We live in dystopian times. The crisis of global capitalism is revealing itself in the most uncompromising fashion. Quantitative easing – the one ‘solution’ to the last crisis – has only re-inflated the global financial bubble, and created the prospect for the next impending crisis to be greater than witnessed heretofore. Government bonds across the industrialized world are either approaching, or already at, negative interest rates. Financial investors, aware of the next big recession, are betting against long term economic growth, for up to the next thirty years. Something is clearly amiss!

SEE THE FULL WRITE-UP OF OUR STREAM OF PANELS, WHICH TOOK PLACE IN MANCHESTER 2019, ON THE OPEN DEMOCRACY WEBSITE HERE

The next Critical European Studies Workshop, organised by the Critical Political Economy Research Network, will take place on 10-11 May 2019 in Lviv, Ukraine.

Details below, and on the Critical European Studies Workshop website:

CES Workshop 2019
Lviv, Ukraine
10-11 May 2019

Organising team: Christakis Georgiou, Daniel Keil, Aliona Lyasheva, Ana Podvršič, Yuliya Yurchenko

Synopsis: The frontiers and the state of the European – quo vadis?

Fifteen years since EU’s biggest enlargement being celebrated as a movement towards unification of European countries under the same vision for the future we see the region falling to the right wing rhetoric amidst the talks of disintegration. Increasing economic unevenness, Brexit, revision of the free movement of labour while deeper economic integration inside the EU and of the Union with its “outside” e.g. the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas, complex role in the refugee crisis, are seemingly contradictory; in many cases contrary to the founding principles and declared mission. Escalating geopolitical confrontations along Europe’s geographic boundary pose questions about the state of the region, its future and its self-appointed – yet often reluctant to take responsibility – hegemon, the EU. The armed conflict and economic crises in Ukraine, Transnistria, Abkhasia – unresolved; the climate change action despite the new elaborate frameworks – toothless; labour mobility is riddled with problems; human rights framework – impotent when applied to non-EU citizens; ‘wealth through growth’ is accumulated by translational capital while subsidized by the taxpayer, unwaged labour and increasingly low waged labour, backed by sweatshops, refugee labour camps and like conditions of migrant labour in global supply chains; responsibility for the unresolved economic recession – shouldered by the region’s most vulnerable. In this workshop we will discuss a number of those burning questions focusing on understanding the causes of the existing problems, assessing their frontiers and the frontier of struggles, the ongoing and the ones to come.

The workshop is open to all scholars and activists interested in critical perspectives on European issues, and is held free of charge.

Programme:

May 10

12:00-13:00 Round of Introductions

13:00-15:00 Session 1:  What is Europe beyond EU-N? Europe and beyond, geopolitics and epistemology

Core text: Stathis Kouvelakis: Borderland. New Left Review 110, March-April 2018.

Commentators: Angela Wigger, Niko Huke, Joachim Becker, Nataliya Rumyantseva, Ivo Georgiev (RLS), Aliona Liasheva

15:00-15:30 Refreshments break

15:30-17:30  Session 2: Fascicisation and crisis of ‘cosmopolitanism’

Core text:  Joachim Becker and Koen Smet, The Socio-Economic Programmes and Praxis of the Nationalist Right in the EU: the Core-Periphery Divide, Paper for the 24th Annual Conference on Alternative Economic Policy in Europe “10 Years into the crisis –What prospects for a popular political economy in Europe?”, Helsinki , 27-29 September 2018

Commentators: Volodymyr Ishchenko, Vika Mulyavka, Owen Worth, Ruth Cain, Yuliya Yurchenko, Daniel Keil

17:30-18:00 Refreshments break

18:00-19:30 Roundtable: left politics and activism in Ukraine

Speakers: Social Movement reps, women, human rights  and LBTQI activists, Ukrainian Christian Youth, trade union activists in Ukraine, Ecological Platform (local Lviv left/anarchist group)

20:00 Dinner 

May 11

10:00-12.00 Session 3: The crisis of work: we work more, we earn less, we pray for robots?

Core text: Moore, P. V. (2018). Tracking Affective Labour for Agility in the Quantified Workplace. Body & Society, 24(3), 39–67.

Commentators: Gunjan Sondhi, Oksana Dutchak, David Bailey, Nina Potarskaya, Artem Tidva, Christakis Georgiou

12.00-12.15 Break

12.15-14.15 Session 4: European division of labour and growth regimes

Core text: Angela Wigger (2019) The new EU industrial policy: authoritarian neoliberal structural adjustment and the case for alternatives, Globalizations, 16:3, 353-369

Commentators: Johannes Jaeger, Claude Serfati, Phoebe Moore, Denis Pilash, Julia Eder, Artem Tidva

14.15-15.30 Break

15.30-17.30 Session 5: Towards the ecological catastrophe or an opportunity to change the course? Rebalancing labour, state, and capital in climate politics

Core text: Joel Wainwright & Geoff Mann (2015), Climate Leviathan, Antipode, 45 (1), 1-22.

Commentators: Judith Dellheim, Richard Lane, Christina Plank, a representative from the EcoPlatform (Lviv)

17.30-18.00 Closing

Call for Papers – deadline extended to 15 Feb 2019

The next Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) event will be the CPERN (RN06) stream at the European Sociological Association Conference 2019.

(Digital) capitalism, trade wars and bubble economies: Reclaiming critical political economy in dystopian times (RN06)

14th European Sociological Association (ESA) Conference, 20-23 August 2019, Manchester, UK.

Current times appear dystopian. The rise of the populist right and neo-fascist movements and parties seems to overshadow the prospect for progressive alternatives. The aftermath of the global economic crisis has brought with it prolonged neoliberal restructuring, authoritarianism and heightened inequality. Trade wars, nationalism and closed borders seem to generate more hope than visions of global solidarity. Natural resources continue to be exhausted and climate change proceeds unabated. Quantitative easing – the one ‘solution’ to the last crisis – has only re-inflated the global financial bubble, and created the prospect for the next impending crisis to be greater than witnessed heretofore. All this at a time when digital technologies should be offering a major advance in human capacity; but instead seem only to result in fear of a world without employment.

These dystopian times therefore demand a critical political economy that at once diagnoses the crises that we face, delineates the social structures which have produced them, but also points towards alternatives that are grounded in a utopian vision for making a better world possible.

We invite scholars and activists from the broad spectrum of critical political economy, including scholars with Marxist, feminist, ecologist, postcolonial, labour- and social-movement perspectives, as well as scholars with critical approaches to finance, trade and investment; to reclaim the field of critical political economy, and to advance a form of knowledge that can contribute towards the politicisation and acceleration of social struggles, and transformative praxis.

We especially (but not exclusively) invite abstracts on the following topics:

• Finance, debt, bubbles, and critical theories of money
• Theorising critical political economy: Beyond mainstream, heterodox and/or post-Keynesian economics?
• Rising trade protectionism: A welcome reversal of globalisation?
• Capitalist production and value chains in the digital age
• Authoritarian neoliberalism, coercion and the disciplining of labour
• The role of trade unions, social movements and new left political parties/platforms
• Anarchism, feminism, new materialism and Marxism – building alternatives from horizontalist escape-routes?
• The materialities of ecological challenges: The political economy of migration
• Damaged lives, intensified precarisation and the rise of inequalities
• The question of social reproduction: commodification, cooperation, or mutual aid?

We are interested in all of the above plus more, and wish for the conference to cover a wide range of topics. As such, we seek contributions from scholars and activists with an interest in political economy research, regardless of their disciplinary affiliation and whether they are in academia or not. We also hope to attract a diverse range of participants, from a variety of countries and backgrounds.

Notes for contributors

Deadline for submissions: extended to 15 February 2019

Abstracts should not exceed 275 words. Abstracts must be submitted online to the submission platform, see below. Abstracts sent by email cannot be accepted. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed and selected for presentation by the Research Network; the letter of notification will be sent by the conference software system in March 2019.

Abstract submission deadline: extended to 15 February 2019. Conference website and abstract submission platform:  https://www.europeansociology.org/abstract-submission-now-open

Make sure you submit to the correct stream: RN06.

If you have any questions regarding this Call, or the conference in general, feel free to contact a.wigger@fm.ru.nl or d.j.bailey@bham.ac.uk.

Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) 2018 Midterm Workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS – CLOSED

“Gender, Race, Class and Ecology in and through Critical Political Economy”

1-2 June 2018, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

hosted by the IHC – Instituto de História Contemporânea, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Capitalism cannot be explained by class alone. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, alongside the reinvigoration of far right groups, the global women’s strike in Spring, the vast number of public and political figures guilty of sexual harassment, and environmental disasters such as devastating wildfires, floods and hurricanes, we need a critical political economy that can take account of these interconnected problems and pressures. The upcoming CPERN midterm workshop seeks to reaffirm the importance of class in relation to gender, race, ecology and migration. We are interested in how gender, race, class and questions of ecology intersect, and resulting overlapping oppressions, material inequalities, power relations and social struggles. This includes postcolonial and Marxist feminist approaches to political economy and the personal and ‘embodied’ aspects of political processes. Overall, we welcome contributions on a range of topics that explicitly link gender, sex, race and/or class to key themes and pressing issues in political economy, including (but certainly not limited to) the following:

• Feminist political economy, labour, social reproduction and race: In recent years we saw impressive interventions by Marxist feminists such as Silvia Federici, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Susan Ferguson. We invite contributions on the future of work; invisible, informal and unwaged (domestic) labour; labour, health and safety in logistics and retail industries; the role of migration and race; digitalisation and Gig Economy, precarity; and social reproduction in relation to austerity, neoliberalism or finance-led accumulation.
• Disruptive politics: There is an ongoing debate over the relationship between social movements/labour studies and critical political economy. We invite contributions that target the role of the state and trade unions in social partnerships and social movement unionism, and that explore (possibilities for) new solidarities and dual power structures.
• Sex, sexuality and political economy: Sexuality, sex work, sexual violence, male and female pleasure, menstruation, fertility and resulting social power relations often remain understudied in critical political economy. We invite contributions that address these issues and more.
• The political economy of ecological conflicts: We invite contributions that link ecological struggles, environmental degradation, climate change, natural disasters, the limits of fossil fuel to mass migration, inequalities and the future of capitalism.
• Finance, debt and the state: Ten years after the financial bubble burst, the financial sector is back with double-digit windfall profits, while global debt-levels are now far above that of 2008. We welcome contributions that address (regulatory) developments in the financial sphere, including debt creation, the growth and/or impact of debt, and resistance to debt.
• Power relations in academia: We invite contributions that address the various ways in which academia, higher education and teaching spaces each contribute to the reproduction of inequalities based on gender, race, class and other hierarchies; and ways in which these can be resisted.

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 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.

There is no fee for attending the workshop. The conference language will be English.

Abstracts of around 250 words should be submitted to cpern@criticalpoliticaleconomy.net by 1 February 2018.

We hope that you will find this Call interesting – please also share with colleagues and students who might not yet be part of the CPERN community!

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding this Call, or the conference in general.

Many thanks,

The CPERN Board

Caroline Metz, Anne Engelhardt, Phoebe Moore, David Bailey and Angela Wigger

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

This is the fourth edition of a successful series of workshops put together by European scholars, students and activists with the support of CPERN, the Arbeitskreis kritische Europaforschung (AkE/AkG) and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

This year the CES workshop continues to challenge inconsistencies and blind spots that permeate European Studies and push the boundaries of the critical in the analyses of the area’s problematic. The themes discussed will include the political crisis of the EU and authoritarian modes of politics, the uprise of the new right, questions of climate, and problems of resistance and strategy in production and reproduction as well as in politics and on the streets.

The workshop provides a forum for scholars and activists to meet and discuss critical theoretical and empirical perspectives on the configuration of European capitalism, the EU and political resistance. Previous editions were held at the University of Greenwich in London 2017,at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (2015), and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2014).

In order to foster a constructive debate the workshop will avoid the ‘usual’ conference structure with individual paper presentations and foregrounds collective discussions instead. We will proceed on the basis of thematic block sessions, with each tabling a core text that all participants will have read beforehand. Each of the sessions in the workshop starts with a brief introduction, and 6 participants (to be announced) discussing and enhancing the perspectives developed in that session’s core text from the angle of their own research/activism. This is followed by a mumble where all participants share their ideas in small groups, after which the floor is opened for a plenary discussion.

Confirmed Discussants include Sonja Buckel, Daniela Caterina, Ian Bruff, Daniel Mullis, Carina Book, Manuela Boatca, Sigfrido Ramirez, Tamas Gerocs, Stefanie Hürtgen, Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, Andreas Bieler, Nikolai Huke, Thomas Sablowski, Yuliya Yurchenko, Agnes Gagyi, Daniel Keil, Tibor Meszmann, Theodorus Rakopoulos and more to be announced soon.

The workshop is open to all scholars and activists interested in critical perspectives on European issues. It is free of charge but registration is required. See the full programme below.

  Continue reading →