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

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