RN06 - Critical Political Economy

RN06 Critical Political Economy consists of a community of critical political economy scholars and activists, departing from the understanding that without the hypothesis that a different world is possible, there can be no politics.

RN06 Critical Political Economy (CPERN) seeks to reassert the centrality of critical political economy perspectives, and to promote and facilitate research aimed at understanding recent transformations of capitalism and capitalist societies.

CPERN was established in 2005 and provides a crucial hub for interdisciplinary exchange between scholars and activists from Europe and beyond, straddling the disciplines of political economy, sociology, politics, economics, but is also reaching out to geography, social policy and law.

CPERN is committed to facilitating cutting-edge emancipatory social science: we seek not only to critique existing structures of social inequality, be it alongside class, gender- and race-based forms of oppression, but also to formulate visions for alternative futures, and contribute actively to the politicization and the resilience of social struggles within and beyond the academe. The unification of theory and practice and acts of solidarity take centre stage. We believe that solidarity entails a strong transformative dimension: acts of solidarity do not necessarily involve agents that are alike, nor do they need to result in political imaginaries and trajectories that are devoid of conflict. To the contrary, what Gramsci referred to as a ‘collective intellectual’ is by definition composed of a plurality of forms of the philosophy of praxis. Multiple imaginary futures and horizons of common possibility may co-exist, coincide or even contradict themselves.

CPERN is a heterodox network in terms of theoretical orientation and in terms of its composition: activists, in addition to scholars and scholar activists, are always welcome to join workshops and conferences organised by CPERN. CPERN consists of a lively community of scholars and activists in Europe and beyond and currently counts nearly 2.500 Facebook members, 1000 followers on Twitter and 1.300 subscribers to its mailing list. CPERN members can use the various social media channels for scholarly exchanges, announcing new articles and books, as well as calls for papers, job openings, PhD positions or research funding opportunities. The CPERN board seeks to keep the mailing list and Facebook postings as non-intrusive as possible by ensuring that social media is exclusively used for and by CPERN members, rather than commercial publishers or conference organisers.

CPERN thrives through its active and inspiring community of scholars and activists, collaborations with other organisations and welcomes future cooperation with other ESA Research Networks.You can find more about our activities on our website. Feel free to subscribe to our mailing list, or our Facebook page, or follow us on Twitter.

Covid Capitalism: advancing critical political economy, accelerating progressive alternatives

31 August – 3 September 2021

The next Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) event will be the CPERN (RN06) stream at the European Sociological Association Conference 2021.

Information

Covid Capitalism: advancing critical political economy, accelerating progressive alternatives (RN06)

European Sociological Association (ESA) Conference in Barcelona, 31 August – 3 September 2021, Barcelona.

The contradictory and destructive tendencies of capitalism have landed the world in the Covid pandemic and saddled us with the worst recession in living memory. More than ever, we need a critical political economy that can ask questions of, and provide answers to, global capitalism’s doomed project, while addressing the failure of conventional social sciences to grasp the complexity of our global crises.

This catastrophic fiasco of productivist economic systems is set against (and reinforces) the backdrop of our broken planetary metabolism - this is Covid capitalism.

These disasters are now evident to all. They already invoke political, social and economic reactions – albeit in sometimes contradictory forms. From proposals for a Green New Deal to Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s Strike.

It is in this historic opportunity that we seek a critical political economy to accelerate progressive movements and contribute to an Eco socialist and sustainable world that negates our unequal racialized, sexed, and gendered present.

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

Theorising Covid capitalism
Capitalism and the climate crises
Are we there yet? The Greatest Recession to come?
Understanding the financial rescue(s) and the lack thereof
Alternative epistemologies for alternative political economies
Dissent and resistance under Covid Capitalism
Gender, sex, care, and the household during and after “the lockdown”
Isolation, psychological health crisis, cities/slums
Transforming production and globalised exploitation
Beyond a Global South and North

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: 15 February 2021

The abstract submission platform will open by the end of the year 2020. Details here.

If you have any questions regarding this Call, or the conference in general, feel free to contact d.j.bailey[at] bham.ac.uk or yy04[at] gre.ac.uk

CPERN’s main activities consist of facilitating scholarly and activist exchanges at conferences. Over the past 13 years, CPERN has organised numerous panels and semi-plenaries at the biennial ESA conferences, where both the number of panels and participants has been steadily increasing over time. In addition, CPERN has run well-established biennial workshops, which hitherto have been held in Amsterdam (2006), Oxford (2008), Frankfurt (2011), Barcelona (2012), Vienna (2014), Ljubljana (2016), Lisbon (2018) and Zoom (2020).

CPERN mid-term workshops are never held twice in the same country. Preferably the workshops include collaborations with scholars and institutes from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Southern Europe, in order to branch out to scholars in the periphery who tend to be more isolated and have less financial means to attend workshops and conferences in Europe’s core. The 2018 workshop, entitled “Gender, Race, Class and Ecology in and through Critical Political Economy”, will be held from 1 to 2 June in Lisbon, Portugal, hosted by the Instituto de História Contemporânea (IHC) at the Universidad Nova de Lisboa. The workshops usually last two full days, and attract around 80 scholars and activists. Whereas in the past, all participants used to attend all the panels and in this way could profit from on an ongoing and coherent discussion, due to the growing popularity of the mid-term workshops, parallel sessions had to be introduced. In order to avoid too much of a conference-style setting, and to maintain the intimacy that can be gained from a workshop format, CPERN also organises a joint dinner to foster a CPERN community spirit and, whenever possible also a public event where CPERN scholars and activists meet with representatives from local movements and groups to discuss pressing issues and enable the unification of theory and practice that takes centre-stage in critical research.

The activities of CPERN also go far beyond the organisational setting of the ESA. For instance, we launched the annual Critical European Studies (CES) Workshops series in 2014. The CES seeks to challenge inconsistencies and blind spots that permeate the field of European Studies, and push the boundaries of the ‘critical’ in theoretical and empirical perspectives on the configuration of European capitalism, the European Union and political resistance. The CES also provides a forum for scholars and activists, and is unique insofar as it avoids the 'usual' conference structure with individual paper presentations. The format is as follows: there are thematic block sessions which each table a core text that all participants will have read beforehand. After a brief introduction, about six participants discuss the tabled paper from the angle of their own research/activism, followed by a ‘mumble’ – a technique borrowed from the Occupy Movement where all participants share their ideas in small groups. After the mumble the floor is opened for a plenary discussion and collective knowledge building. The CES Workshops hitherto have taken place in Amsterdam (2014), Barcelona (2015), London (2016), Frankfurt (2017), while the 2018 CES Workshop will be held in May in Budapest. The CES Workshops have in the meantime culminated in a collaborative effort by multiple organisations. In addition to different local organisers the CES involves the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Berlin, Transform! Europe, the German Arbeitskreis für kritische Europaforschung (AkE), which forms part of the German Assoziation für kritische Gesellschaftsforschung (AkG) and the International Political Economy Group (IPEG) of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

In 2017 CPERN co-organised the Annual Conference in Political Economy together with the International Initiative for Political Economy (IIPPE) and the Berlin Institute for International Political Economy (IPE) in Berlin.

In 2018, CPERN held its mid-term workshop in Lisbon - details here.

In 2019, we coordinated a stream of panels as part of the European Sociological Association conference in Manchester, with a write-up here.

Contribution by RN06 in The European Sociologist, issue 41, 2018

RN06 Biennial Report for 2017-2019
RN06 Biennial Report for 2015-2017