For conference schedule and details, visit http://weber.soc.berkeley.edu/~breslauer2007/

Over a half-century after Harry Truman promised the “benefits of…scientific advances and industrial progress” to the non-Western world, an estimated 2.7 billion people continue to live on less than $2 per day. Yet, even as the post-World War II development project is criticized from across the political divide, there is today striking optimism about the potential to end global poverty. Working with new paradigms and brandishing new technologies of measurement, international, national, and subnational actors including the state, private sector, and civil society are meeting in contested sites around the world, struggling over the production of authoritative knowledge. To make sense of this moment, in which the spread of neoliberalism is encountering proponents of the interventionist state, champions of populism, and transnational social movements claiming alternatives, we need an understanding of the politics of expertise and the production of knowledge. This conference seeks to bring together graduate students from all disciplinary backgrounds whose work touches on these issues, in both the global North and South.

The Breslauer Graduate Student Symposium is an annual conference comprised primarily of UC Berkeley graduate students on an internationally relevant theme. The goal of the symposium is to support graduate student research on international issues related to the pursuit of solutions to real-world problems. The symposium was established in 2001, and is made possible by a campus donor in honor of George Breslauer, political scientist and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Berkeley. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together graduate students working on issues of expertise and knowledge in the areas of development, globalization, and poverty alleviation.

This year's keynote address will be given by *Timothy Mitchell*, a political and social theorist in the department of politics at NYU, whose work focuses on the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.

Questions can be directed to the conference co-coordinators Daniel Buch and Peter Dixon at Breslauer.2007@gmail.com.