Organizers: Kathryn Ibata-Arens, Etienne Nouguez

The Covid19 pandemic disrupted the global status quo, creating an opening for transformative approaches to improving human health and the health of communities, healthcare provision, governance over the use and pricing of drugs and medicines, and medical innovations in biotechnology. For example, open innovation systems and sharing in the commons have introduced healing medicines and medical innovations (e.g. current national and institutional boundary-spanning Covid19 vaccine collaborations). The pandemic has however, exacerbated inequality in who gets access to medical care and medicines, and at what price.

In the global race to launch a Covid19 vaccine, millions of people suffering from other equally devastating (non-communicable epidemics of) chronic conditions and acute illness have been neglected. We have yet to reckon with this untold impact on human health. Further, market competition has in part led to human subjects abuses in developing countries in the race to develop new drugs (including Covid19 treatments and vaccines), and a decline in the discovery of radical new innovations in medicines for poor populations. The pandemic also revealed supply shortages in many markets and the struggles between states to get access to medicines and medical devices (masks, tests, ventilation devices…), revealing the inequalities between and within countries in access to health.

Finally, the numerous uncertainties and controversies about the efficacy of some treatments (such as hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, yet-to-come vaccines…) of Covid-19 and the value of peer-reviewed publications or expert regulation have revealed the scientific but also political and social dimensions of medicines valuation, opening new fields of investigation for scholars working on valuation, expertise and regulatory capture.

This mini-conference aims to convene a group of related panels around issues in global health and medicines, to facilitate useful critical discussion and reflection on participants’ works-in-progress. Driving questions include:

• What theoretical advances are being made in understanding causal mechanisms in improving, or undermining human health and community health, for example, through state policy and firm and organizational strategy? What new frameworks and methods are being developed to identify key actors and explain actions (e.g. improving, or undermining health, broadly defined)?
• What is the evolving role of the state, healthcare systems and professions, and other actors (multilateral bodies, firms, non-profit organizations) in medical and medicine provision and innovation? Are we seeing a shift from traditional dominant blocks (North America and Europe) to new actors (Asia and the Global South)? Likewise, how have states and healthcare organizations been effective (or ineffective, indifferent) in the valuation and pricing of medicines (fair, equitable, and affordable access to life saving medicines)?
• What should be the responsibility, if any, of the global intellectual property rights regime as arbitrated by such powerful organizations as the World Trade Organization and global corporations in monitoring access and benefit sharing of profits resulting from research and development into new drugs and medicines?
• What are the roles for regulation and institutionalization of markets for such boundary-products between medicine and health food as probiotics, herbals, so-called nutraceuticals, and other dietary supplements – in ensuring the health and safety of consumers and patients?
• In what way is current research and policy aiming for “inclusive” innovation (e.g. in healthcare provision, new drug discovery) focused on distributive aspects versus stakeholder inclusion, or both (e.g. under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs))? What is the relative role for (social) entrepreneurs, large firms, and other actors?

Our mini-conference encourages submissions of papers exploring emerging frameworks and theories, as well as empirically rich original data from the developed and developing world and at various levels of analysis (e.g. local community, firm, state, multilateral institution). Scholars at all levels are welcome. In the spirit of innovation and creativity, the panels will have an interactive workshop format around discussant feedback and moderated audience participation.

Organizers: Zophia Edwards, Julian Go

This mini-conference, building upon last year’s mini-conference of the same name, welcomes papers investigating the legacies of colonialism, racism and slavery upon capitalist expansion and global development. While critical theories and studies of development have existed for decades, starting with Dependency/World-Systems theories and continuing through the “postdevelopment” approaches – manifested in the work of Escobar (1984) and Ferguson (1990) among others – newer “decolonial”, “postcolonial” and “Southern” approaches have emerged in their wake. These paradigms have surfaced in a variety of fields and subfields, including comparative-historical sociology, social theory, political theory and comparative politics. Together they make explicit the Eurocentric, imperial/colonial and often racialized bases of Northern social science and seek critical alternatives, either by reconstructing historical narratives as “entangled” and “connected” or by discovering and critically deploying the knowledge, concepts and theories of postcolonial/Southern thinkers and social movements.

The miniconference will take stock of these recent critical turns and their implications for the study of development. Compared to earlier critical approaches, what if any is the added value of these approaches for understanding social, political and economic development? What are the limits? What theories, concepts and research follow from the recognition of the decolonial/postcolonial critique of knowledge? Revisiting these questions has become particularly urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated racial inequalities and called into question current hegemonic models of “development.” Theoretical, programmatic, or empirical papers are welcomed. Topics might include but are not restricted to:

• legacies of imperialism and colonialism upon development
• racial capitalism
• the colonial gaze and the imperial episteme in development studies
• global academic inequality and epistemic inequality
• southern/subaltern knowledges, theories, and concepts
• decolonial developmental practices and knowledges in international organizations
• racialization and developmental projects
• Southern and subaltern resistance to Eurocentric development projects
• decolonial methods of research
• ”imperial feedback” and the circulation of technologies and knowledges
• global health, COVID and postcolonial theory

Organizers: Muyang Chen, Yixian Sun, Matthias Thiemann, Jiajun Xu

Despite the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, our world has faced a tremendous financing gap—up to $2.5 trillion per year—to implement the Sustainable Development Goals. COVID-19 has further increased burdens of most countries in the Global South. As the pandemic unfolds, multilateral development banks and donor countries began to provide emergency funding around the world. In this time of crisis and the forthcoming recovery era, it is crucial to reconsider the role of development finance in supporting socio-economic development at the global, regional, national, and local levels. In fact, the system of global development cooperation has experienced significant changes since the United Nation’s Monterrey conference in 2002, as demonstrated by the rise of many new actors and funds such as China’s development finance institutions and their instruments to support the Belt and Road Initiative. Accordingly, we have seen a burgeoning literature investigating these changes and their implications. This mini-conference aims to further advance this research agenda while taking into account the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and the resultant economic and political environments.

We welcome contributions examining development finance and its impact through different theoretical and methodological lenses. We adopt a broad definition of ‘development finance’, which encompasses the mobilization of various types of resources—domestic and international, public and private—for development. While the mini-conference pays particular attention to the post-COVID era, it does not exclude research taking historical perspectives. Key questions include, but are not limited to:

• What is the impact of COVID-19 on development finance, including domestic, bilateral and multilateral finance? How does such impact vary across regions and countries?
• What are the responses of different development finance institutions to the current and past global crises? Can their responses strike a right balance between short-run recovery and long-run transformation in recipient/borrower countries?
• What are the roles of emerging development finance players in facilitating global development, and how do they reshape global governance of development cooperation?
• Given the urgent need to implement the Sustainable Development Goals, how should development finance providers prioritize goals at different stages of development so as to better tackle trade-offs between financing different goals?
• What are the challenges for public financiers in mobilizing private financing to ensure a just and green transition? How is the risk of over-insuring private finance regarding the necessary risk-taking for that transition? Can direct central bank refinancing be an effective solution?

Through an interdisciplinary conversation, we hope to build a global network of researchers studying changing dynamics of development finance and its impacts on socio-economics across the globe. We welcome contributions presenting robust empirical evidence on continuous and evolving challenges in development finance, but also encourage participants to take a forward-looking perspective in exploring solutions to addressing financing gaps at different levels. We support diversity and decolonization of knowledge: scholars from different backgrounds and at different career stages are invited to submit their work and we will give more opportunities to researchers based in or from the Global South.

Organizers: Kathleen Griesbach, Mateusz Halawa, Lisa Suckert, Marcin Serafin

This mini-conference takes up the empirical phenomenon and the theoretical concept of crisis, but investigates it through the vantage points of temporality and the capitalist time regime. We are interested in research that relates the economic causes and consequences of crises and similar disruptive events to concepts of time, speed, rhythms, durations, and time horizons.

We particularly invite contributions from the following four areas of interest, but we are open to other, related topics.

a) Disrupted time horizons

Crises are temporal ruptures: their unexpected emergence marks the difference between “before” and “after,” profoundly disturbing perceptions of continuity. How does capitalism, as an economic order oriented towards the future, cope with the disrupted time horizons of crisis? When do crises narrow the horizon down to surviving the present and when can crises become “critical junctures,” opening the future for new developments? How are future oriented economic practices like innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment affected by crises?

b) Desynchronized temporalities and the rhythms of crisis

Crises and similar ruptures, including revolutions, catastrophes, and epidemics, challenge established temporal orders. We invite contributions that analyze how crises exacerbate or mitigate the frictions between the temporalities of capitalism and those of social spheres, e.g. the state, politics, home, care work, sleep or religion. How do crises redistribute time budgets, forcing actors to wait or to speed up? How do they interfere with established timelines such as “just in time” production, working time arrangements, and business plans? Resolving crises may require an approach to time that differs from the dominant capitalist time regime. For instance, how does the short-term profit imperative of financialized capitalism conflict with the long-term horizons required to make sense of the climate crisis? How can we slow down when capitalism requires acceleration?

c) The temporal inequalities of crisis

We are looking for papers that examine profit and inequality in times of crisis from a temporal perspective. How do people differ in their ability to sustain periods of waiting, speeding up or buying back time?

When crises disrupt time horizons, rhythms, and regimes, some actors are able to leverage those disruptions, while many others lose out. For example, some digital and platform companies are benefitting from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, while others are having their economic futures immobilized and their livelihoods eliminated. What do these temporal processes look like, and what are their short- and long-term consequences for inequality at different scales?

d) Toward new time regimes

We are interested in contributions that explore how the disruption of existing time regimes gives way to new approaches to time. For example, have experiences of prior crises incentivized companies to prepare for the unexpected or to reconsider the role of economic slack? What devices, digital technologies, and social techniques are used to manage new temporal conflicts? Can crisis lead to an increase in temporal autonomy?

In situations of crisis, state  interventions are often geared toward stepping in and “bridging” the way to a more stable economic future. How do states enable actors to remain patient or incentivize them to speed up and become active? Can economic interventionism mitigate the tensions of capitalist time regimes?

Organizers: Moises Balestro, Antonio Botelho, Bruno Gandlgruber, Michelle Hsieh, Arie Krampf, Andrei Vernikov

Increasing uncertainty produced by the dual economic and health crisis set renewed political constraints on socio-economic policymaking. This mini-conference claims the need for an analytic framework that combines the growth model approach with economic nationalism. The purpose is to shed new light on the political and ideational components in the conflicts of distribution, class dynamics, and state-nation conflicts over economic and geopolitical preferences.  It builds upon Hirschman’s premise that ideas are the binding agents of economic development and that national visions encourage economic development. Such unprecedented developments call for a conceptual framework combining the growth model approach in comparative capitalism with a renewed economic nationalism discussion to make sense of capitalism’s reconfigurations.

It aims to identify the nexus and under what conditions economic nationalism reconfigures the possibilities and conditions the participants of social blocs and shapes the content and the form of the growth regime under existing national institutional arrangements. Economic nationalism re-orders the interests and recast the discourses of actors, creating seeds of institutional change. Thus, it enlarges the repertoire of our political understanding of varieties of capitalism.

Economic nationalism undergirds the societal legitimacy of economic development goals.  Social cohesion around the nation-state provides political stability. It galvanizes economic actors and civil society around a development strategy as in the techno-nationalism or strengthening the country’s geo-economic position. Differently from protectionism or statism in response to globalization, it influences national identities and nationalism as a developmental rationale on economic policy, institutions, and strategies (Helleiner 2002). It pulls the state and the nation together, alongside fuelling a pragmatic realism in economic disputes over national interests in global affairs (Pillar, 2013).

The growth model recasts the nation-state’s role.

As an extension of VoC, it purports to shift the analysis from the supply to the demand side and include the national capitalism coalitions. A growth regime is built and sustained by a social bloc, composed of a cross-class alliance held together by a dominant discourse (Baccaro 2019), which, in turn, sustains the institutional arrangement supporting a VoC.

By stressing the need to go beyond the black or white labels of statism or liberalization, the contributions should attempt to grasp the reconfiguration of contemporary capitalism in the complex and uncertain impact of the economic, political, environmental, and health crises on the politics and content of growth models. It thus invites papers on the topics:

• How national identities and nationalism can shape growth models?
• How does economic nationalism reconfigure social blocs alliances undergirding a growth model regime?
• What are the growth model responses to income inequality and green production competitiveness?
• Will economic nationalism responses to crises lead to a growth model convergence in capitalism?
• Can economic nationalism mobilize new actors into social blocs? Can these new social blocs break institutional stalemate arrangements and unleash economic growth and social development?
• How different Growth Models – consumption- and export-led – shapes state preferences in the global realm.
• How different growth models shape national identities and related conflicts.

Organizers: Stéphanie Barral, Patrick Bigger, Ritwick Ghosh, Ian Gray, Hanna Lierse, Mi Ah Schøyen

Before the global COVID-19 outbreak, climate change was emerging on the political agenda as perhaps the greatest contemporary global policy challenge. Addressing climate change and other environmental challenges will require restructuring economic systems, and the pandemic has demonstrated such opportunities – from restrictions on economic activities to massive economic rescue packages. Potentially, these may be designed in a way to address the twin eco-social challenges of the Anthropocene: Accelerate the shift away from environmentally destructive modes of production and consumption while simultaneously reducing human vulnerability from an increasingly hostile environment. This transition is known broadly under the heading of the “green economy”, a reference to the various ways economic and financial tools are used to advance environmental ends. Policy examples include carbon trading, payments for ecosystem services, financial products like green bonds, and public spending on infrastructure, resilience, and risk reduction. As green economic ideas gain momentum, it is worth pausing and taking note of what goes on under the name of green transitions, particularly implications for inequality and capitalism.

This mini-conference aims to advance an interdisciplinary dialogue to grapple with green economic transitions. While the environmental risks of climate change are well understood, there is still very little knowledge about the structural and institutional factors that shape governance trajectories towards net zero carbon and environmentally resilient economies. Conversely, it is little researched how green transitions affect societies at large as well as the social challenges and inequalities they might produce. In this mini-conference we welcome theoretical as well as empirical contributions from micro or macro level perspectives that study the green transition from four analytically distinct, but empirically overlapping angles:

First, we welcome comparative or single-case contributions that discuss the theoretical-normative dimension of green transitions. How do green economic solutions relate to ideas of justice, fairness as well as well-being and inequality? Are there limits or incompatibilities between environmental and equity goals? And how is the green transition legitimized?

Second, we encourage papers that examine the varieties of expert knowledge, such as accounting, metrification and modelling that have emerged as influential brokers in the effort to achieve “greener” economic outcomes. How do we situate the role these different forms of expertise play within these processes of transition?

Third, we invite papers analysing empirical patterns of the various theories of change. Questions include but are not limited to: Which policies are at the forefront of the transformation?  How can we explain institutional arrangements and practices of greening? Possible approaches might look into the role of various actors including partnerships between multilateral institutions, states and NGOs as well as different institutional configurations and pressures as triggers or obstacles of change.

Fourth, we invite contributions that shed light on patterns of societal perceptions and attitudes towards different aspects of climate change and policies of mitigation and adaptation. How can we, for instance, explain variation in preferences towards sustainable consumption patterns across cohorts or societal groups? From this perspective we are also interested in which societal groups are benefitting from the eco-social transformation and which ones are falling behind.

Organizers: Lotta Björklund Larsen, Anna-Riikka Kauppinen, Miranda Sheild Johansson

The corona pandemic is both a health and economic crisis, among other things, with the World Bank predicting a 5.2% contraction of global GDP in 2020. In response, fiscal rescue packages have been devised on local, national and international levels with the aim of mitigating the devastating socio-economic impacts. These rescue packages involve large and often radical new tax proposals, with the OECD recommending a ‘gloves off’ approach where all options should be explored (2020). Discussions around fiscal policies trigger both hopes and fears about alternative economic futures, fire up discussions about the rights and the capabilities of states to tax, and expose existing narratives about how fiscal flows shape the society and public at large. Furthermore, current and future fiscal packages capitalize on dependencies between the state, private sector, and taxpayer citizens, generating new kinds of divisions, inequalities and benefactors.We are in a moment where taxes are seen as a tool for managing the looming economic crisis, which raises questions about what taxes ‘do’, what they should do, and how.

This mini-conference aims to bring together participants from a wide range of disciplines, involving a broad spectrum of methodological approaches and diverse geographical locations, for the study of fiscal relations in the face of pandemics, and beyond. We invite papers that engage and expand on the following topics:

• The pandemic has exposed existing inequalities and entrenched them further, with vulnerable populations suffering disproportionate financial and health harms. This adds further urgency to policy conversations about fiscal fairness, in particular how taxes can be mobilized to tackle social inequality. Can social insurance packages, general welfare, or universal basic income do the job, or does this crisis bring new options to the table?
• The fiscal rescue packages trigger generational conversations about debt and moral discourses around deficit spending. How do questions of who should pay now and who will pay back, if ever, shape our fiscal debates and policies?
• What are the implications of fiscal rescue packages on gender? Women seem particularly affected by the pandemic due to the high percentage of female employment in hard-hit sectors such as hospitality, health care and personal care services. Concerns about the health for children and elderly in public institutions have increased the amount of care work at home, predominantly by women. Has taxation taken such changes into account? How can future fiscal policies be designed with greater attention to household labour?
• In order to fund its 750billion EUR rescue package, the EU has pushed forward with plans to become a tax collecting institution. Could ‘tax sovereignty’ move beyond the purview of the nation-state? What are the implications for the ethics of citizenship, societal obligations and a sense of belonging?
• To what extent do experiments in taxation sparked by Covid-19 create a critical conjuncture in the history of capitalist transformation and state-business relations, given the distinctive pathways and power dynamics of regulatory reforms and economic privatisation in different regional contexts?

Organizers: Jorge Atria, Jens Beckert, Felipe González López, Aldo Madariaga, Guadalupe Moreno

Contemporary capitalism is facing momentous transformations. Global scale processes like financialization, automatization and robotics, climate change, and rising inequalities are significantly altering the way capitalism functions, even spurring discussions about its eventual demise. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated these trends and reflections. Ultimately, the answers that societies will give to these formidable challenges in the next decades will significantly shape the future of the capitalist economy.

Imaginaries of capitalist transformation are both constructed and contested in public discourses. How are these transformations eroding deep-seated images of capitalist development? What images of the future are emerging as part of these interconnected transformations? We are interested in how these “politics of expectations” unfold. How do economic elites, entrepreneurs, civil society, political parties, experts or journalists disseminate their interpretation of the future? What economic, political, normative or institutional resources enable them to promote dystopic or utopic ideas and increase their capacity to shape ongoing transformative efforts?

This mini-conference invites contributions that analyze capitalism’s contemporary transformations and respective imaginaries from the vantage point of three core arenas affecting the future economy: the economic public sphere where expectations about economic processes are formed, economic policymaking where public interventions in the economy are decided, and the state as a key economic actor in modern economies.

1. The economic public sphere: What imaginaries of the future economy emerge in the public sphere? How do dystopic and/or utopic imaginaries of the future shape current interventions in the economic and political fields? How is public opinion reacting to the current transformations? What is the role of conventional vs digital media and new technologies in building and discussing these expectations? How are new economic “facts”, “truths” and “instruments” constructed, disputed, and disseminated?
2. Economic policy(making): We welcome contributions on a variety of economic policy topics, but particularly on macroeconomics and growth regimes, that is, how countries rebalance their growth strategies in an era of secular stagnation; environmental policy, or how countries face the potential trade-offs between economic growth and environmental protection; and skills formation and social protection in the face of automation and the future of work. What are today’s key economic policy debates in these realms? What actors and struggles are behind these? How do they shape future economic policy interventions? What types of resources do they mobilize to gain influence?
3. The State: Are there new ideas about the role of the State in the future? How are existing ideas about state consolidation and public debt changing? Are current debates about elites and taxation rebalancing fiscal commitments? What are the political and moral implications of this? How are bureaucracies adapting to the new challenges?

Organizers: Théo Bourgeron, Susi Geiger, Matthew Soener

Among the main threats to social order are the growing devastation of the environment, rising authoritarianism, and the COVID-19 pandemic. While capitalism has played a central role in generating these crises, these looming disasters entertain an ambiguous relationship with the accumulation process. They disturb “business as usual”, but they also generate new profit opportunities for capitalist actors (Klein 2007). This opens a new field of investigation for socio-economic research, as it becomes crucial to understand changes in the organisation of capitalism during times of disasters. The mini conference will address several interrelated themes that will help explore this issue; across all themes, we particularly invite diverse global perspectives:

1. Capital accumulation and authoritarianism in a world at risk of war. As inequalities have reached record-high levels, the recent period has seen a weakening of civil liberties, the rise of authoritarian governments in many democracies, and increased geopolitical tensions between governments. Scholars have highlighted how neoliberal accumulation regimes foster authoritarianism (Brown 2015), while others have shown how wars do not prevent profit accumulation (Harvey 2003; Banerjee 2005). What are the links between the current accumulation regimes and the rise of authoritarianism? How does capital accumulation perpetuate itself in an increasingly authoritarian world at risk of war?
2. Profits and markets in times of environmental disasters. Capitalocene is characterised by the simultaneous crises of mass extinction and climate change, directly resulting from the pursuit of capital accumulation (Moore 2015). Environmental dispossession also affects populations, strengthening already-existing social, gender, and racial inequalities. However, with the help of policymakers (and the “new climate regime”: Latour 2015), economic actors increasingly turn environmental crises into new markets (e.g. “green finance”). How do environmental crises and their social consequences transform markets and profit strategies? What are the consequences of these changes on societies and inequalities?
3. Reorganising markets and capital accumulation through global pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has consolidated existing trends toward monopolisation. Digital multinationals have seen revenues soar to the detriment of smaller firms, and pharmaceutical firms have enjoyed unprecedented access to the highest levels of national and international policy. How does the COVID-19 pandemic affect the hierarchies between economic actors and capital accumulation processes? How could policy actors, civil society and alternative economy actors stem the tide of monopolisation precipitated by the pandemic?
4. Stemming disaster capitalism. On a more hopeful note, what are the possibility that disasters open up for a transformation of accumulation regimes in the interest of the people? What (new) strategies of resistance against these accumulation regimes emerge? Among other issues we will consider the scope for academic activism (e.g. political ethnography: Juris and Khasnabish 2013) and study the renewal of resistance movements that people develop as a result of finding themselves “in a world of fire” (Malm 2021).

References upon request.

Organizers: Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova, Stephan Scheel

This mini-conference attends to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on international migration, the reconfiguration of mobility regimes and related processes of rebordering. Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in spring 2020, governments around the world have responded to the pandemic with the closure of national and regional borders, (selective) travel bans and so-called ‘lock-downs’. These mobility restrictions have variously obstructed circular migration patterns, family reunification, refugee resettlement schemes and transnational networks, while spurring a proliferation of spaces of confinement and processes of rebordering. Hence, migrants and refugees belong, for sure, to the people that have been most affected by the pandemic and related mobility restrictions. In this context it is important to stress that border closures, travel bans and other forms of mobility restriction have not always been informed by a purely epidemiological logic. In many instances, they also carry – more or less explicitly – nationalist agendas and racist imaginaries. Infamous examples include talk about the ‘Chinese virus’ and related racist attacks against people read as Asian, or the coercive confinement of refugees in overcrowded, unsanitary detention centres in Europe and elsewhere.

At the same time, the pandemic has exposed the dependency of many economies on migrant labour or the remittances migrants send to support communities of origin in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Likewise, the harsh working conditions migrant workers have to endure in many industries have been exposed by the pandemic. Examples include thousands of seamen stranded on cruise ships, undocumented migrants working without any protection in the so-called gig-economy via Uber and other digital platforms, or the scandal about the cramped accommodation units of migrant workers in the German and U.S. meat industry, which became hotspots for the spread of the virus.

To study how the COVID-19 pandemic affects international migration and the reconfiguration of contemporary border and mobility regimes, this mini-conference therefore invites paper proposals that engage with questions related to the theme of migration, bordering and capitalist restructuring in pandemic times. In particular, we welcome submissions that engage with one of the following questions:

• How does the COVID-19 crisis, including its economic fallout, affect the daily lives, mobilities and survival strategies of particular groups of migrants, such as migrant workers, refugees, deportees, or transnational families, in particular contexts?
• What kind of transformations of capital-labour relations, biopolitics, notions of territory, citizenship and sovereignty can we discern if we follow the proposal to use processes of rebordering as method (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), that is, an analytical angle to expose larger social, political and economic transformations?
• What kind of racist imaginaries and configurations emerged in the context of the COVID-19 crisis and how did they play themselves out in practice?
• Since the highly mobile elites were identified as a key source of ‘super-spreader events’, how were the privileged affected by mobility restrictions? And how have they responded to these restrictions?
• In how far have epidemiological considerations and practices led to a readjustment of existing border and mobility regimes and related security dispositifs?

We welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages. To facilitate a truly transnational dialogue across continents and academic language barriers the mini-conference organizers welcome submissions in both English and Spanish. You find a Spanish version of the cfp below.

Esta mini-conferencia analiza los impactos de la crisis del COVID-19 en la migración internacional, la reconfiguración de los regímenes de movilidad y el control fronterizo. Desde el inicio de la crisis de COVID-19 en la primavera de 2020, los gobiernos de todo el mundo han respondido a la pandemia con el cierre de las fronteras nacionales y regionales, prohibiciones (selectivas) de viajes y la imposición de cuarentenas. Estas restricciones a la movilidad han obstaculizado de diversas maneras los patrones de migración circular, la reunificación familiar, los planes de reasentamiento de refugiados y las redes transnacionales, al tiempo que han estimulado la proliferación de espacios de confinamiento y el redoblamiento del control fronterizo. Así, migrantes y refugiados, indudablemente, son parte de los colectivos que se han visto más afectados por la pandemia y las restricciones a la movilidad. En este contexto es importante subrayar que los cierres de fronteras, las prohibiciones de viajes y otras formas de restricción a la movilidad no siempre se han basado en una lógica puramente epidemiológica. En muchos casos, también ha conllevado – más o menos explícitamente- a programas nacionalistas e imaginarios racistas. Entre los ejemplos infames cabe citar la discusión sobre el “virus chino” y los ataques racistas conexos contra personas que se leen como asiáticas, o el confinamiento coercitivo de refugiados en centros de detención superpoblados e insalubres en Europa y otros lugares de las Américas.

Al mismo tiempo, la pandemia ha puesto de manifiesto la dependencia de muchas economías de la mano de obra migrante o de las remesas que los migrantes envían para apoyar a las comunidades de origen en África, Asia o América Latina. Las extremas condiciones de trabajo que deben soportar los trabajadores migrantes en muchas industrias han quedado asimismo expuestas por la pandemia. Entre los ejemplos figuran miles de marineros varados en cruceros; migrantes indocumentados que trabajan sin ninguna protección en economía informalizada y terciariazada a través de Uber y otras plataformas digitales; en campos agrícolas; o en la industria alimenticia, sobre todo en la de la carne, en condiciones inhumanas, por ejemplo en  Alemania o Estados Unidos, que se convirtieron en focos de propagación del virus.

Para estudiar la forma en que la pandemia de COVID-19 afecta a la migración internacional y la reconfiguración de los regímenes contemporáneos de fronteras y movilidad, esta mini-conferencia invita a presentar ponencias que aborden las cuestiones relacionadas con la migración, el redoblamiento del control fronterizo y la re-estructuración capitalista en tiempos de pandemia. En particular, acogemos propuestas que aborden una o algunas de las siguientes preguntas:

• ¿Cómo afecta la crisis de COVID-19, incluidas sus repercusiones económicas, a la vida cotidiana, la movilidad y las estrategias de supervivencia de determinados grupos de migrantes, como los trabajadores migrantes, refugiados, deportados o las familias transnacionales, en contextos particulares?
• ¿Qué tipo de transformaciones en las relaciones entre el capital y el trabajo, la biopolítica, las nociones de territorio, ciudadanía y soberanía podemos discernir si seguimos la propuesta de utilizar la frontera como método (Mezzadra y Neilson 2013), es decir, como un ángulo analítico para exponer transformaciones sociales, políticas y económicas más amplias?
• ¿Qué tipo de imaginarios y configuraciones racistas surgieron en el contexto de la crisis de COVID-19 y cómo se desarrollaron en la práctica?
• Dado que las élites altamente móviles fueron identificadas como una fuente clave de “eventos de súper expansión” del virus, ¿cómo se vieron afectados los privilegiados por las restricciones de movilidad? ¿Y cómo han respondido a estas restricciones?
• ¿Hasta qué punto las consideraciones y prácticas epidemiológicas han llevado a un reajuste de los regímenes fronterizos y de movilidad existentes y los dispositivos de seguridad conexos?

Aceptamos propuestas de investigadorxs en todas las etapas de sus carreras. Para facilitar un diálogo verdaderamente transnacional a través de los continentes y superar las barreras del lenguaje académico, los organizadores de la mini-conferencia acogen con agrado propuestas de ponencias y presentaciones en inglés y en español.

Organizers: Gary Herrigel, Adriana Mica, Ann Mische

Social action, entrepreneurship, decision-making and even contemporary crises generate and are generated by contexts of opportunity, possibility, and alternatives.

The expectation, projection and reification of possible futures frame contexts of preparation and response to crises – such as the global financial crisis, the European crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, exploring the generation of (and experimentation with) the possible can be a tool to reduce or, at least, challenge social inequalities. At the same time, visions of the possible can generate disappointment regarding less advantageous or unexpected developments, as when, for example, we collectively fail to anticipate episodes of crisis (financial, migratory etc.) or do not act in response to crises (ecological, public health etc.). These developments and pitfalls infuse the exploration and transformation of the possible with urgency, pressing policymakers, scientists and citizens to imagine yet more alternative scenarios and push the boundaries of what people consider to be plausible and desirable futures.

There are many threats and perversions involved in the process of possibility identification. Perhaps most notably, the exploration of possibility can generate cynicism about futile utopianism or “voluntarism”. Further, some preoccupations with possibility can also lead to the reification of future scenarios, and to subsequent fatigue and (ironically) to pessimism about the future. Examples include the reification of “dark” futures in relation to economic downturns, limits to growth and resources, health and environmental risks, the “invasion of migrants” in Europe, as well as the most recent projections regarding the fatal economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The common activity of “doom scrolling”  shows how contemporary obsessions about the future can just as easily generate negative as  positive scenarios about the future.

This highlights problems of perspective, inclusion and power in ways that help identify both the potential for destabilization and the contours of recomposition. Reification occurs via the voicing of certitude that certain risks or possibilities will materialize, without preliminary discussion of the extent to which possible worlds are in fact probable.  Cynicism arises when possibilities have little substance or are too willfully detached or contentious regarding relations in the present. The study of possibility is thus extremely hazardous and easily undermined or rendered inconsequential.  The generation of credible possibility is genuinely difficult as a social, political and theoretical problem. It nearly always involves destabilization in both ideas and practices.

This mini-conference aims to explore the ways in which the generation and exploration of possibility, as a social process, affects and informs developmental currents across domains in the contemporary world. We will discuss how it enables or blocks individual and collective action; how it contributes to political struggles; how it provides templates for social policy; how it re-arranges temporalities across social fields and how it legitimizes rearrangements triggered by crises of contemporary capitalism. We will also consider the conditions that lead to the exhaustion of possible futures. Finally, we will discuss the most suitable sociological theories and research methods that scholars can use to investigate possible worlds.

Organizers: Markieta Domecka, Adam Mrozowicki, Karol Muszyński, Valeria Pulignano, Me-Linh Riemann

While much exists on how political, technological and economic forces have yielded precarious work—work deprived of security and stability—more scholarship and debate is needed today about capitalism and the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the lives of workers, individuals and their families. The health and socio-economic consequences of COVID-19 have been profound, particularly for those in precarious conditions even before the outbreak of the pandemic. Thus, we need to ask how, and to explain why, the class-based contradictions and power asymmetries are experienced and ‘lived’ by the ‘precariat’ during a period of dramatic crisis. This has important implications for the study of precarity in post-COVID in two ways: the reinforcement or blurring of the boundaries of work and life as reflected through the lived experiences of pandemic; the emergence of new and/or the reinforcement and reproduction of old dualisms, cleavages and inequality(ies) by occupation, social class, age, gender, ethnicity. It is also critical to explore what political possibilities exist for rebalancing the aforementioned asymmetries while protecting democracy. Rising insecurity under austerity led to the rise of ‘populist’ political parties, which are now often major political actors in the post-COVID-democracy, accusing governments and press of lying about pandemic. Contributions will explore the four following areas:

1. Precarious Work & Life Trajectories:

• What and how does post-COVID add to current definition and conceptualisation of precarity?
• What combination of work/employment conditions and life/family trajectories expose individuals to varying levels of precarity, and why?
• How do precarious workers reconcile previous biographical achievements with their current forms of making a living in post-COVID?
• Which sectors of the labour force are at particular risk of insecurity and biographical uncertainty in post-COVID?
• How do precarious workers project their own professional and personal futures in post-COVID?

2. Precarity and Work-Life Boundaries

• How far does COVID affect ‘grey zones’ where boundaries between public and private life, work and ‘non-work’ are reinforced or reduced? Are new social boundaries created, and how?
• How do workers experience and make sense of the blurring of boundaries of paid (productive) and unpaid (socially reproductive) work as well as professional and private times and spaces in the post-COVID period? How does unpaid as unremunerated labour account for precarity?
• As workers find themselves occupying grey spaces in the economy how are their social lives transformed? How do they cope with isolation, and life held in abeyance?

3. Precarity, Dualism, Inequality

• How far does the exposure to post-COVID reflect the already existing inequalities within society, and how?
• How are lockdown restrictions affecting labour markets? How do new forms and ways of organizing work (telework, remote work, hybrid work, digital work) relate to, and impact, segmentation? How does and how it affects social mobility across (and within) existing/new social divides?

4. Politics of Precarity

• How are political actions and inactions under COVID impacting the lives and work of precarious workers?
• To what extent and how can biographical experiences explain socio-political radicalization at the individual level?

Organizers: Anne-Sophie Béliard, Sidonie Naulin, Victor Potier

Organizers: Ilias Alami, Milan Babic, Adam Dixon, Nana de Graaff, Imogen T. Liu

Already before the current pandemic, state-led economies and development trajectories called into question core tenets of the liberal world order and its underlying (neo)liberal and coordinated economic models. After Covid-19, this trajectory will be reinforced: so-called “state capitalist” economies and state-led development strategies are projecting alternative pathways of economic success, which resonate with global demands for a stronger role of the state in economic and social matters in the face of the pandemic – also in the “liberal heartland” of the West. The rise and relevance of those alternatives is, however, not a simple return to atavistic statist development tools. The new statist practices are transnationally integrated like never before, as research on networked corporate elites, ownership and investment ties, and state-supported capital flows shows. Moreover, these developments beg for a deeper understanding of the world historical context within which they are  unfolding.

The aim of this mini-conference is to further advance this research agenda, especially in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Calls for a stronger role of the state in coordinating, managing, and protecting economies and societies of the fallout of this crisis are perceptible all over the globe and from all political corners. We want to critically examine this acceleration of existing trends; and gather a variety of theoretical, methodological, and conceptual approaches in order to understand the dynamics shaping the new state capitalism before and after the crisis. The papers for this mini-conference will analyse concrete new configurations and practices of state capitalism – or varieties thereof – and its tools.

Taking a broad perspective on the issue of state capitalism, the contributions could address some of the following issues:

• What is new about the recent “wave” of state capitalism across the global economy? What are the drivers of its emergence?
• Explaining the diversity of state capitalism across the spaces and scales of the global capitalist economy.
• The rationale for and new tools of state intervention: Are they integrating into or challenging the rules and structures of globalization?
• The transformation of the developmental state and of the logics and instruments of “catch-up” development (e.g. the transformation of industrial and innovation policy).
• The role of (new) national narratives and the reconfiguration of national identities in the light of a global expansion of statism.
• The geopolitical and geoeconomic calculus, drivers and implications of state capitalism.
• Does the Covid-19 crisis instigate new forms of state-capitalism? What is the nature of these state-interventions and what are the consequences?

The mini-conference hence addresses the topics of alternative paths of (capitalist) development and the question of a redistribution of prosperity, power and identities in a world economy at a time of global fragility and change. Scholars from different disciplines, approaches and backgrounds are invited to explore the rise of state capitalism and statist development models, and their consequences in all areas of socio-economics. We especially encourage colleagues from the Global South to submit contributions that help us to better understand the present and future of state capitalism in a time of global crisis and change.

Organizers: Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Jeff Powell

Heterodox economists and political economists have long pointed to the structural subordination of developing economies in the global economy. One way in which this subordination is particularly manifest is in its monetary and financial dimension. That governments in Argentina, Ghana and Turkey are running into debt and currency problems might not just be a matter of domestic governance but might be the result of a more systemic problem.  To say that the global monetary and financial system is a hierarchical system is to point to the relations of power, dependency, and violence that are the flipside of monetary and financial relations between creditors and debtors. So far, the literature has largely focused on developing economies’ monetary subordination and investigated broad structural and macroeconomics processes, with particular emphasis on moments of crises and extreme volatility. We still know very little about the specific, every-day financial relations, practices and mechanisms which reflect developing economies’ subordinate financial integration and distinctly shape the behaviour of economic agents in these countries. Economic geographers and sociologists have presented excellent work on the spatially and socially variegated financial practices, but place limited attention to the macroeconomic, monetary, and political structures underlying them. This mini-conference brings together the concerns with both macro-structure and agency to conceptualise their interaction in structured global financial markets.

Supplementing this general line of questioning, we particularly welcome contributions that explore the following issues:

1. Manifestations and Drivers of Financial Subordination: What are the specific manifestations of financial subordination? What causes financial subordination? And are there different degrees? Is financial subordination only mediated through macro-variables (e.g. exchange rates, interest rates, capital flows) or are there also “micro” mechanisms (e.g. production of knowledge, legal frameworks, governance rules etc.) which reflect this subordination? What are the roles of different institutions, policies, and locational factors in shaping financial subordination?
2. Conceptualising and Historicising Subordinate Financialization in the Periphery: How can financial subordination be conceptualized? What is the historical development of this process? What is the relationship between financial subordination and (subordinate) financialisation? What is the contribution of different disciplines in analysing financial subordination in the developing world? How is financialization different in and across developing economies? Does mapping phenomena encountered in advanced economies onto the developing world overlook the structural differences between these economies?
3. Value, Class and Distribution: What is the relationship between money, finance and the production and distribution of value. Who gets to profit from the way global finance and money work and how? What are the underlying class dynamics that produce and reproduce the global financial dynamics we observe? How do various domestic agents, such as non-financial corporations, shape the financial subordination? What is the role of the State in shaping financialisation in the developing world?
4. Finance and Production: How is financial subordination in developing economies linked to their real integration into international production networks? Is financial subordination a direct result of developing countries’ productive subordination? In what way monetary and financial subordination favour corporations centred in core capitalist economies?