The next CPERN Mid-term workshop will take place in Helsinki, from 30 July to 01 August 2025
Abstract submission for papers and panels is now open! Please submit your abstracts (max. 250 words) to cpernRN06@gmail.com
Deadline: 21 March
Call for Papers: Critical political economy and the time of monsters: understanding the present, imagining the future
The polycrisis of capitalism proliferates globally in a tragic yet unsurprising manner. As capitalism continues to foster exploitation, extractivism, alienation, and conflict, it depletes its own material foundations while being wrapped in consumerism and the promise of never-ending growth.
This perceived normality is presented as a way of life that needs to be protected by weapons and armies, if need be. Competing actors surveil their subjects under the banner of security and well-being concerns, and train us to wilfully document and report our lives on social media and personal devices. Places and spaces where autonomy and privacy can be exercised are increasingly shrinking. Places and spaces where capital is produced and reproduced are increasingly transformed and destroyed by the direct effects of capitalism itself – extreme climate events, diseases, “market failures”, mass migration, and armed conflicts. With that shrinkage, perpetual war and states of exception are normalised as a means of politics, however unequally. While nuclear arsenals are being repleted and militarisation is advancing for some, the right to self-defence is denied to others. In the words of Antonio Gramsci: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’
Across the globe there are rising waves of protest and armed conflict, yet solutions to systemic causes of hunger, poverty, inequality, debt, and global heating are limited. The UN system and the, however imperfect, “international rule-based order” are under threat of disintegration. Russia preys on Ukraine, Israel does the same to Palestine (and more recently Syria), and the EU and US are losing international credibility as genuine intermediaries. At the same time, the Trump presidency spells uncertainty for an already decaying US hegemony, while China’s significance is growing if rapidly changing. As conflicts, and economic, humanitarian, and environmental disasters multiply, the far right is on a global march while the left is in crisis.
Critical scholarship, visions of progressive politics, and alternatives to capitalist production and reproduction are sorely needed. In this call we invite critical political economy papers that go beyond methodological nationalism, old theories of imperialism and colonialism, and the imaginary and often instrumentalized neutrality of academia/academics and knowledge, and that embrace intersectionality without omitting the dimensions of social class or the natural world.
We invite you to join us in scholarly discussions in Helsinki in July 2025.
We especially (but not exclusively) invite abstracts on:
- The role of academia and academics in the time of monsters
- World order – rules, economy, uni-/multipolarity
- Capital, labour, and nature relations
- Climate crisis, ecocide and extractivism
- Political economy of knowledge production
- Methods and methodologies of reification and resistance
- Grand theories: bias goggles or toolboxes?
- Research ethics, financial liability, and ethics of purpose
- The rise of the right and the meaning and forms of fascism today
- The state of left politics and academia
- Social movements and labour struggles
- Feminisms and social reproduction
- Solidarity practices under and beyond capitalism
- Degrowth, post-capitalism and eco-socialism
- Culture wars
- Racial capitalism and othering
- Normalisation of illegal wars and military industrial complex
- International legal and economic order
- Supply and value chains
- Food security, food sovereignty and agroecology
- (Global) public health
- Austerity and de-development
- Algorithmic management, quantification, surveillance
Please submit your abstracts (max. 250 words) to cpernRN06@gmail.com
Deadline: 21 March
We hope to see you in Helsinki!
Best wishes from the CPERN Board (Yuliya Yurchenko, Bernd Bonfert, Gemma Gasseau, Madelaine Moore, Adriano Cozzolino)
Critical Political Economy Research Network (RN06) 