Papers will address the need to think of corporate globalization at both the macro/theoretical level and at the local/ethnographic/grassroots level. Panelists are sought who can locate their work within a discussion about the utility of looking at transnational corporations (TNCs) as a way of locating struggles about environmental, labor, health, and human rights issues in both the local and the global. Panelists should seek to press beyond a practicing/theory or activist/academic dichotomy.

Although a discussion of Coca-Cola and the San Francisco MEG hotels will be included as illustrative recent examples of anthropology and anthropologists thinking through corporate globalization, presenters do not need to use Coke or the hotels as a research site -- simply touching on them as examples and then discussing the potential for including analysis of a particular TNC situated in their own field site should suffice.

In a twist on the tradition of interlocutor panels activists from United Students Against Sweatshops' Coca-Cola campaign and one other group have been invited to serve as discussants. Additional discussants from within the discipline would also be welcomed (particularly in the event of a double session).

The session will attempt to answer two central questions for activist research in the context of 21st Century corporate globalization:

Is there potential for gaining some purchase on "global capitalism" as the effect(s) of located (if differentially powerful and mobile) agents to be found in comparative analysis of the local effects of a single TNC by teams of anthropologists?

Can anthropologists with an applied or activist perspective coordinate research and data dissemination on the effects of particular TNCs and the remedies imagined or practiced in particular locales?

Abstracts of 250 words or less, in AAA format, should be emailed to robrien@temple.edu.