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Contact: Walter Zooi
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Internationally Renowned Globalism Theorist Manuel Castells Speaks at REDCAT

November 25
8:30 p.m.
$8 general admission

Los Angeles, November 7 - Noted sociologist and interpreter of the information society Manuel Castells will discuss the role of culture in shaping local identity with CalArts President Steven Lavine, in the first of a new President's Ideas and Dialogues series at REDCAT - the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater - CalArts' new performance venue and gallery in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The discussion begins at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $8 for general admission seating. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office located at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets, calling 213-237-2800 or by clicking here

"No one has influenced my thinking more over the past decade than Manuel Castells. We are fortunate that he has just moved to Los Angeles, where he now teaches at the USC Annenberg School of Communication," explained CalArts President Dr. Steven Lavine. Castellls' three-volume study, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, was hailed by Anthony Giddens as "the most compelling attempt yet to map the contours of the global information age." In the just released updating of the second volume, "The Power of Identity," Castells adds fresh material on Al-Qaeda, the Zapatista movement, and on other emerging sources of resistance to globalization, as well as the United States' surprising response to global interdependence. "My experience is that, having enjoyed Castell's insights, you will never read the newspaper in the same way again," commented Dr. Lavine.

Manuel Castells speaks six languages and has spent over twenty years traveling the world, gaining direct personal experience with the cultures and societies he writes about. Among the subjects within Castells' conceptual purview are the collapse of the Soviet Union; the potential emergence of the Asian Pacific as the next region of major world power; and the rapidly increasing growth of a "Fourth World"-- a series of "black holes of informational capitalism" (areas that have been cut off from the flow of wealth and information in the global economy) that refuses to confine itself to national borders. He also raises the specter of a "global criminal economy," a dark counterpart to transnational corporations, and suggests that trends such as fascination with gangster movies "may well indicate the cultural breakdown of traditional moral order, and the implicit recognition of a new society, made up of communal identity and unruly competition." Castells has been internationally acclaimed for reading the pulse of late-20th-century social trends. His ideas are bound to provoke debate about any efforts to shape the trends of the 21st century.

REDCAT, a technologically advanced black box performance space, 3,000 sq. ft. art gallery and lounge located within Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles, is a natural extension of CalArts, an institution that has been long known for challenging artistic traditions and enabling young artists to learn from--but also to question--some of the world's top practitioners in each artistic discipline. This same spirit of heightened cultural and civic discourse is what brings REDCAT to life.

A detailed biography of Manuell Castells follows.

Manuel Castells holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is, as well, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Castells was born in Spain in 1942 and grew up in Valencia and Barcelona. He studied law and economics at the Universities of Barcelona and Paris. He received a doctorate in sociology and a doctorate in human sciences from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

Between 1967 and 1979 he was assistant professor, then associate professor of sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at the University of Paris. In 1979 he was appointed Professor of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. During his tenure at Berkeley he was chair of the Center for Western European Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for International Studies. In 1988-93, while remaining on the Berkeley faculty, he was Professor and Director of the Institute for Sociology of New Technologies, at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Montreal, Catolica de Chile, FLACSO-Chile, Campinas-Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Metropolitana de Mexico, UNAM- Mexico, Central de Venezuela, Copenhagen, Geneva, Amsterdam, Oxford, Moscow, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Hitotsubashi-Tokyo, Wisconsin-Madison, Boston, Southern California, and, in several occasions, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has lectured in over 300 academic institutions in 43 countries.

He is the author of 21 books and editor or co-author of 15 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture" was published by Blackwell in 1996-98 in the first edition and in 2000-2003 in its second edition. It has been translated into Spanish (Spain and Mexico), French, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Chinese (in complex characters in Taipei, in simplified characters in Beijing), Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Danish, Korean, Japanese, Parsi, Arabic, Lithuanian, and Catalan. His most recent books are "The Internet Galaxy" (Oxford University Press, 2001), "The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model" (Oxford University Press, 2002, with Pekka Himanen), "La societat xarxa a Catalunya" (Mondadori, 2003, co-author), and "The Network Society: A Global Perspective" (London: Edward Elgar, 2004, editor and co-author)

Among other academic distinctions, he has received the Guggenheim Fellowship; the C. Wright Mills Award from the American Society for the Study of Social Problems; the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution to community and urban sociology; the Kevin Lynch Award from M.I.T., the Medal of Urbanism from the City of Madrid; the Order of the Lion of Finland; the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government; the National Medal of Science from the Government of Catalonia; and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Valencia, Queen's (Canada), Castilla-La Mancha, Twente (Netherlands), San Andrez (La Paz), Sao Paulo (Medal of Honor), Higher School of Economics (Moscow), and Helsinki University of Technology. In 1994 he was appointed to the European Academy.

He has served, or currently serves on the following advisory committees: High Level Expert Group on the Information Society of the European Commission; Advisory Council on Science and Technology, Government of Spain; Advisory Board of the Research Institute of the International Labor Office (ILO); International Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation on the Problems of Socio-Political Transition (1992); Advisory Board to the United Nations Secretary General on Information and Communication Technology and Global Development; Advisory Council to the United Nations Task Force on Information and Communication Technology (current); Advisory Board of the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program; International Advisory Council to the President of South Africa on Information Technology and Development (current); United Nations Secretary General's High Level Panel on Global Civil Society and the United Nations (current). Has been an advisor to the Governments of Chile (Allende administration), Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua (Sandinista administration), Brazil (Cardoso administration), Russia (Yeltsin administration), Finland, and South Africa, as well as a consultant with US AID, the European Commission, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, ILO, and UNESCO.