Organizers: Fulya Apaydin, Arie Krampf, Andreas Nölke, Merve Sancak

Comparative political economy (CPE) and international political economy (IPE) constitute two main fields trying to understand how capitalism(s) (do not) work. While providing important insights, these fields have important shortcomings that can be addressed by bringing them together. The CPE literature, especially studies on comparative capitalisms (CC), has been criticised for not accounting for the linkages of the national with the global. The Regulation School and the recent growth models perspective (GMP) partially address these shortcomings. Nonetheless, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of the connections between national capitalist systems and global capitalism, and amongst different types of national capitalisms. The IPE literature studies these connections, but is limited to explain whether inter-state dynamics have a meaningful impact on national capitalisms or account for the variations between countries.

This mini-conference aims to fill this void. It invites theoretical and empirical contributions that bring together the CPE and IPE approaches to understand contemporary capitalist societies. It focuses on the late industrializing countries —including middle-income and low-income countries— which have experienced industrialization and global integration at very different stages and thus, have unique institutional structures and distinct relations with the global economy. It is necessary to study global capitalism from the perspective of the periphery and the semi-periphery, and growth models and capitalist systems in the Global South must not be studied as unsuccessful attempts to emulate growth strategies of the North, but rather as strategies designed to address their subordinated position in global capitalism. We especially welcome studies that focus on underrepresented geographic regions in CPE and IPE.

The mini-conference invites contributions that examine different areas of ‘connection’ between the national and the global, the Global North and South, and the South-South linkages. As for the theorization of the ‘national’, we invite contributions focusing both on the macroeconomic/demand side (GMP) and on the microeconomic/supply side (CC), and those connecting the two approaches. As for the theorization of the ‘international’, we invite contributions focusing on the role of international institutions and/or transnational flows.

Some of the suggested lines of inquiry include but are not limited to:

1. International finance and national economic systems

• To what extent do international financial dynamics shape economic growth and inequalities under national capitalist regimes?
• How do differences in the financialization experiences of national capitalist systems affect global financial flows?

2. Interstate/multilateral approaches

• How do different types of trade and investment agreements and multilateral institutions shape national economic systems?
• How do different national economic systems affect multilateral organisations and/or international agreements (in the field of trade and investment)?

3. Migration

• What are the relations between international migration and national capitalist structures?

4. Security-economy nexus

• How do variations in security conditions affect national capitalist systems?
• How do developments in national capitalist systems affect global security conditions?

5. International trade and investment

• How do global flows of goods/services and investment (including commodity cycles) affect national capitalist systems and vice versa?

Organizers: Larry Au, Kathryn Ibata-Arens, Wan-Zi Lu, Etienne Nouguez

Health and medicines have become the center of controversy in recent years. From the transnational anti-vax movement, the diminishing authority of medical professionals, to the disputed efficacy of alternative and traditional medicines—controversies around claims of authority and accountability have affected the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Social scientists have analyzed causes of such contestations as rising mistrust, the politicization of science, misinformation and disinformation on social media, as well as broader discontents over marketization of medicine. Against this backdrop of controversy, stakeholders—such as patients, physicians, policymakers, and the pharmaceutical industry—have altered their health-seeking behaviors, clinical routines, and approach to regulating and developing new drugs.

Controversies also bring forth struggles between stakeholders, as each vie for control in setting the new norms and rules that govern these marketplaces. For example, physicians have turned to mobile and tele-health solutions in providing care. Meanwhile, these changes prompt questions over the quality of care and how to regulate clinical interactions. Likewise, activists and policy reformers have championed open innovation systems to increase production capacity of Covid-19 vaccines and access to essential medicines; but these attempts were met with resistance from those benefiting from the privatization of profits. But amidst these struggles, therein lies new possibilities for innovation to advance more equal and equitable visions of healthcare.

The MedHealth mini-conference convenes interdisciplinary panels around these controversies, struggles, and transformations in contested spaces and disrupted markets. We will facilitate critical discussion and reflection on participants’ works-in-progress. Some potential questions include:

• ANARCHY: How has the panic-buying of such drugs as ivermectin impacted the markets for these drugs? What is the lasting influence of Covid-19 on the authority of experts and medical professionals? How has misinformation and disinformation impacted perceptions of trust and health-seeking behaviors?
• ACTIVISM: When and where have patient organizations been able to cooperate with scientists and clinicians to develop new protocols for medical care? What is the role of citizen science in a predominantly market-driven system of biomedical innovation? How can (social) entrepreneurs, large firms, and other alliances and coalitions foster new norms in healthcare?
• COORDINATION: What are some causal mechanisms in improving, or undermining community health, for example, through policy and organizational strategy? How do frameworks and methods identify key actors and explain outcomes? In the context of global health, how can different stakeholders work to promote access to healthcare?
• CONTROL: How have states and healthcare organizations been effective (or ineffective, indifferent) in the pricing of medicines? What should be the responsibility, if any, of the global intellectual property rights regime as arbitrated by the World Trade Organization in limiting patents on living matter? What are the roles for regulation of markets for such boundary-products between medicine and health food as probiotics, herbals, and other dietary supplements?

We encourage submissions exploring theoretical and empirical analysis from the developed and developing world. 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, Alexandre White

This mini-conference, building upon the last two successful mini-conferences of the same name, welcomes papers investigating the fractious connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, and slavery and 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.

This proposed mini-conference will continue to 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 models of coordination, control, and capitalist development. Theoretical, programmatic, or empirical papers are welcomed. Topics might include but are not restricted to:

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

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.

Organizers: Nina Bandelj, Heba Gowayed, Daniel Hirschman, Jordanna Matlon, John N. Robinson III

While scholarship on the interplay between economy and society is grounded in a core assumption that social forces shape economic processes, there is a void in theorizing the role of racism and ethnic chauvinism in this scholarship. Much of the vast literature on racial/ethnic inequality discusses its linkages to economic structures and processes, but scholars of the economy have rarely brought their tools and perspectives to bear on this dialogue. Existing research often privileges the role of the state over that of markets and firms. The realm of race/ethnicity and the realm of economy are often treated as two separate spheres, albeit ones that have the potential to interact and impact one another. Instead, this mini conference seeks to showcase research that foregrounds economic racism, ethnic chauvinism and racial capitalism in constituting the contemporary fractious economy.

We invite submissions that build on a body of work in labor market discrimination, racialized organizations, racial wealth gap, racism in the housing market, seller-consumer cross-ethnic relations, ethnic enclaves, and technological racism, among others. Research using intersectional approaches and global perspective is welcome. Submissions that explicitly link to the SASE 2022 theme “Fractious Connections: Anarchy, Activism, Coordination, and Control,” are strongly encouraged.

An explicit goal of this mini-conference is to showcase contributions from scholars from diverse backgrounds, across disciplines and using various methodological and theoretical approaches to advance an expansive understanding of economic racism, ethnic chauvinism, and racial capitalism.

Organizers: Manuel Nicklich, Sabine Pfeiffer, Stefan Sauer, Jasmin Schreyer

Whether we are speaking about technology (Pfeiffer 2021; van de Poel 2003), ecology (Olsson et al. 2004), economics (Brynjolfsson & Hitt 2000) or politics (Erickson & Kuruvilla 1998; Jacobsson & Lauber 2006), the term ‘transformation’ is a central buzzword of the present moment. While this seems to be unproblematic in journalistic language or day-to-day conversation, it raises a series of questions in social science. Various scholars, for their part, foresee a new developmental phase of socioecological systems (Barton et al. 2021), a digital capitalism defined by distributive forces (Pfeiffer 2021) or even a fourth epoch in the history of civilization and media (Baecker 2018). Although there are classic (Polanyi 2001 [1944]) and more recent approaches (Aulenbacher et al. 2019; Burawoy 2000) to dealing with “transformation”, the question of how to tie up all those different phenomena remains unanswered. When the debate connects normative claims, such as stopping climate change or preparing for the digital future, the use of the term transformation demands a socio-economical understanding of what we mean by ‘transformation’ or ‘transformative’. As a heuristic, ‘systemic transformation’ will be understood as a multidimensional social change on the microlevel, meso-level and macrolevel of complementary societal institutions. From our perspective the quality of systemic transformation is guided by a focus on three dimensions, i.e. by the argument that this transformation is 1) socially prepared, 2) technically enabled and 3) discursively negotiated and socially mastered. In general, transformation could be suitable as a searching and guiding concept in the current discussion within social science, which – however – needs to be situated in relation to terminology such as social change, modernization, disruption, evolution and revolution. For these reasons, the mini-conference addresses the question of the extent to which social, economic, political and technological processes have the character of a systemic transformation and what constitutes this transformation. Key questions include, but are not limited to:

• At what point can we speak about ‘transformation’? Is there a threshold for a transformative state? What dimensions need to be considered?
• How can we even analyze a transformation of systemic quality that will change all the institutional systems of society in a fundamental and lasting way?
• Is transformation always systemic, or could transformation also be contained, channeled or limited to particular sectors or subsystems of society?
• Above all, are transformative processes manageable within modern society or is this an illusion of societal actors?

As these discussions are usually situated within national conversations, the development of a more international discourse is necessary. Based on this, the mini-conference plans to achieve an interdisciplinary combination of social science, economic and historical perspectives on new societal configurations of work, technology, economics, politics and ecological questions to grasp the multi-layered dynamics of transformation, and thereby to better understand what this term actually means. We invite contributions that address transformations empirically and theoretically, especially in areas where social, economic and historical developments perhaps come together most clearly and with a critical impact on whole societies.

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.

References

Aulenbacher, B., Bärnthaler, R., & Novy, A. (2019): Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and Contemporary Capitalism. Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Soziologie 44(2): 105–13.

Baecker, D. (2018). Listening to Media in Cultural Theory, Sociology, and Management. Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 25(4), 25-40.

Barton, C. M., Ullah, I. I., Bergin, S. M., Mitasova, H., & Sarjoughian, H. (2012). Looking for the future in the past: long-term change in socioecological systems. Ecological Modelling, 241, 42-53.

Brynjolfsson, E., & Hitt, L. M. (2000). Beyond computation: Information technology, organizational transformation and business performance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(4), 23-48.

Burawoy, M. (2000). A sociology for the second great transformation? Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 693-695.

Erickson, C. L., & Kuruvilla, S. (1998). Industrial relations system transformation. ILR Review, 52(1), 3-21.

Jacobsson, S., & Lauber, V. (2006). The politics and policy of energy system transformation. Explaining the German diffusion of renewable energy technology. Energy Policy, 34(3), 256-276.

Olsson, P., Folke, C., & Hahn, T. (2004). Social-ecological transformation for ecosystem management: the development of adaptive co-management of a wetland landscape in southern Sweden. Ecology and Society, 9(4).

Pfeiffer, Sabine (2021): The Greater Transformation: Digitalization and the Transformative Power of Distributive Forces in Digital Capitalism. In: Critical Thought (forthcoming).

Polanyi, Karl. (2001 [1944]): The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, 2nd edn., Boston: Beacon Press.

Van de Poel, I. (2003). The transformation of technological regimes. Research Policy, 32(1), 49-68.

Organizers: Barbara Brandl, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Carola Westermeier

Financial infrastructures are the lifeblood of political economies worldwide. Financial infrastructures are, therefore, considered by policy-makers worldwide as physical ‘things’ requiring protection in avoiding potentially catastrophic consequences of their failures.

Inspired by conceptual developments from the field of Science and Technology Studies financial infrastructures, however, have also widened to encapsulate sociotechnical processes. Not merely cables and computer servers, but the relations of financiers and other humans to these and other physical objects, financial infrastructures are the processes sustaining essential activities such as cashless payments, government transfers, and bond trading. Often taken-for-granted, assumed and backgrounded, these relations are rendered visible when they fail, cease to function, or undergo profound changes.

The global pandemic has reminded many of our dependence on increasingly digital infrastructures. The ongoing digitization of infrastructures, including those enabling the global circulation of currencies, credit, and debt, as well as the disbursement of government aid and loans, attracts both the geopolitical interest of leading policymakers, as well as the everyday notice of citizens and consumers. The development of central bank digital currencies and attempts to ‘disrupt’ established financial infrastructures by the likes of Facebook with its diem (formerly Libra) currency have drawn the attention of regulators and citizens alike to payment infrastructures that have up to now remained out of the spotlight.

The growing concern of social scientists and the general public regarding the impacts of the digitalization of financial infrastructures requires more nuanced analysis of patterns of continuity and change that can emanate from interdisciplinary analysis of financial infrastructures. The goal of this mini-conference is to explore the past, present and future of financial infrastructures. We seek contributions exploring themes broadly related to the following questions:

• What are financial infrastructures? How are they distinguished from and how do they overlap with other institutions and organizations?
• How do financial infrastructures change? How does digitalization affect the essential functions of infrastructures, such as the exchange of money, in modern societies? Which actors and processes are able to effect change in financial infrastructures?
• How inclusive or exclusive are financial infrastructures? How do they relate to (historical) social inequalities, such as colonial power relations? How are financial infrastructures interlinked with global power structures?
• How do financial infrastructures matter beyond the financial sphere? How do they gain importance for security or for the management of property? How are financial infrastructures interlinked with the process of financialization?

This mini-conference will take up these and related questions concerning the agential qualities of infrastructures, as well as regarding the historical and ongoing contemporary development of financial infrastructures in and beyond the dominant Anglo-American centres of finance. Crucially, we seek wider perspectives from beyond the West, including much needed post-colonial and (post-) socialist approaches and findings.

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper (can be in a preliminary stage)  by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.

Organizers: Céline Bessière, Maude Pugliese

Wealth inequality is on the rise both within countries and at the global level—it has now reached levels unseen since the first decades of the 20^th century. While research on the causes and consequences of this phenomenon is quickly developing, few studies have explored how gender intersects with wealth inequality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on labor-related incomes; until recently, it has dedicated comparatively little attention to the question of gender disparities in the process of wealth accumulation. This mini-conference aims to bring together scholars who study how gender may shape the reproduction/intensification of wealth concentration in different national contexts.

We are especially interested in papers addressing the following issues using a variety of methodological approaches, from ethnographic research to statistical analyses.

• Historically, legal discrimination has prevented women from accumulating wealth all over the world. Nowadays, in Western legal traditions (common law and Civil code territories) property laws are formally equal. This is not the case in countries where religious or customary traditions explicitly favor male property rights. In these different national contexts, we welcome papers that study the political and legal framing of male and female accumulation, as well as the role of legal and wealth professionals (lawyers, judges, notaries, wealth managers, bankers, …) in the extension/reduction of the gap.
• The gender wealth gap is poorly documented because surveys around the world tend to collect wealth data only at the household level. This strategy obscures gender wealth inequality located within couples, and it sometimes even leads to the assumption that couples share and equalize wealth across partners. That assumption may have been adequate fifty years ago, when most couples were married for life. Since then, however, a growing number of couples have adopted cohabitation over marriage and even those who are married can now opt for matrimonial property regimes without obligations to redistribute wealth after divorce. In this new context, how do spouses and partners manage their wealth? How do they distribute it in the event of marital breakdown or death?
• A few countries have recently begun to collect individual-level wealth data. What does this evidence say about gender wealth gaps, especially within households; how large are those gaps and how do they change across countries, depending on class, race, age, and between generations? More importantly, how can they be explained? Are gender wealth gaps entirely due to wage inequality between men and women or do other factors also play a role? For example, are receipts of intergenerational transfers unequal across gender?

How does gender influence the reproduction/intensification of wealth inequalities? While men remain wealthier than women, on average, a number of women have now joined the ranks of the national and global wealth elites. Are there differences in the strategies men and women deploy to protect their wealth, pass it on to their children, and create family dynasties?

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper (ca. 6000 words) by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants. We plan to publish these – details on request.

Organizers: Donatella Della Porta, Irene Dingeldey, Heiner Heiland, Jeremias Herberg, Franziska Laudenbach, Martin Seeliger

The current constellation is in flux: While the production system is rearranging in terms of space (European integration and globalization) and the means of production and distribution (tertiarization and digitalization), rising sea levels, burning forests and rain-driven floods are calling for a decarbonization of the economy. This complex constellation will result in multiple transformations, also taking place in the field of labour and industrial relations. Strategies of decarbonization are possibly increasing fractious relations on a sectoral scale within and between different nations.

In this mini-conference we analyze the respective changes and their effects on the transformation of labour and collective action. In order to strengthen workers’ position to influence the ongoing multiple transformations, this mini-conference invites both conceptual and empirical contributions of all methodological varieties exploring the following issues:

Panel I: Paradoxes of Labour Mobilization in Digital Capitalism

Digital technologies allow for new practices, both for anarchism, activism, coordination and control. This is especially true for work and employment. Digitalization increases connectivity, expands communication and gives opportunity to new forms of agency in labour relations.

On one hand, companies extend their agency since they utilize comprehensive digital control regimes, reducing workers’ autonomy. On the other hand, digital technologies are used by workers to establish self-organized communities (e.g. platform cooperativism) and new cultures of solidarity. Overall mobilization within digital capitalism may again strengthen anarchy and activism.

In view of this paradox various questions arise:

• Are new forms of workers’ voice and mobilization as well as new actors emerging?
• Does digitalization change the composition of weak and strong ties in labor? Does this change collective action?
• Are there differences and similarities in the use of digital agency according to nations, regions or economic sectors?

Panel II: The Conditions and Consequences of Decarbonization

Climate change acts as a great equalizer due to its global impact, but also triggers existential inequalities. Decarbonization is one of the most critical, but also difficult aspects in this context. In this panel we discuss how locally specific, and globally influential re-articulations of industrial relations emerge highlighting the conditions and consequences of decarbonization as a network of disrupting and re-connecting industrial legacies at different levels. The notion of industrial labour and care work, the relationship between government and industry, the nexus of local action and global discourses, and the role of science, technology, and innovation articulated in close interaction with the industrial past and socioecological futures.

• How do the practices and imaginaries of decarbonization shape the political cleavages between local and global, essential and non-essential work, industry and sustainability?
• How do they distribute responsibilities, entitlements and blame between governments, industry, social movements, and academia when decarbonization processes take place?
• How do actors navigate between the local specificity and the global impact that decarbonization has on labour relations and local livelihoods?

Panel III: The paradox of transnational solidarity in transforming working relations

The globalization of production, digitalization and the transnationalization of policy making opens up new opportunities for collective action and workers’ solidarity, but at the same time collaboration is restraint by a multitude of contradictory regulations and normative ideals developed within different systems of industrial relations.

The proposed panel seeks to show when and how fractious connections are overcome by acts of solidarity. Hence, we search for more places, acts and motives of transnational solidarity, including more or less spontaneous activism as well as institutionalized forms of coordination:

• How do processes of transformation (digitalization, decarbonization, globalization) influence solidarity in transnational working relations?
• What are challenges of transnational solidarity? And how and where have they successfully been mastered?
• Which new alliances appear within the processes of multiple transformations?

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.

Send any questions to Martin Philipp Seeliger | Universitaet Bremen <seeliger@uni-bremen.de>

Organizers: Gary Herrigel, Adriana Mica, Ann Mische

The way we cope with the uncontrollability of our society, prepare for the next economic crisis or public health emergency, or navigate access to public policies in times of disruption is embedded in 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 migration crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, and other visible emergencies (ecological, 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, the projections regarding the fatal economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the recent scenarios regarding the unfolding of new future crises and the next pandemic. The common activity of preparedness and “doom scrolling”  shows how contemporary obsessions about the future can just as easily generate negative as  positive scenarios.

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. On the other hand, being visible and material in its effects in terms of inequality and structural violence, or in fortunate cases of reduction of inequality and attempts to pursue integration and equity.

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, at global level. We invite papers that discuss how it enables or blocks individual and collective action; how it generates global capabilities of emancipation and activism; how it contributes to political struggles and even anarchism; how it provides templates for social policy; how it re-arranges temporalities and connectedness across social fields and how it legitimizes fractious rearrangements triggered by crises of contemporary capitalism. We also encourage papers that consider the conditions that lead to the exhaustion of possible futures, and the mechanisms which emerge as proxy elements of coordination. Finally, all papers should reflect on the  most suitable sociological theories and research methods that scholars can use to investigate possible worlds.

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper (max 9,000 words) by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.

Organizers: Sabrina Axster, Ida Danewid

Capitalism requires cheap, disposable, and easily exploitable labor. From sweatshops in Bangladesh, to domestic workers in the Gulf Region, agricultural laborers in Europe, and service staff in the United States – racialized communities who have themselves been rendered vulnerable through the impact of global capitalism are simultaneously those whose labor keeps the system running. Scholars of racial capitalism have long pointed us in this direction. Interdisciplinary scholarship in critical migration and border studies, research into prisons and policing, and analyses of the surveillance state have recently also begun to take an interest in these processes. By examining the political economy of state violence, these literatures have shown how systems of control were designed and implemented to protect private property, maintain social order, and pacify unruly populations. In short, prisons, police, and migration controls both manage the consequences caused by capitalism and facilitate its functioning by ensuring the availability of extractable labor and land. Most of this research has so far focused on carceral institutions in the global North and, in particular, the United States. In contrast, this conference aims to take seriously the distinctively global and imperial roots of the carceral state. We hope to bring together a collective of scholars working on: the interconnected histories of borders, policing, incarceration, and surveillance; the relationship between global and local forces of control; and the interplay of racism, state violence, and capital accumulation on a global scale. We are particularly interested in research that pushes against the confines of methodological nationalism and that sheds new light on the multiple origins of the carceral empire of control.

We invite abstracts for papers that engage with the following and related questions:

1. What is the contemporary and/or historical relationship between racial capitalism and technologies of control and state violence?
2. What does an analysis of racial capitalism tell us about the connections between various forms of policing, bordering, and practices of surveillance across the globe?
3. How do local, regional, and global actors interact and thereby shape practices of control and state violence in different geographical contexts? What are the feedback loops between these localities?

Organizers: Carina Altreiter, Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch, Stephan Puehringer, Ana Rogojanu, Georg Wolfmayr

The mini-conference discusses the impact of an increasingly strong reliance on competition, competitiveness, and particularly ‘spatial competition’, as a prime mode of social organization and as a core concept for designing social institutions on different ontological levels of social reality: (1) international and national policies and institutions (macro-level), (2) regional institutions, organizations, and discourses (meso-level), as well as (3) everyday practices (micro-level).

More precisely, the mini conference deals with the following questions:

• What (performative) impact do different conceptions of competition have on the various ontological levels?
• What kind of (social or political) struggles over the economic logic of competition can be identified and what are the main actors in these struggles?
• How is competition over space organized (e.g. between supranational entities, countries, regions, cities or in the field of housing)?
• How are the different ontological levels of competition and competitiveness connected?

Main research questions

We particularly welcome contributions that explore the following issues:

• International and national policies and institutions (macro-level): How do conceptualizations of competition transmit into institutions such as the African Union, the European Union, or ASEAN, as well as national governments? What performative impact do they have on regulatory frameworks? What are the intended and unintended consequences of these transmissions?
• Regional institutions, organizations, and discourses (meso-level): How do different concepts of (economic) competition structure the practices of organizations involved in spatial struggles? How is the concept of competition negotiated in public debates and discourses?
• Everyday practices (micro-level): How is the logic of competition adopted, negotiated and transformed in self-concepts and daily practices of actors involved in spatial struggles?

Interdisciplinary and pluralist orientation

The mini-conference is open to contributions from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including (but not limited to) anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, political science, sociology. Since the aim of the mini-conference is also to facilitate a transdisciplinary view on the multi-level impact of the economic concept of ‘competition’, interdisciplinary approaches to the issue are considered particularly strong contributions. Moreover, individual contributions may focus on one particular level, yet contributions that explore the interrelations of ontological levels are especially welcome.

To facilitate the transdisciplinary discourse, the communication and exchange across different paradigms, and to allow all presenters to benefit from their participation, the mini-conference will feature a short co-presentation (max. 5 minutes) for each paper. To this end, each presenter will be asked to prepare such a short co-presentation for one of the other papers to be presented in her session. Sessions will be organized in a way that is still enough time for both general, and paper-specific exchange.

Organizational issues

Abstracts must not be longer than 1000 words and should be submitted through the official SASE submission system. Please make sure you choose the right mini-conference to ensure the correct allocation of your submission.

The full papers will be distributed to the discussants who will prepare a short co-presentation. Full papers do not need to be finished papers, but should allow the discussants to prepare a constructive co-presentation.

Organizers: Franco Bonomi Bezzo, Anne-Marie Jeannet, Gábor Scheiring

Deindustrialization, the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, is ubiquitous to advanced economies. While most measures of deindustrialization emphasize how many workers have lost jobs, the social costs are much larger. They are difficult to quantify so many of them remain poorly understood. Some refer to this as the half-life of deindustrialization, meaning that it is “like radioactive waste, its effects remain long after abandoned factory buildings have been torn down and workers have found new jobs.”[1]

However, the scholarship on the consequences of deindustrialization has so far mostly focused on men in working class occupations, living in “left-behind places”. This perspective limits a full understanding of the consequences of deindustrialization on social life, which are more complex than job and income loss. Deindustrialization reshapes social cohesion, the division of labor inside and outside the family, it reconfigures identities and class alliances. Deindustrialization also affects demographic process in many ways, from shrinkage, through mortality to family formation. Finally, going beyond the narrative of loss, deindustrialization also opens up some new possibilities to create more just and sustainable futures for old industrial areas, depending on how well politics and policies respond.

Given these pervasive sociopolitical implications, there is an urgent need to better understand the multifaceted long-term ripple effects of deindustrialization. The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together scholars to debate and illuminate the long-term social consequences (i.e., the half-life) of deindustrialization. We invite submissions on many aspects of deindustrialization’s consequences but especially encourage work that focuses on the understudied or misunderstood aspects. We are especially looking for submissions covering areas currently underrepresented in deindustrialization studies, such as the experience of women, ethnic minorities, urban areas, and middle and low-income countries that are undergoing premature deindustrialization.

We seek papers that explore the following areas:

1. Deindustrialization and the Social Transformation

• How has economic restructuring changed the gender division of labour?
• How has it changed the ‘social fabric’ of everyday life, such as by altering social cohesion and community participation?
• What is the meaning of social class and identity in post-industrial society
• Has inter-generational mobility improved or worsened due to the decline of industrial work?

2. Demographic Shifts

• Family formation: How has the decline of industrial jobs affected marriage and fertility rates?
• Depopulation, shrinkage: Why have people moved away from ‘deindustrialized places’ and what are the demographic consequences for such local areas?
• Mortality and health inequality: How has industrial job loss affected health and life expectancy (e.g. the ‘deaths of despair’)?

3. Political and Policy Responses

• Electoral outcomes and political participation: how
• Just and green transition: how has deindustrialization lead to a more ‘green’ economy and what are some of the social benefits of the transition?
• Welfare and social policy responses: how can states compensate for job loss? What policy instruments can attenuate the negative consequences of deindustrialization?

[1] Linkon, Sherry Lee (2018) The Half-life of Deindustrialization. University of Michigan Press.

Organizers: Daniel Aldana Cohen, Neil Fligstein, Simone Pulver, Caleb Scoville, Stéphanie Barral, Ritwick Ghosh, Ian Gray

Climate Change is one of the defining issues of the 21st century. Humans are being challenged to find a set of policies, practices, and standards of behavior that provide long-term economic opportunities and improved quality of life around the world while maintaining a sustainable climate and viable ecosystems. At the core of how we collectively respond to this challenge are questions of global governance and coordination and political activism arrayed against the organized opposition of large sectors of the world economy like energy extraction and energy production, agriculture, and mining. Governments and communities who depend on these activities for their principal forms of revenue and employment are dug in to oppose efforts at climate mitigation. Put bluntly, the issue of whether and under what conditions capitalism can meet this challenge, and what alternatives to capitalism might look like, is at stake. The purpose of our mini-conference is to explore these themes in order to better understand what is going on and what might be possible.
We can think of no other issue that embeds all of these features of our current politics. In addition to addressing possibilities and limits of actions to decarbonize the economy, the social sciences also have an important role to play in better understanding the human dimensions of climate change’s physical impacts and designing strategies for adapting to these negative consequences. Climate change raises major questions of equity concerning how poor and marginalized communities, who have so far borne the brunt of disasters and other climate-driven risks, will cope with the increased pace of change. It also considers how developing countries with more vulnerable populations will suffer in the near future, promoting new waves of migration and social conflict.

We are interested in papers that consider political economy, corporate responses to the climate challenge, the role of markets and financial institutions, social movements and NGOs, cultural and meaning systems, macro-comparative policy research, technological innovations, and the social organization of science and science policy. We are also interested in work that tries to make sense of the social and political effects of climate change including issues like environmental justice, disaster research, impacts on labor, human health, security and conflict, and social demography with some attention to migration. Finally, we are interested in contributions that try and reference ongoing successful and unsuccessful efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate 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 dimensions. 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. In financial markets of developing economies, this subordination is reflected in persistent external vulnerability and financial instability and severe macroeconomic policy constraints. So far, this literature has largely focused on developing economies’ monetary subordination and investigated broad structural and macroeconomic 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 behavior of economic agents in these countries. Economic geographers and sociologists have presented excellent work on the spatially and socially variegated financial practices, but pay little attention to the macroeconomic, monetary, and political structures underlying them. The recent emerging scholarship on critical macro-finance focuses mainly on the experience of core capitalist economies. This mini-conference brings together the concerns with both macro-structure and agency to conceptualize their interaction in structured global financial markets.

Following last year’s successful mini-conference on the same theme, we invite both conceptual and empirical contributions of all methodological varieties. 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?
2. Conceptualizing and Historicizing Subordinate Financialization in the Periphery: How can financial subordination be conceptualized? What is the historical development of this process? To what extent is financial subordination about cross-border relations, and to what extent is it a concept that can also be applied to internal financial relations? What is the contribution of different disciplines in analyzing financial subordination in the developing world?
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 shape the financial subordination?
4. Finance and Production: How is financial subordination in developing economies linked to their real integration into international production networks? How has the evolution of global value chains increased the pressure of firms in non-core economies to borrow in foreign currencies, and thus their dependency on foreign lenders? In what way does monetary and financial subordination favor corporations centered in core capitalist economies?

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.

Organizers: Gary Lawrence Francione, Harald Grethe, Stefan Mann, Mona Seymour, Achim Spiller

For many centuries, it was clear that killing and eating animals would constitute a pillar of human nutrition. This certainty, however, has become fractious. The “value chain” of animal products suffers from increased criticism for environmental, ethical and health reasons. At the same time, the worldwide amount of animal products sold and consumed each year increases to unprecedented heights.

While a majority of the Western world would probably agree that an unchanged continuation of today’s developments in animal production is not the pathway to follow, it is extremely open which institutional route will be taken over the coming decades: which role will vegan activism – with and without violence – play? Who coordinates and controls political steps that would either lead to better living conditions of the animals involved or towards an end of killing animals for processing them to food? These and other questions are strongly linked to the conference theme.  In our mini-conference we take up the challenge of the vegan movement to discuss

• whether enterprises will translate public pressure into new business models. How can farms adapt to changing societal demands, and how the food industry and retailing?
• whether governments will put pressure on animal production to either transform or terminate the system. Will animal production face the same fate as slavery that has been banned in every country between 1806 and 1981?
• how non-governmental organizations will transform public opinion and eventually agriculture. So far, their focus is often on individual behaviour, but they may shift their emphasis for more fundamental changes.
• which role new technological options play: In which way do innovations like cultured meat and social movements interact?

Empirical pieces of work are as welcome as theoretical approaches on how to sustainably transform or terminate the system of animal production.

Please note: This mini-conference additionally requires the submission of a full paper by 15 June 2021 for all accepted participants.