Critical Political Economy early career scholar writing workshop

Thursday 8 June 2023
University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy

Application deadline: Friday 10 March

On the morning ahead of this year’s CPERN mid-term workshop we will be holding a writing workshop for early career scholars (PhD students and recently completed PhDs). This will be an opportunity for those working on attempts to secure their first publication. Participants will be paired with a more established scholar in the field of critical political economy, in order to receive detailed feedback with the goal of facilitating the writing and publication process. The Early Career Scholar Writing Workshop is timed so that participants can also stay to participate in the CPERN mid-term workshop and join that wider network.

This is the third time we’ve run the early career scholar writing workshop – the last one went well and provided an opportunity for detailed feedback on papers being prepared for publication. We’re confident that this year’s workshop will be equally constructive. 

The workshop is supported by the Conference of Socialist Economists, which publishes the journal, Capital & Class, and which can provide limited funding to support travel and accommodation. 

If you are interested in attending, please send a brief note detailing the paper you are currently working on (1 paragraph), outlining what stage in your academic career you are currently in (1 paragraph max), and what publications (if any) you already have to date.

Email to: cpern@criticalpoliticaleconomy.net by 10 March 2023.

Thursday 26 January, 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

On zoom, register here: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAvcumqrzkiHdcp85tt4tSaNDoEoyhhx0Jh

Jokubas Salyga is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His work focuses on the historical sociology and political economy of capitalist development in East-Central Europe, and he is particularly interested in post-communist transformations in the Baltic states, forms of resistance against neoliberal restructuring of East-Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union as well as analytical concepts in historical materialism.

Discussants:

Yuliya Yurchenko, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Greenwich, International Business and Economics Department.
Owen Worth, Professor at the University of Limerick, Department of Politics and Public Administration

The article is available here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gpe/1/1/article-p129.xml

Abstract

This article approaches the electoral success of Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) from a Critical Political Economy perspective. It explores immediate and longer-term factors conducive to the surge in the support of this far-right party. After situating the radical rightist reaction in Estonia within the wider continuum of far-right morphologies across Europe, the article attributes the immediate factors explaining EKRE’s ascendence to the conjuncture of the 2008 economic crisis and its resolution. It is contended that the authoritarian neoliberal (post-)crisis environments engendered a surveillance-based imposition of fiscal restraint at the European level and recalibrated the repertories of state interventionism at the national spatial scale. In Estonia, this served to (re-)produce the vocabularies of crisis in line with the far-right’s sensibilities and eroded the public’s trust in the parties of the political mainstream. The analysis of immediate factors behind the rise of the far-right is then supplemented with a forensic examination of popular disenfranchisement with the outcomes of post-communist transformation, the party’s ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism and EKRE’s class-constituted support base. As will be demonstrated, the far-right has attracted the votes of working-class segments residing in the peripheries of the country as well as poverty-stricken pensioners, youths and the disenchanted sections of the middle class. The article concludes by evaluating the claim that EKRE’s inclusion in the coalition government from April 2020 to January 2021 amounted to a break from neoliberalism.

23 February 2023 17.00 (GMT)

Register for zoom link: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpde2qrzktGtOmJeJrrzewc4fP_eV25Qv-

Data agency in surveillance capitalism: empowering citizens in CryptoParties

Prof Dr Sigrid  Kannengiesser 

While citizens are more and more disempowered and exploited in surveillance capitalism, there are initaitives that reflect on the problems and challenges of current datafication and try to empower users of digital media technologies and online communication to put them into the position to decide for themselves if and with whom they share their data and develop skills of data protection. Using the concept of „data agency“ the talk presents results from a study in which CryptoParties have been analyzed as an examples of initiatives in which these empowering practices take place: activsists from diverse backgrounds share their expertice in encryption practices to enable citizens who try to learn these practices to protect their privacy in processes of online communication. While the presentation discusses the possibilities and potentials of data agency in CryptoParties, also constraints and ambivalences that can be identified in these practices are revealed. 

Data subjects as strangers

Prof Dr Phoebe V Moore

Progress has been predicted by privacy activists for people who are also known as ‘data subjects’ by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because we, as data subjects, technically have more rights to access and control data about ourselves based on this legislation. However, there is not enough clear discussion about the data subject herself in intrinsic, ontological ways not only in recent regulation but in the everyday lives of (deep) mediatisation. The GDPR’s definition refers to an ‘identifiable natural person’. Digging deeper we see that the subject is referenced against two very different ‘selves’: one, a consumer; and two, a worker. These identifiers cannot be conflated, given the opposite social positions that workers and consumers possess, and in particular, the social relations of alienation depending on which transaction we conduct. Data construction of subjects, subjectification and subjectivation must be problematised and Althusser’s theory of interpellation revived. Subjects are potentially so abstracted we become strangers to our’selves’. Indeed, what happens to our subjectivities in the process of datafication? Who now has the right to ‘enunciation’, or the right to formate the self, the right to subjectivity? 

CPERN mid-term workshop – Call for Papers (deadline 28 February 2023).

Thursday 8 – Saturday 10 June 2023

University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy

With support of the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”

The global political economy is experiencing a rapidly spreading “cost of living crisis” – but which is far better understood as a “costs of capitalism crisis”. These costs of capitalism go far beyond rising energy prices, rising inflation, and disruption to supply chains. Rather than a merely technical supply-chain problem or a disruption to trade relations and diplomacy, instead, we are experiencing a global, interconnected and multi-form crisis, the effects of which are being materially, corporeally and socially felt ever more urgently, in a way that is inescapable for any section of the global population. In our next CPERN mid-term workshop, we seek to better understand these interconnected ‘costs of capitalism’. Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war have exacerbated the unaffordability of basic goods and services and accelerated climate change and ecocide; in the long term, it is capitalism that we cannot afford. 

We see a decline in real wages and loss of livelihoods for the global working class as a whole. This sits alongside devastating climate change and mass displacement,  accumulation by dispossession, collapsing public services and public health systems, the ongoing tightening of restrictions on democratic rights, a further breakdown of international cooperation, exacerbation of population surveillance with implications for workplaces and movement across borders,  and the continued election to office of far-right and neo-fascist parties. The political elites and corporate media search incessantly for scapegoats to blame – be it foreigners, the ignorant working class, or asylum seekers and migrants.  Rather than playing a blame game which pitches people against one another, we instead seek dialogue that can apply an analysis of the current crisis that reveals the causes and costs of capitalism. 

These “costs of capitalism” require an intellectual, analytical and conceptual framework through which to understand and explain; in order to change it.  This is the role of critical political economy, which we seek in our next mid-term workshop to develop, explore, and apply to the current crisis. 

We invite scholars and activists from across the field of critical political economy to contribute to the next CPERN mid-term workshop, to delineate, explain, understand the multiple elements of the current ‘costs of capitalism’ crisis, and to develop a scholarship that works with those social forces with the capacity to disrupt, resist, transform and transcend the current, and to build a better world beyond capitalism and its never-ending crises.

We are especially keen for papers that address the following themes:

• The materiality of the crisis of neoliberal ideology. The unaffordable ‘cost of living’ on planet earth experienced by a rapidly growing number of increasingly vulnerable populations is the material symptom of neoliberal ideology and its ecocidal productivist fetishism. How do those materialities manifest themselves? How are they embodied?

• The crisis of public health in the wake of the pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated existing health inequalities globally, from vaccine apartheids, including the inability of governments to remove vaccine patents, to the increased threats on public health systems around the world. The creeping in of privatisation together with an expansion of for-profit healthcare investors is forcing many healthcare workers to strike. 

• The continued rise of fascism? Fascism globally is on the rise; it is at its most overt since WWII and it is taking on new forms. What is behind those phenomena? How can we understand them, describe them, combat them? Especially in the context of reinvigorated nationalism and regionalism, and the normalisation of authoritarianism? 

• Where next for financialisation? There is a mountain of debt upon which the global political economy rests. Now that interest rates are rising, and the austerity agenda is once again on the table, there is a very  real risk that these are highly shaky foundations. What next? Will we see a repeat of the global financial crisis? Is there a space for a global debt justice moment?

• Workers and the costs of capitalism. How are workers impacted by the multiple contemporary global crises faced? The tensions within a global division of labour is exacerbated by tightening migration restrictions, supply chain issues around intensified race-to-the-bottom corporate manoeuvres, restructures and mass layoffs, the collapse of big tech companies, blatant labour arbitrage in platform and digitalised work environments, and a dramatic and rapid rise in worker monitoring and surveillance in all sectors after the pandemic has normalised these patterns. How has the rise in working from home (WfH) impacted people’s livelihoods? What protections are there for digitalised workers? What psychosocial and safety and health risks do workers face as they continue to bear the brunt of the costs of capitalism?

• Alternatives and resistance. Is the so-called cost of living crisis being met by a new wave of class struggle and non-capitalist experiments? What are the chances of success? Are trade unions back with a bang, or a whimper? Can prefigurative solidarity economies create meaningful alternatives to the capitalist market? What forms and networks of international solidarity are emerging? Are digital solidarity networks the solution for the advancements of far right authoritarian pursuits?  

• De-coupling as a cost of capitalism?  There is plenty of talk these days about ‘decoupling’ as global supply chains are affected by growing tensions in trade and post-pandemic disruption. Are we witnessing a resurgence of national protectionism in this new phase of global capitalism? What are the effects and implications of this? And where can we see struggles for economic sovereignty that reject and transcend regressive notions of decoupling in favour of international solidarity?

• The Costs of Capitalism in the Global South. How are the divisions, and relations, between the Global North and South affected and changing during the post-pandemic period? What are the deep intersectional dynamics of those divisions and relations? 

• Intersectional struggles of capital and labour. How do (changing) struggles, expressed along class, race, colonial, sexed, and gendered lines, intersect with each other, and within the global political economy? Are there emerging areas of intensification of racism and discrimination emerging within the symptoms of the costs of capitalism?

• Social reproduction. How are the already-strained means of social reproduction changing? How does social reproduction interact with the constitutive inequalities of capitalism and what sources of hope, if any, do they offer?

• Climate devastation, resistance, and future-making What is the space for solidarity and internationalism in the fight against ecocidal capitalism and its costs? How do and how can we resist the latter? What alternative economic and social models shall be built? What space is there for a noospheric world to emerge?   

• The critical political economy of geo-politics and militarism. The geo-political tensions that continue to destabilise our world are often neglected by political economy analyses. Yet capitalism and geo-political rivalries are interconnected and require a critical political economy analysis. What recent, historically rooted manifestations of that interconnectedness can help us better understand those rivalries and do away with them? 

We are interested in all of the above, and more, and wish for the workshop to cover a wide range of topics. We welcome scholars and activists with an interest in critical political economy, from a variety of countries, social backgrounds, and disciplinary affiliations, regardless of whether they are in academia or not. We are particularly committed to promoting the participation of PhD students, early career scholars, and activists. Limited funds will be available for scholars and activists in precarious situations (who cannot get other sources of funding) to support travel and accommodation costs. Please inform us if you may require help with funding when you send us your abstract.

The workshop is planned for in-person attendance, as far as that is possible. If you are unable to attend in-person, let us know and we will try to facilitate online participation.

As a result of our links to the new journal Global Political Economy we also welcome, and will gladly facilitate, panel submissions where the intention is for the panel to result in a special issue proposal for the journal. 

We will be able to provide workshop invitation letters for those needing a visa.

There will be a small fee for attending the workshop, to cover the costs of tea/coffee. The conference language will be English.

Abstracts of around 250 words should be submitted to: cpern@criticalpoliticaleconomy.net by 28 February 2023.

Many thanks,

The CPERN mid-term workshop 2023 organising committee

David Bailey, Bernd Bonfert, Adriano Cozzolino, Phoebe Moore, Owen Worth, Yuliya Yurchenko, Gemma Gasseau, Davide Monaco, Pietro Masina 

The Critical Political Economy Research Network is Research Network 06 of the European Sociological Association.

Thursday 15 December

A discussion of Christoph Sorg’s new book – Social Movements and the Politics of Debt: Transnational Resistance against Debt on Three Continents

Christoph Sorg is a researcher based at Ruhr-University Bochum. His research focuses on intersectional theories of capitalism, social movements, globalization, digitalization, finance and debt. In addition to his recent book, he has also recently published on the possibilities of democratic economic planning in the age of digitalization, in Critical Sociology.

commentators: 

Bernd Bonfert is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Science at Aarhus University and a member of the CPERN board and the editorial board of the journal Global Political Economy. He has recent publications in the Journal of Rural Studies, Globalizations and Capital and Class.

David Bailey is an Associated Professor in Politics in the University of Birmingham and convenor of CPERN. He has a forthcoming co-authored article in Environmental Politics on the critical political economy of climate activism.

The workshop gave us an excellent opportunity to hear about this newly published research into the intersection between debt, social movements, and critical political economy.

From the book blurb: It would have been hard to miss the pivotal role debt has played for contentious politics in the last decades. The North Atlantic Financial Crisis, Global Recession and European Debt Crisis – as well as the recent waves of protest that followed them – have catapulted debt politics into the limelight of public debates. Profiting from years of fieldwork and an extensive amount of empirical data, Christoph Sorg traces recent contestations of debt from North Africa to Europe and the US. In doing so, he identifies the emergence of new transnational movement networks against the injustice of current debt politics, which struggle for more social and democratic ways of organizing debt within and between societies.

The book is available as an e-book for free, here: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463720854/social-movements-and-the-politics-of-debt

CPERN

Thursday 29 September 5.00 – 6.00 BST/ 6.00-7.00 CEST

The COVID-19 pandemic has only further magnified the already growing political-economic and societal power of platforms. This article delves into the different realities of platform workers by juxtaposing two cases: location-based Amazon warehouse workers and web-based Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. Informed by a historical materialist approach that accounts both for the contextual conditions and the agency of workers, this article asks: how does the organisation of workers (location-based vs. web-based) relate differently to their labour organisation and mobilisation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic?

The workshop focused on one of the articles from the Global Political Economy journal launch issue:

Labour realities at Amazon and COVID-19: obstacles and collective possibilities for its warehouse workers and MTurk workers

Article available here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gpe/1/1/article-p59.xml

Speaker and article author: Dr Sarrah Kassem is employed as a research associate and lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Tübingen, Germany after completing her dissertation on workers’ alienation and agency in the platform economy. Her general teaching and research foci are working conditions in the platform economy, labour organisation and intersectional dimensions of the labour movement.

Discussants:

Phoebe V Moore is Professor of the futures of work at University of Essex, School of Business. Link to bio here.

Saori Shibata is Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on Japan’s political economy, including the changing nature of work, the digital economy and how Japan’s model of capitalism is transforming, with recent publications in New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, British Journal of Political Science, and Contesting Precarity in Japan: The Rise of Nonregular Workers and the New Policy Dissensus (Cornell University Press).