Online workshop, 23 May 2024 at 5pm UK time / 6pm CET

On zoom, register here: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqdO-pqT4oH9EWHBhs_AZpH42rUL-Jt9zy

Oscar Berglund is a Senior Lecturer in International Public and Social Policy at the University of Bristol. His research looks at political contestation of global processes like neoliberalisation, austerity and climate change. This includes both non-violent contestation by social movements and parliamentary forms of contestation. Oscar’ research draws on a historical materialist theoretical framework with a focus on political agency and contestation, and he is particularly interested in how social movements use civil disobedience to achieve their aims and how they justify their law-breaking.

Discussants

Louisa Rosemary Parks is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento

Laurence Cox is a Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University

The workshop will loosely revolve around the article How effective are climate protests at swaying policy? available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03721-z

Abstract

Climate protests have been increasingly studied across many academic disciplines since 2019. This is not least because many scientists have themselves become activists through groups like Scientist Rebellion and XR Scientists. Probably because of the heavy scientist engagement, there is a hunger for evidence-based claims of effectiveness of different kinds of protest. As somebody who has studied these movements from a critical political economy perspective since 2019, Oscar Berglund has been invited to co-author pieces on the topic in Nature and Nature Climate Change, as well as give talks to large audiences of scientists. In this talk, Oscar will discuss what Critical Political Economy as a discipline can contribute to this newfound urge for changing the world amongst the broader scientific community.

Online workshop, Thursday 25 April 2024, 5pm UK time / 6pm CET

On zoom, register here: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpceytqzwpGt0yHNN66DnsjsD2Enga4iDv

Sam Ashman is Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Johannesburg. Her fields of research are Post-apartheid economic development in South Africa, financialization, industrial policy, combined and uneven development, and the state.

Discussants

Ilias Alami, Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development, Centre of Development Studies & Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge

Jörg Nowak, Professor of International Political Economy, Institute of International Relations, University of Brasilia

The article is available here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gpe/2/1/article-p37.xml#d3355727e961

Abstract

Surprisingly little uneven and combined development (UCD) work focuses on Africa. This article both widens the geographical scope of UCD literature and attempts to address a major blind spot in this literature: the importance of race and gender in understanding the UCD of world capitalism and global political economy. Helpful in this process, we argue, is an engagement with the work of Black Marxism and Marxist Feminism and the literature on Racial Capitalism. We draw on the work of Stuart Hall on race and class, and the importance of understanding their changing articulations, indeed of the need to look at multiple articulations – of the state and state power with forms of production; racialised ideologies; and systems of reproduction. We use a case study of South Africa to illustrate our argument. South Africa, previously on the periphery of the global system, was changed profoundly by the discovery of vast gold deposits and the construction of a forced labour system to secure its profitable extraction. South Africa’s specific form of racial capitalism challenges not only linear conceptions of development, but also binaries between free and forced labour, and Eurocentric conceptions of social reproduction.

Online Workshop, Wednesday 27 March, 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Speakers

Matthew Thompson is a Lecturer in Urban Studies at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He works at the intersection of theory, policy and practice and his research interests include critical urban political economy, urban social movements, and cooperative alternatives to capitalism.

Yousaf Nishat-Botero is a PhD Fellow at Bayes Business School, City University of London. His research interests are at the intersections of critical theory, organization studies, and political ecology. These interests guide his research into economic planning, degrowth/post-growth organizing, and urban/rural futures.

Discussants

Christoph Sorg, Researcher, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University Berlin

Agnes Gagyi, Researcher, Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg

The article is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294231210980

Abstract

Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle? In seeking answers to such questions, this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre’s work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract space – an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution, through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical struggles over the urban – as the mediator of capitalist relations – and look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.

Online Workshop, Thursday 22 February 2024, 5pm UK / 6pm CET

Speakers:

Johannes Jäger (book editor) is a professor and head of the economics department at the University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna. His research focuses on critical international political economy, global finance, regional development, European integration and Latin America. 

Patrick Bond (author) is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His research covers subject areas across political economy, political ecology and social mobilisation.

Richard Kozul-Wright (author) is the Director of the Globalisation and Development Strategies Division at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Discussant:

Susanne Soederberg is a professor of political economy at Queens University. Her research focuses on subjects of global political economy, global finance, corporate power and the geopolitics of debt.

The book is available here: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/understanding-green-finance-9781803927541.html

And you can read the first chapter online here: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781803927558/book-part-9781803927558-8.xml

Abstract

Exploring how green finance has become a key strategy for the financial industry in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis. This timely handbook book critically assesses the current dominant forms of neoliberal green finance. Understanding Green Finance delivers a pioneering analysis of the topic, covering the essential tenets of green finance with an emphasis on critical approaches to mainstream views and presenting alternatives insights and perspectives. The book first introduces the concept of, and current approaches to, green finance and green monetary policy, ultimately presenting a range of potential alternatives including both reformist and transformative-progressive approaches. Chapters explore how neoliberal green finance tends to deepen financialisation, and does not effectively address environmental problems, offering insights into reformist forms of green finance that insist that state regulation and public financing are crucial to tackling environmental problems.

Online Workshop, Thursday 25 January 2024, 5pm UK / 6pm CET

Aleksandra Piletić is a Lecturer at King’s College London. Her research is situated at the intersection of international political economy and economic geography. Her most recent research has focused on post-2008 crisis ‘mutations’ of neoliberalism, which has taken two broad lines: one has focused on the relationship between digital platforms and neoliberalism and the question of what is disruptive and what is continuous about platforms and so-called ‘platform capitalism’. The other has focused on the intensification of coercive and authoritarian practices for the purpose of solidifying post-2008 crisis forms of neoliberalism. Here, she has conducted research on urban and renewable energy politics.

Discussants:

Alke Jenss, Senior Researcher, Coordination Cluster Contested Governance, Arnold Bergstraesser Institute

Yuliya Yurchenko, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, University of Greenwich

The article is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2023.2167985

Abstract

In light of the recent rise of authoritarianism and processes of ‘democratic backsliding’ in the Balkans (and other parts of CEE), the EU has projected an image of itself as a bastion of democracy and a counterweight to authoritarian tendencies and regimes. In contrast, this article points to the ways in which the EU – through its enlargement strategy – has legitimized authoritarian practices in candidate states. These practices have been inherently linked to the adoption of the EU acquis communautaire and deepening processes of neoliberal restructuring. In Serbia, the mandated transition to renewable energy, and the associated rise in small hydropower as a solution for meeting renewable energy targets, has led to an intensification of state-sponsored violence and coercion. By focusing on a small hydropower development in Rakita, Serbia, this paper highlights the inherently multiscalar nature of authoritarian state power and potential new avenues for contestation.

Disaster Capitalism and Critical Political Economy: Catastrophe or Emancipation?

the next CPERN stream of panels will be at the European Sociological Association Conference, in the city of Porto, Portugal, from August 27th to 30th, 2024.

The Call for Papers is now open. Join us in Porto next August!

CPERN is Research Network 06 of the European Sociological Association – when submitting abstracts make sure to indicate that you want your paper to be included in our stream of panels (RN06).

Disaster Capitalism and Critical Political Economy: Catastrophe or Emancipation?

Capitalist crises continue to proliferate. From the Climate Crisis, through the Covid crisis, and on to the Polycrisis. This is Disaster Capitalism.

It sees the decaying global order being replaced with multipolar militarization: “forever wars”, the Russian neocolonial genocidal invasion of Ukraine, the horrific mass killing of civilians amidst the reinvigorated Israel-Palestine conflict, military uprisings across Africa, and heightened geo political tensions in the Asia Pacific.

Advances in technology take the form of automated alienation.

The ongoing drive for expansion creates yet more degradation of our planet and the climate disaster worsens by the year.

We need critical political economy to understand, explain, and help transform, disaster capitalism.

Yet, the capitalist drive towards destruction also undermines the capacity for critique. Academia is subordinated to the needs of capitalist growth; and critical perspectives are marginalised. Conservative forces seek to neutralise the potential for resistance; manufacturing divisive culture wars, and channeling blame towards the most vulnerable in society.

It is in this context that we need, more than ever, an intellectual and political project to inform existing experiments in resistance and emancipation, which are also proliferating, and which offer routes beyond this catastrophe.

We especially (but not exclusively) invite abstracts on:

• Understanding contemporary Disaster Capitalism
• Opportunities and trajectories of emancipation
• Digital capitalism, AI, and automated alienation
• Coercion and consent in Disaster Capitalism
• The new militarised multipolarity
• The interconnection of global production, finance, and disaster
• New challenges to neo colonialism and racialized exclusion in Disaster Capitalism
• The Climate Crisis and Its Alternatives
• Social reproduction in and against Disaster Capitalism

Abstracts must be submitted through the conference platform, which is available here.

Deadline: January 15th, 2024

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We hope to see you there.

CPERN Board:  David Bailey, Yuliya Yurchenko, Bernd Bonfert, Owen Worth

Thursday, 26 October, 5pm UKT / 6pm CET

James Steinhoff is an Assistant Professor / Lecturer and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at the University College Dublin. His research focuses on the political economy of algorithmic technologies, data and digital labour, and draws on resources from media studies, science and technology studies and labour studies.

Discussants:

Phoebe Moore, Professor of Management and the Futures of Work at the University of Essex Business School

Justin Joque, Visualisation Librarian and Adjunct Lecturer at the Digital Studies Institute, University of Michigan

The article is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448221099217

Abstract

Surveillance of human subjects is how data-intensive companies obtain much of their data, yet surveillance increasingly meets with social and regulatory resistance. Data-intensive companies are thus seeking other ways to meet their data needs. This article explores one of these: the creation of synthetic data, or data produced artificially as an alternative to real-world data. I show that capital is already heavily invested in synthetic data. I argue that its appeal goes beyond circumventing surveillance to accord with a structural tendency within capitalism toward the autonomization of the circuit of capital. By severing data from human subjectivity, synthetic data contributes to the automation of the production of automation technologies like machine learning. A shift from surveillance to synthesis, I argue, has epistemological, ontological, and political economic consequences for a society increasingly structured around data-intensive capital.