Thursday 26 May 

5pm (BST)/6pm (CEST)

Register here:  https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArcO6qrjkuH9Ea4UQK9S6BTuujpp0RZTmw 

speakers:Rodrigo Nunes (Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro)

David J. Bailey (University of Birmingham)

Melany Cruz (University of Leicester)

Rodrigo Nunes will present some of the key themes of his recently published book,Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021), which represents a major intervention in the ongoing question of political organisation facing the left. 

This will be followed by reflections from David Bailey and Melany Cruz. 

Followed by an open discussion chaired by Phoebe Moore.

We are very pleased to have such excellent speakers join us.

Rodrigo Nunes is professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is the author of Organisation of the Organisationless. Collective Action After Networks (Mute, 2014) and Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021). His writing has appeared in publications such as Les Temps Modernes, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Public Books, Viewpoint, as well as in media outlets like The Guardian and Jacobin. As an organiser and popular educator, he has been involved in several initiatives in Brazil and in Europe, such as the first editions of the World Social Forum and the Justice for Cleaners campaign.

David Bailey is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, and currently coordinator of the Critical Political Economy Research Network. He is a co-author of Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting (the Critical Political Economy of) Neoliberal Europe, published in the Routledge/RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, and has recently published peer-reviewed articles in Capital and Class, Globalizations, and the British Journal of Political Science.

Melany Cruz is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on theories of violence and nonviolence, with a particular interest in resistance movements, feminism, and progressive politics in Latin America. She has published a series of articles on Chile’s social uprising and the newly elected progressive government in Tribune Magazine.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Thursday 28 April, 5pm BST, 6pm CEST, 7pm EEST

speakers:

Aliona Liasheva (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv)

Marko Bojcun, Ukrainian socialist and author of The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897-1918.

Yuliya Yurchenko (University of Greenwich)

This event was dedicated to a discussion of the complexities of the pretexts, narratives, critical political economy and geopolitics of the war in Ukraine that is now in its ninth year. The discussion is organised around a reading of three different texts by three authors/Ukraine researchers with different areas of expertise. This discussion will be as political as it is scholarly (as always, but more so this time for obvious reasons).

The workshop aims to challenge conventional understandings and discourse, and to develop a deeper understanding of Ukraine’s political economy, its statehood and nationhood, strengths and weaknesses, socio-economic and societal ills. In doing so, the workshop will seek to draw materially-rooted conclusions that challenge the epistemological, ontological, and methodological weaknesses of conventional political economy, international relations, and political science approaches to understanding the world, and to do so outside Eurocentrism and its equally limiting critique.

The workshop will open with an outline of the major challenges facing Ukraine at the moment and the state of the war to date, followed by brief interventions from the authors before opening up for discussion.

Readings

Alona Liasheva – Without shelter: housing policy in wartime

Marko Bojcun – On the Current State of Negotiations, April 2022

Yuliya Yurchenko – Fighting for Ukrainian Self-Determination

Further readings/links:

https://commons.com.ua/en/zapiski-zi-lvova/

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/03/ukrainian-working-class-formation-ussr-nato-war-national-identity

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/why-is-war-in-eastern-ukraine-still-going-on/

https://www.openpetition.eu/petition/online/people-around-the-world-demand-imf-to-cancel-ukraines-unjust-debt?confirm=c48e28e7f89562da89bcde11d35c9f25

https://spectrejournal.com/fighting-for-ukrainian-self-determination/

A critical political economy of health movements

Thursday 24 February 

5pm (GMT)/6pm (CET)

Mònica Clua-Losada (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) 

Olatz Ribera-Almandoz (CIDOB: Barcelona Centre for International Affairs)

Mary Naughton (University College Dublin)

Mònica Clua-Losada and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz will discuss their recent paper, ‘Health movements in the age of austerity: rescaling resistance in Spain and the United Kingdom‘.

The paper analyses the rescaling strategies implemented in public health services in Spain and the UK during the current economic crisis, and contributes to the understanding of the scalar dynamics and strategies of two social struggles against the privatisation of hospitals and health centres in these two contexts: Marea Blanca (White Tide) in Madrid and Keep Our NHS Public in Greater Manchester. It argues that social movements are more successful when they exploit scale shifts to transform institutions into centres of resistance.

This will be followed by reflections from Mary Naughton on the critical political economy of health care and resistance, and beyond, that the paper raises. 

Followed by an open discussion.

We are very pleased to have such excellent speakers join us.

Monica Clua-Losada is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley. Her research focuses on Critical Political Economy (CPE) and the role of subaltern groups, with a focus on labour in the context of authoritarian neoliberalism. As well as being an earlier convenor of the the CPERN board and currently co-editor-in-chief of the new journal, Global Political Economy.

Olatz Ribera-Almandoz is a Associate Researcher at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs) in the area of migration. She is also a member of the Johns Hopkins University – Universitat Pompeu Fabra Public Policy Center. Her research focuses on the interactions between social agents and public institutions in the context of multilevel states, with a special focus on migration and asylum policies and the (new) demands of social justice, welfare and housing. She recently completed a PhD in Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona).

Mary Naughton is based at UCD, where she works with the ERC project: Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime. She recently published, ‘Mobilising societal power: Understanding public support for nursing strikes‘, in the Industrial Relations Journal.

We look forward to seeing you there!

For the January 2022 CPERN monthly workshop we were joined by Bhabani Shankar Nayak who is a political economist at the University for the Creative Arts, UK, and whose research interests include political economy, South Asia, the market, microfinance, faith and the Hindu religion and capitalism. His recent book, Hindu Fundamentalism and the Spirit of Global Capitalism in India, focused on the relationship between the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and mining-led capitalism while evaluating the impact on the new economic reforms on tribals and their social, cultural, and religious identities in Odisha. In the paper presented we considered Odisha from the perspective of microfinance and microcredit networks, as a framework for capitalist accumulation.

The paper was followed by a discussion led by CPERN board member, Yuliya Yurchenko. 

Fraternal Capitalism examines microfinance and microcredit networks led by local, regional NGOs, COs and Self-Help Groups in Odisha. The paper further explores the link between these networks and different regional, local, national and international agencies tapping the small savings of rural poor. It is organised and securitised by the Government of India and Odisha to create and facilitate a fraternal framework for capitalist accumulation processes in rural Odisha. It shows the dynamic nature of global capitalism that engages with small savings of rural poor.

Critical Political Economy early career scholar writing workshop

Thursday 21 July 2022
University of Limerick

On the day before 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.

This is the second 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 and 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 28 February 2022.

CANCELLED DUE TO STRIKE ACTION

Save the date: 24th March 17.00 (GMT) 18.00 (GMT)

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? 

Discussant: Dr Stephan Görland 

The next CPERN workshop (every final Thursday of the month)

Thursday, 25 November 5pm (GMT)/6pm (Central European Time)

speakers: 

Kirstin Munro, University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley.

Jule Goikoetxea, University of the Basque Country

Register here: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZclf-ioqTwtHNC7Vyt-9ns8jqwGV2rK6EhC 

For this session, we are focusing on developments in Social Reproduction Theory. 

The discussion will begin with a consideration of the recent paper by Kirstin Munro in Science and Society: “Social Reproduction Theory,” Social Reproduction, and Household Production”   https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2019.83.4.451
This will be followed by reflections from Jule Goikoetxea on issues for social reproduction theory, and beyond, that the paper raises. 

Followed by an open discussion.

We are very pleased to have such excellent speakers join us.

Kirstin Munro is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at The University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley and  much of her recent work has explored the question of social reproduction theory, as well as questions relating to production, unproductive workers, the household, and the Marxist critique of political economy.

Jule Goikoetxea is professor of political theory at the University of the Basque Country, as well as being a member of the International Gender Studies Centre at Oxford University. Her work includes a focus on political theory, state theory, political philosophy, feminist theory and feminist philosophy.

We look forward to seeing you there!