Seoul and Gottingen. He was candidate of the Socialist Party for president in South Korea in 2007. He founded the Basic Income Korean Network, the BIEN affiliate in South Korea. Philippe Van Parijs is professor at the faculty of economic, social and political sciences of the University of Louvain. Renana Jhabvala is one of the best-known representatives of women’s interests working in the informal sector in India. She has held several positions at the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India, which represents the interests of self-employed women at risk of poverty. Rolf Kunnemann is the Human Rights Director at the Secretariat of FIAN International (FoodFirst Information and Action Network) in Heidelberg. He has been working on human rights to adequate food, especially in rural areas of the Global South, since 1983. Tereza Campello is Minister for Social Development and Hunger Alleviation in Brazil.
The language of the main conference will be English, but some plenary sessions will have simultaneous translation into German. The language of the host-nation day will be German. Organizers recommend that people register for the conference early because of the limited number of available places available.
More information is available on the conference website:
https://www.bien2012.de/en
Even more information is available from the conference organizers at:
office@bien2012.de
by Yannick Vanderborght | Aug 21, 2012 | News
Drawing thousands of participants, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association took place in Denver (Colorado) on 15-21 August 2012. At the initiative of its current President, Erik Olin Wright (University of Wisconsin Madison), the theme chosen for this years’s plenary sessions and for a sequence of thematic sessions was “Real Utopias”. The idea of a universal basic income was given a prominent place. Philippe Van Parijs (Louvain and Oxford) gave the opening plenary lecture on the importance of utopian thinking and the ways in which sociologists could contribute to intelligent utopian thinking on basic income. Erik Olin Wright’s massively attended presidental address emphasized the special importance of basic income in supporting the sustainability of other real utopias. And the idea of basic income kept coming up at other sessions, for example in Claus Offe’s (Berlin) intervention on “What does it mean to be a progressive in the 21st century?”, or in Yochai Benkler’s (Harvard) session on “Practical anarcism in networked societies”.
The lectures by Erik Olin Wright and Philippe Van Parijs can be watched on
