SASE 2023 Conference in Rio de Janeiro

Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order

20–22 July 2023
Windsor Florida Hotel | Hosted by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Conference Theme Overview

En español a continuación

We have observed numerous signs of disruption—at all levels of social relations—of the world built over the past two centuries, in the heat of the industrial revolution and revitalized by successive waves of systemic innovations.

It now seems that some of the engines that have driven this process are breaking down, not only from a conjectural perspective due to the most immediate episodes (pandemic, wars, planetary awareness of global warming, etc.) but also in view of the sustainability of long-term socio-economic development.

In particular, the role of fossil fuels, which have enabled the establishment of the current production and consumption model, threatens the very survival of the planet, and with it its human inhabitants. Beyond millenarian discourses, the energy transition—to leave behind carbon and its destructive effects on the environment that hosts us—is an urgent necessity. The entire fabric that has been built around the carbon energy paradigm is likewise showing signs of stagnation and deterioration.

In their disruption of current models, technological innovation, robotization, and AI may represent an opportunity to move toward this new world order. But the governance of the coming transformations must also lead to the construction of new forms of political organization and new labor scenarios that overcome the ups and downs of volatile and geographically limited democratic systems.

More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old Western dream of the urbi et orbi extension of its old democratic formulas of economic and political governance does not seem to have prevailed. Rather, we are besieged by a malaise resulting from the advance of growing authoritarianism, even in the very heart of the oldest democracies. It is not, as in the past, the emergence of fascism or Nazism, strictu sensu, but the expansion of authoritarian expressions of all kinds, with idiosyncratic characteristics, that are permeating institutions in the most varied geographical settings.

These authoritarianisms obstruct the opportunities offered by technological progress for a more inclusive world in all spheres of human life. The counterpoint will have to be new forms of governance in institutions, freeing us from the absolute power of large corporations. Emerging social movements demand forms of democracy that are more participatory than representative, with direct involvement in the collective governance of citizens and their forms of organization in interconnected networks. A new socio-economic paradigm would have to provide answers to this socio-political breaking point.

Demography does not help the matter. We are aware that the production and consumption model—which we have built with greater or lesser success, according to geographical region—and the social and political stabilizer of the Welfare State are suffering from a demographic rupture this century. Increased longevity forces us to rethink this model based on a constantly growing economy in a market framework that drives intense inequalities.

Beyond the hyperglobalization that has been built over recent decades (Rodrik 2022)—with growing economic and social inequalities, and with management concentrated in large corporations and a few political operators—a new international order must respond to the need for higher levels of security and equality for citizens and countries in multiple areas. And this framework of alternative paradigms must also reflect the new economic geography (East-West, North-South) that has changed the world map of international economic relations.

As Diane Coyle points out in her latest work, “we are in a period where there are no clear worldviews to shape policy decisions, and there is a mixture of ideas, both statist and free market, combined with profound voter discontent and loss of trust” (2021:195). In sum, we are immersed in a disoriented society, in which political choice becomes very difficult and confusing, and is expressed through more or less violent protest (Badiou 2021).

Despite neoliberalism’s failure to attain higher levels of growth, prosperity, equity, and freedom, its strange non-death (Crouch 2011) has continued to obstruct the emergence of new socio-economic paradigms. It is necessary to move forward with a new social, economic, and political paradigm that lights new paths for productive organization and the consumption model, and which enables us to maintain a stable balance with the natural world in which we live.

Socio-economics, it should be remembered, is a scientific approach that seeks to build alternative paradigms in the social sciences; thus, in this context, it is a dynamic axis that contributes to the establishment of a new theoretical and methodological horizon in the social sciences. In this perspective, SASE provides a platform for creative empirical and theoretical research on key social problems. We are committed to supporting a diverse international membership which fosters and produces thoughtful yet lively intellectual and interdisciplinary debates.

With regard to these themes, and the more specific areas of the 18 networks that organize the contents of our society, we encourage you to submit your papers and your proposals for mini-conferences at the 35^th annual SASE conference, which will be held at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in July 2023.

We look forward to seeing you at SASE/Rio de Janeiro 2023!

SASE President: Santos Ruesga

Socioeconomía en un mundo en transición: rompiendo líneas y paradigmas alternativos para un nuevo orden mundial

Hemos venido observando numerosos signos de ruptura —en todos los niveles de las relaciones sociales— del mundo construido durante los últimos dos siglos, al calor de la revolución industrial y revitalizado por sucesivas oleadas de innovaciones sistémicas.

Ahora parece que algunos de los motores que han estado impulsando este proceso se están estropeando, no sólo desde una perspectiva coyuntural por los episodios más inmediatos (guerras pandémicas, conciencia planetaria del aumento del calentamiento global, etc.) sino también a la vista de la sostenibilidad del desarrollo socioeconómico a largo plazo.

En particular, el papel de los combustibles fósiles, que han permitido el establecimiento del actual modelo de producción y consumo, amenaza la propia supervivencia del planeta, y con ella de sus habitantes humanos. Más allá de los discursos milenarios, la transición energética —dejar atrás el carbono y sus efectos destructivos sobre el medio ambiente que nos alberga— es una necesidad urgente. Todo el tejido que se ha construido alrededor del paradigma de la energía del carbono también muestra signos de estancamiento y deterioro.

En su disrupción de los modelos actuales, la innovación tecnológica, la robotización y la IA pueden representar una oportunidad para avanzar hacia este nuevo orden mundial. Pero la gobernanza de las transformaciones venideras también debe conducir a la construcción de nuevas formas de organización política y nuevos escenarios laborales que superen los vaivenes de sistemas democráticos volátiles y geográficamente limitados.

Más de tres décadas después de la caída del Muro de Berlín, el viejo sueño occidental de la extensión urbi et orbi de sus viejas fórmulas democráticas de gobernanza económica y política no parece haber prevalecido. Más bien nos asedia un malestar producto del avance de un autoritarismo creciente, incluso en el seno mismo de las democracias más antiguas. No se trata, como en el pasado, del surgimiento del fascismo o del nazismo, strictu sensu, sino de la expansión de expresiones autoritarias de todo tipo, con características idiosincrásicas, que están permeando instituciones en los más variados escenarios geográficos.

Estos autoritarismos obstruyen las oportunidades que ofrece el progreso tecnológico para un mundo más inclusivo en todas las esferas de la vida humana. El contrapunto tendrán que ser nuevas formas de gobierno en las instituciones, liberándonos del poder absoluto de las grandes corporaciones. Los movimientos sociales emergentes demandan formas de democracia más participativas que representativas, con implicación directa en la gobernanza colectiva de los ciudadanos y sus formas de organización en redes interconectadas. Un nuevo paradigma socioeconómico tendría que dar respuestas a este punto de quiebre sociopolítico.

La demografía no ayuda en el asunto. Somos conscientes de que el modelo de producción y consumo -que venimos construyendo con mayor o menor éxito, según la región geográfica- y el estabilizador social y político del Estado del Bienestar, sufren una ruptura demográfica en este siglo. El aumento de la longevidad obliga a repensar este modelo basado en una economía en constante crecimiento en un marco de mercado que impulsa intensas desigualdades.

Más allá de la hiperglobalización que se ha construido en las últimas décadas (Rodrik 2022) —con crecientes desigualdades económicas y sociales, y con la gestión concentrada en grandes corporaciones y unos pocos operadores políticos—, un nuevo orden internacional debe responder a la necesidad de mayores niveles de seguridad y igualdad para ciudadanos y países en múltiples áreas. Y este marco de paradigmas alternativos también debe reflejar la nueva geografía económica (Este-Oeste, Norte-Sur) que ha cambiado el mapa mundial de las relaciones económicas internacionales.

Como señala Diane Coyle en su último trabajo, “estamos en un período en el que no hay visiones del mundo claras para dar forma a las decisiones políticas, y hay una mezcla de ideas, tanto estatistas como de libre mercado, combinadas con un profundo descontento de los votantes y pérdida de confianza. (2021:195). En suma, estamos inmersos en una sociedad desorientada, en la que la elección política se vuelve muy difícil y confusa, y se expresa a través de protestas más o menos violentas (Badiou 2021).

A pesar del fracaso del neoliberalismo en alcanzar niveles más altos de crecimiento, prosperidad, equidad y libertad, su extraña no muerte (Crouch 2011) ha seguido obstruyendo el surgimiento de nuevos paradigmas socioeconómicos. Es necesario avanzar con un nuevo paradigma social, económico y político que ilumine nuevos caminos para la organización productiva y el modelo de consumo, y que nos permita mantener un equilibrio estable con el mundo natural en el que vivimos.

SASE Presidente: Santos Ruesga

Mini-Conferences

The 2023 SASE Annual Meeting featured 12 mini-conferences:

MC 1: Post-Neoliberal Transformations: Politics, Practices and Governance in a Changing International Political Economy

Organizers: Pedro Garrido da Costa Lima, Alexandros Kentikelenis, Gabriel Rached, Quinn Slobodian, Christy Thornton

For many observers, the activist government responses to the spread of Covid-19 represented a radical break from the dominant paradigms of economic management and the role of the state: neoliberal orthodoxies on ever-expanding markets, limited state intervention and individual self- reliance were jettisoned as policymakers used the power of the state to oversee large social assistance and economic support packages. Academics have pointed to how the failures of neoliberalism—hollowed-out state capacity and widening socio-economic inequalities— exacerbated the impact of the pandemic and thoroughly discredited this policy paradigm, while Financial Times editorials quickly heralded the emergence of a ‘post-neoliberal order’.

This is not the first time that neoliberalism has been pronounced dead or dying. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, there was no shortage of commentary on the imminent collapse of the neoliberal order (e.g., Stiglitz, 2008; Wallerstein, 2008). But over the subsequent decade, social scientists comprehensively documented that this was not the case. For example, the crisis had long-lasting adverse effects on employment, and sparked a renewed assault on state intervention through austerity and privatization. Will this time be different?

This mini-conference seeks to interrogate the shifting ground of ongoing post-neoliberal transformations. In doing so, we do not treat post-neoliberalism as a rigid temporal demarcation signifying the end of the neoliberal era. Instead, we use the term to refer to the ongoing (re)orderings of political economies across the world: this is not necessarily done in opposition to the neoliberal paradigm, but in interaction with it. Given the neoliberal dominance of the past decades, ongoing transformations occur in necessary dialogue with the ideological, political and policy infrastructures of this ‘always mutating’ paradigm (Peck and Theodore, 2019). In the Global North, attempts to enact post-neoliberal policy programs are most advanced, but they have often taken reactionary forms (Davies, 2021) or been co-opted by corporate and financial interests (Braun, 2021). In the Global South, there is diversity of policy responses to the crises of neoliberalism, and ongoing efforts to change the mode of integration into global value chains are eliciting resistance from guardians of economic orthodoxy like the World Bank (Bair et al., 2021). And China does not fit neatly in the neoliberalism/post-neoliberalism spectrum (Slobodian, 2022).

This mini-conference hopes to encourage empirical attempts to capture the broad contours of post-neoliberal transformations, including attention to their intellectual, bureaucratic and political aspects, as well as place them in their broader historical context. How have countries or regions sought to move beyond the neoliberal paradigm, how have they succeeded or failed, and why? How have global processes shaped the possibilities for post-neoliberal alternatives? How do social movements and political forces across the ideological spectrum relate to the neoliberal order and its potential overhaul? What are the intellectual underpinnings of ongoing political-economic transformations? What parallels can be drawn from past attempts at fundamental paradigm change? Submissions that approach these questions through innovative theoretical and empirical work across a range of disciplines (including political science, sociology, history, public policy, geography, and economics) are welcome.

Potential topics on post-neoliberal transformations that submissions could explore are as follows:

Domestic dimensions: The changing role of central banks in managing global crises; The role of state intervention and industrial policies; Policies to combat climate change and their relationship to neoliberalism; Changes in (post)neoliberal labor practices; The politics of inflation management
Transnational dimensions: The role of South-South economic relationships, commodity cartels, or return of non-alignment; Precedents for “friendshoring” or repatriation of supply chains; Transnational labor and social movement responses to a changing political economy
Global governance dimensions: The role of China in the emerging global economic model; The shifting politics of austerity in International Financial Institutions; The emergence of new global organizational actors; The impact of geopolitical tensions on shifting economic models; Reforms to the contemporary international institutional framework; The role of regional blocks and regionalism.

MC 2: Connecting the Dots between Global Capitalism and National Capitalisms in a Transitional World Order

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

During the last decade, the world order has been undergoing massive transformations across multiple levels. Those processes of change were manifested in domestic political transformation as well as in global restructuring of institutions and hierarchies. To make sense of these developments it is essential to connect the dots between the global and national trends. Our mini-conference seeks to attract cutting-edge contributions that address those linkages.

The world order is shaped by multi-dimensional dynamics, which are observable at the domestic and the international levels. On the international level, the world is going through transitions via rearrangement of international organization structures, institutional and regime changes, as well as through a reformation of global hierarchies. The changes on the international level influence domestic processes in the form of economic regime changes, rise of new ideologies and the formation of new types of political coalitions. At the same time, the transformations at the domestic level – particularly in large economies and powerful states – can have important repercussions on the international level via feedback effects.

For the community of scholars in Socio-Economics, these transitions lead to particular challenges with regard to the internal structure of the discipline. Primarily, any systematic study of the economic aspects of a changing world order requires a deeper understanding of the interactions and linkages between International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE). International organizations, institutions, regimes and structures–which are usually studied by IPE scholars—are affected and shaped by domestic actors; but at the same time, they affect and shape domestic economic regimes. Therefore, connecting the dots between IPE and CPE is essential both to understanding the transitional world order and to further our understanding of comparative capitalism.

In line with these considerations, this mini-conference will invite theoretical and empirical contributions that bring together the CPE and IPE approaches to understand contemporary capitalist societies, global capitalism, and the changes they have been going through. This also calls for a careful analysis of the transnational relations between national units as well, a crucial aspect that tends to be forgotten in the often too strict sharing of tasks between the two sub-disciplines that either focus on the intergovernmental/global level or on the comparison of national models. Correspondingly, we highlight three core study areas to carefully identify the new contours of the new global economic order: national capitalism, transnational economic relations and global institutions. A more nuanced focus on the complex state of the global economy is evermore important to understand the novel challenges to the current world order. For example, overlooking the role of international finance when researching the ‘authoritarian turn’ in many countries will provide only a partial understanding about this issue. Similarly, the dynamics of international migration, national capitalist structures, security, and domestic politics cannot be studied in isolation from one another.

Given the broader focus of our mini-conference on the global level, we believe it is also necessary to study global capitalism from the perspective of the periphery and the semi-periphery. This implies that growth models and capitalist systems in the South must not be studied as unsuccessful attempts to emulate growth strategies in the North, but rather as strategies designed to address their subordinated position in global capitalism. Therefore, our mini-conference will put a special emphasis on the late industrialising countries —both middle-income and low-income countries— which have experienced industrialisation and global integration at very different stages but are increasingly playing a key role in the global political and economic system. This is not only because of the growing size of their economies, which is the case for most of the BRICS, but also their crucial place shaping the global movement of goods, services, finance, and people. For instance, late industrialisers including Turkey, Colombia and Pakistan currently host the largest number of refugees worldwide, putting these countries in a critical position for not only domestic political relations but also their capitalist structures and transnational relations.

With this focus, the mini-conference will invite contributions on national capitalism, transnational political and economic relations, and global institutions to better understand the current and changing capitalist world order. This can include – but is not limited to – investment, trade, finance and migration flows, linkages between multilateral institutions and national capitalist systems, and interactions between different capitalist societies. We are especially welcoming studies that focus on underrepresented geographic regions in CPE and IPE, and the communities that are increasingly networked with the Global. More specifically, the papers in this mini-conference will address one or more of these questions:

To what extent do new financial challenges under a changing world order shape economic growth and inequalities under national capitalist regimes?
How do historical differences in the financialization experiences of national capitalist systems affect current trends in global financial flows?
To what extent do varying types of trade and investment agreements, multilateral institutions and international regimes shape national economic systems?
How do variations of national economic systems affect multilateral organisations and/or international agreements (e.g., in the field of trade and investment)?
How are the current global dynamics, such as digitisation and international migration, affecting the national labour institutions, labour markets, and labour movements?
How do variations in rapidly evolving security conditions affect national capitalist systems?
How do recent challenges to the working of national capitalist systems (e.g. Coronavirus, supply-chain crisis, war in Ukraine…) affect global security architecture?
How do novel challenges to the global flows of goods/services and investment (including commodity cycles) influence national capitalist systems and vice versa?

MC 3: A Digital Revolution in the Making? Productive Opportunities, New Divides and Implications for Development and Policy in Middle-Income Countries

Organizers: Antonio Andreoni, Elvis Korku Avenyo, João Carlos Ferraz, Alejandro Lavopa, Fiona Tregenna

Rapid technological innovation and the increasing adoption of digital technologies are transforming productive sectors, especially manufacturing industries, into smarter production systems. In low- and middle-income countries, the application of advanced digital technologies is renewing prospects for technological catch-up and sustainable structural transformation. Indeed, digitalisation is an essential component of green industrialisation and renewable energy. At the same time, these digital transformations are also creating new divides among firms at the local level and along global value chains. Digitalisation is indeed highly unequal and poses new developmental challenges. Mounting pressure on upgrading workers’ skills and new forms of compression on workers and employment are examples. Understanding these emerging dynamics of transformation and how to govern digitalisation towards inclusive and sustainable structural transformation is central to this mini-conference.

In middle-income countries, structural transformation has been stifled by the middle-income trap, middle-income technology trap, and premature deindustrialisation (Andreoni and Tregenna, 2020). The modernisation of industrial processes through the application of digital production technologies and processes is a critical breaking point away from these traps and vicious cycles. The emerging literature analysing digital production technology adoption in middle-income countries, largely based on firm-level surveys reveals that the adoption of digital technologies is occurring in firms but at an uneven speed and scale with only few manufacturing firms and industries integrating advanced technologies and processes into their production processes (IEL, 2018; Albrieu, et al. 2019; Ferraz et al., 2019; UNIDO, 2019; Ferraz et al., 2020; Delera et al., 2022; Avenyo et al., 2022; Avenyo and Bell, 2022). In addition, the emerging ‘islands of success’ are impacting firms, industries, and countries differently (Andreoni, et al., 2021a). The uncertainty around the immediate benefits and risks associated with advanced digital technologies uptake is also discouraging aggressive investments (Andreoni, et al., 2021b). Hence, the digital transformation process and its gains may not lead to the expected disruptive transformation and may even be elusive in middle-income countries (Ferraz et al., 2019; Delera et al., 2022).

To advance the adoption of digital technologies and unlock the benefits of digital industrialization for industrial development, countries require a minimum base of digital skills and capabilities (UNIDO, 2019; Kupfer et al., 2019). That is, firms are required to possess a certain level of foundational capabilities (Andreoni et al., 2021b). The accumulation and the development of foundational capabilities and skills determine a country’s readiness to embrace digital technologies, and positions firms to exploit the potential gains and benefits from the digital transformation. The evidence on the adoption and diffusion of digital technologies and the building of digital skill competencies in middle-income countries remain limited and anecdotal. The foregoing suggests that several conceptual issues and questions on the adoption and successful application of advanced digital production technologies and building of competencies in middle-income countries remain answered.

The following is a preliminary list of questions that this mini-conference would like contributors to address:

What are the key opportunities and challenges firms in middle-income economies face in adopting and adapting advanced digital technologies?
How do firms and their workers learn to digitalise?
How do digital technologies impact workers?
What digital skill competencies and foundational capabilities are crucial prerequisites for sustainable and inclusive structural transformation in late industrialising economies?
How digital technologies can contribute to green industrialisation in middle-income countries?
What policies and institutions are needed to direct and govern digitalisation in middle-income countries?

These issues are not posed in other related SASE networks. Given that digitalisation is ubiquitous, new thinking based on firm and industry case studies is needed for evidence-based policy response to these questions. The SASE 2023 mini-conference is aimed at bringing together and consolidating the scant research on these issues, particularly from a middle-income point of view. The mini-conference would reflect and discuss issues around what is needed for digital technology- and digital skills-driven industrialisation and structural transformation agenda in middle-income countries. This is critical for appropriate policy response. The mini-conference will also solicite research covering issues around digital leadership enablers and how this influences employment creation patterns in middle-income countries; the emerging differences and consolidation of public policies for digitalisation; role of digitalisation in enabling countries to mitigate and to reduce carbon footprints as countries aspire to industrialise sustainably; and finally, set an agenda to develop a research network on digital industrialisation and economic production and its related issues in middle-income countries.

References

Albrieu, R., Ferraz, J. C., Rapett, M., Brest Lopez, C., Nogueira de Paiva Britto, J., Kupfer, D. and Torracca, J., (2019). The Adoption of Digital Technologies in Developing Countries. Vienna: United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Andreoni, A, & Tregenna, F 2020. Escaping the middle-income technology trap: A comparative analysis of industrial policies in China, Brazil and South Africa. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 54, 324–340.

Andreoni, A., Barnes, J., Black, A. and Sturgeon, T., (2021a). Digitalization, industrialization, and skills development: Opportunities and challenges for middle-income countries. : A. Andreoni, P. Mondliwa, S. Roberts & F. Tregenna, Hrsg. Structural transformation in South Africa, Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Andreoni, A., Chang, H. J., & Labrunie, M. (2021b). Natura non facit saltus: Challenges and opportunities for digital industrialisation across developing countries. The European Journal of Development Research, 33(2), 330-370. Avenyo, E.K., Bell, J.F. and Nyamwena, J. (2022). Determinants of digital technologies’ adoption in South African manufacturing: Evidence from a firm-level survey. CCRED-IDTT Working Paper 2022/02: Johannesburg.

Avenyo, E.K and Bell, J. (2022). Disruptive Technologies and Manufacturing Performance in South Africa: Firm-Level Evidence. The African Economic Research Consortium Working Paper 2022/004: Nairobi.

Delera M, Pietrobelli C, Calza E, Lavopa A. 2022. Does value chain participation facilitate the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in developing countries? World Development. 152:105788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105788 Ferraz, J. C., D. Kupfer, J. Torracca, and J. N. P. Britto (2019). ‘Snapshots of a state of flux: how Brazilian industrial firms differ in

the adoption of digital technologies and policy implications.’ Journal of Economic Policy Reform 23(4): 390–407, Ferraz, J.C. 2021. Chasing the rainbow: towards an experimental framework for the assessment of digitalisation at firm level. IE UFRJ DISCUSSION PAPER: TD 040; Instituto de Economia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

IEL (2018). Indústria 2027: Riscos e oportunidades para o Brasil diante de inovações disruptivas. Brasilia: IEL. www.portaldaindustria.com.br/cni/canais/industria-2027.

Kupfer, D., Ferraz, J. C. and Torracca, J., 2019. A Comparative Analysis on Digitalization in Industry in Selected Developing Countries: Firm Level Data on Industry 4.0. Background paper prepared for the Industrial Development Report 2020. Vienna: United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

UNIDO (2019). ‘Industrializing in the digital age.’ Industrial development report. Vienna: UNIDO.

MC 4: Recasting Futures: Fracturing Multiplicity of Learning

Organizers: Gary Herrigel, Adriana Mica, Ann Mische

Governance of disruptions and building new resilient models in moments of uncertainty and change entails recasting the future and formulating new trajectories for social, economic, and political regimes. Moments of destabilization in which incumbent conceptions of the future are destabilized and new ones proliferate and compete with one another have been unfolding in the last two decades in cascades. The global financial crisis of 2008-9, for instance, gave rise to a recomposition and reformulation of financial risks, of the role of finance in the political economy, and of the scope and legitimacy of central bank action in the economy. The refugee crisis of 2015-2016 projected spatial encounters and infrastructures around various new conceptions of future mobility, sovereignty and citizenship. The COVID-19 pandemic, similarly, generated a variety of projections for global health and health policy (resting in part on new technical imaginaries) along with various forms of distrust for expert knowledge. Finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given rise to complex and tragic imaginaries of risk, destabilization, strategic uncertainty and nuclear and environmental catastrophe.

These kinds of transitional states generate alternative paradigms for the future, projections of order and practice that invariably recompose the relational and institutional world as we know it. The future is the crucial space of contestation for all of these projections and new imaginings. Learning, experimentation and failure are central institutions, practices and events in our analytic purview. The mini-conference serves as an occasion for economic sociologists, political economists and social theorists, and those involved in critical failure and ignorance studies to come together to explore points of compatibility, complementarity and difference in the way in which they theorize the construction of relationships between the past, present and future in the contemporary world. The shared analytical frame is that the future is more than simply a temporal “not yet”, but instead is understood to be a globally heterogeneous site of projection, contestation, learning, failure and strategic ignorance.

The mini-conference is open to a broad array of possible contributions, ranging from highly abstract social theoretical discussions of action, uncertainty, risk and change, to central problems in economic sociology and political economy concerning institutional and strategic change, learning, failure, democratic backsliding and expansion, environmental crisis and identity challenges and struggles of all kinds. We are interested in theoretically unraveling how the future in the transitioning and broadly self-recomposing world is constituted. What is publicly at stake and what is tacitly put on hold? How are bridges from the present to the future imagined and constructed? Are futures unitary? Can they ever be “real” or are futures always narratives of the not yet? Traditionally, the mini-conference has had a strong interest in the processes that drive economic and political utopias and dystopias. But most broadly we are interested in the way in which the future emerges in all of its multiplicity of fracture, failure, success, hopefulness and cynicism.

MC 5: Elites and Power Structures

Organizers: Bruno Cousin, Christoph Houman Ellersgaard, Elisa Klüger, Elisa Reis, Thierry Rossier, André Vereta-Nahoum, Kevin Young

The current transitions and breakdown of the economic order call for attention to how elites, as engineers and operators of this order, are promoting or responding to the disruptions caused by climate change, economic crises, pandemics and digitalization, notwithstanding their own role in the creating and acceleration of these transformations.

As democracy is being challenged by both authoritarianism and the hollowing out of democratic institutions, the role played by elites both within and outside these institutions – and the relations between their strategies of action – merits further scholarly scrutiny. As the growth models and the legitimacy behind elite coalitions are challenged, new elite constellations and their responses to legitimacy crises need to be charted. Therefore, the different hegemonic projects of various elites still need to be studied to understand their contribution to the persistence of neoliberalism and to the stability of the socio-economic configurations.

In short, to address the most pressing problems of the current socio-economic order, we need to know more about the elites who play a pivotal role in it. Therefore, this mini-conference invites scholars who want to contribute in the discussion on how elites compete and cooperate to influence this order, on how they react to pressures and demands from below, how they articulate different publics in support of their projects, and how they address major societal challenges. More specifically, we call for new scholarship interested in researching power elites, that is, groups positioned at the top of key institutional orders (Mills 1956, Bourdieu 1989). In particular, we encourage contributions that investigate elites who play a key role in governing the economy, be that through positions in large corporations, think tanks, or in institutions that shape the rules of the game, like governmental agencies and regulatory bodies.

The study of elites is already a buoyant research area. Fifteen years ago, Savage and Williams (2008) had stated that elites had been “forgotten in the social sciences”. Yet ever since, a vast literature has become available on economic, professional and cultural elites, and their intersections, in various national settings. This scholarship draws on a variety of methods and forms of data collection, such as prosopographies, archival data on taxes and ownership, analysis of elite networks and interlocks, geometric data analysis of elite groups, ethnography of elites, elite interviews and textual analysis of elite discourses. However, to a large extent this literature remains stuck in descriptions of particular cases, and mostly situated at the national level and/or restricted to the countries of the Global North. While this field has come to be a ‘rich and fast-growing terrain’ it still ‘gives us little capacity to make sense of the ways in which elites are influencing our world’ (Cousin et al., 2018: 226).

Large scale comparative work on elites has surprisingly slowed since the early 1990s (Higley, Hoffmann-Lange, Kadushin & Moore 1991), with perhaps the exception of work focusing on the study of corporate interlocks (see e.g. Heemskerk et al. 2013, Cárdenas 2012). This means that the relation between different aspects of elites and larger changes in the political economy during the last three decades still remain understudied and under-theorized. This is a surprising lacunae because many heterodox economic perspectives offer ways to productively theorize how elites operate within organizations, how status is reproduced, and how they link up with one another. Furthermore, the availability of large new datasets available to researchers and the development and combinations of new qualitative and quantitative methods make the potential for integration and cross-fertilization of different approaches. While we need to develop both a theoretical frameworks and suitable methodologies to allow for meaningful comparisons, efforts to do so will enable elite research to engage with broader socio-economic scholarship. This includes scholarship linking heterodox economics to the study of elites, studies of gender, race and ethnicity, as well as the innovative use of new methodologies to study elites and elite power.

The research questions relevant to understand the roles elites play in the current socio-economic order are many. It is important, for example, to examine if the power elites are becoming more integrated or more fragmented; to see how elites interact with experts and engage with expertise through think tanks or other ways to construct persuasive narratives to their claims; to understand the functioning of social institutions such as race and ethnicity among elites; to map out the relationships between established power elites and new political forces of anti-establishment parties; to assess how elites in the Global South and the North migrate and interact; to understand where and how their projects are assembled, how they mobilize social support, and how they fend off attacks on their legitimacy and exorbitant privilege

This SASE mini-conference aims thus to open the dialogue on the above mentioned issues by inviting scholars to discuss and engage with the work on power elites in order to build a stronger comparative framework with deeper linkages to other research topics in political economy, economic sociology and related fields. We encourage contributions from adjacent fields, such as work on expertise, intellectuals, interest formation and advocacy. We anticipate that participants will present theoretical and empirical work on power elites, but will also be motivated to position their research in a comparative framework, to grasp how elite constellations coalesce into national and international power structures. This could include works addressing the relationship between elites and rising inequality, growing political discontent or the capability to adapt to a more ecologically sustainable economy.

Furthermore, we hope this mini-conference will enable discussions on the wider scope of elite research, including the questions raised by classical traditions such as Marx, Weber, Mills, or Bourdieu. Specifically, we will enable discussions on the dynamics between elite groups and dominated classes , as well as contemporary contributions on democracy, technocracy, and technoscientific capitalism. Lastly, we hope these discussions can help to lay the ground for the recently initiated World Elite Database project (see Savage & Hjellbrekke 2021).

References:

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. State Nobility – Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cárdenas, Julián. 2012. “Varieties of Corporate Networks: Network Analysis and FsQCA.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology53 (4): 298–322.

Cousin, Bruno, Shamus Rahman Khan, and Ashley Mears. 2018. “Theoretical and Methodological Pathways for Research on Elites.” Socio-Economic Review 16 (2): 225–49.

Heemskerk, Eelke M., Fabio Daolio, and Marco Tomassini. 2013. “The Community Structure of the European Network of Interlocking Directorates 2005–2010.”PLoS ONE 8 (7): e68581.

Higley, John, Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, Charles Kadushin, and Gwen Moore. 1991. “Elite Integration in Stable Democracies: A Reconsideration.” European Sociological Review 7 (1): 35–53.

Mills, Charles Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Savage, Mike, and Johs Hjellbrekke. 2021. “The Sociology of Elites: A European Stocktaking and Call for Collaboration.” III Working Paper 58. London: LSE.

Savage, Mike, and Karel Williams. 2008. “Elites: Remembered in Capitalism and Forgotten by Social Sciences.” The Sociological Review 56: 1–24.

MC 6: A Future for Health: Policies, Organizations, and Practices within Market and Social Transformations

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

The future of health and wellbeing for individuals and communities is at a turning point. From pandemics, climate change, and social movements, to a reckoning over the current model of socio economic development: markets and societies around the world are transforming into new socio economic arrangements with profound implications for the future of health. At the same time, policy actors, activists, and private interests are leading these transformations, prompting renewed urgency for social scientific empirical analysis and grounded theorizing. For instance, social movements centered around access to medicines have demanded that equity be the prime consideration in the distribution of medicines, while activists have called for inclusion of patient perspectives in the production of knowledge around disease conditions. Likewise, increased scrutiny over the model of socio-economic development that prioritizes growth above all else has called into question the marketization of healthcare that has become cost prohibitive to patients.

Such global transformations have implications for all levels of economy and society. In anticipating and preparing for a future for health, we must examine the international, state, and local level policies, organizations, and practices that are leading these transformations. For example, we can look at how policies around open innovation in the regulation and development of medicines help bring down the costs of healthcare and make life-saving medicines accessible to the broader public. Similarly, we can examine how health organizations and professions are creating new ways to engage with the communities that they serve, as well as planning for resiliency for future shocks and disturbances. Finally, we can also focus on the health practices of individuals and patients, as they strive for a healthier future. As scholars of socio-economics, political economy and like-minded peers, we too have a role to play in examining and charting this future for health.

The MedHealth mini-conference convenes interdisciplinary panels around policies, organizations, and practices that are impacting the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities amidst broader social transformations. We will facilitate critical discussion and reflection on participants’ works-in progress. Some potential questions include:

Healthcare systems and health policies: Why are some healthcare systems more resilient than others when facing social and economic shocks? What must be done to bridge the gap in equity and access between the Global North and the Global South? How can healthcare systems better prepare for future pandemics? What are some alternative health policies that can aid in the reduction of healthcare costs?
Healthcare organizations and professions: How have jurisdictional struggles between healthcare professions produced alternative arrangements of healthcare? What are some of the strategies that healthcare organizations have adopted to confront the challenges posed by social and economic transformations? Why has mistrust in medical expertise increased in recent years, and what can be done by medical experts to earn trust?
Medicines regulation and development: How has open innovation disrupted previous models of drug and treatment development? What alternatives are available for a more just and equitable distribution of medicines? How can and should we regulate such boundary-spanning products as probiotics and herbal medicinals?
Health practices: How have individuals and communities adapted their health practices in recent years in response to broader social transformations? What are some strategies that patients and publics have taken up to adapt to the rising costs of healthcare and medicines? Why have complementary and alternative medicines become more popular amongst certain patient groups and patient movements?

The MedHealth mini-conference encourages submissions of papers exploring emerging frameworks and theories, as well as empirically rich original data from around the 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.

We will accept and review abstracts, extended abstracts, or full papers by the deadline for the call for papers. We expect accepted participants to submit full papers by June 15.

MC 7: Decolonizing Development

Organizers: Zophia Edwards, Julian Go, Jason Jackson, Alexandre White

This mini-conference, building upon the last three 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 alternative 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 miniconference 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 paradigms 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 economic and political organization, 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

MC 8: Welfare States and Inequalities in the Global South

Organizers: Renata Bichir, Patrick Heller, Eduardo Marques, Prerna Singh

This mini-conference would bring together current scholarship on the form and impact of recent socio-economic and political transformations in the configuration, functioning and effects of welfare states in the global south. There is a long and deep literature on advanced capitalist economies that has demonstrated just how critical the development of the welfare state has been in making capitalist economies more inclusive and less unequal. Part of that literature has also shown the ways in which welfare policies can also contribute to promoting long term economic dynamism. The literature has also underscored the highly varied forms and pathways of welfare states formation (and transformation) and how consequential these variations are to promoting justice and equity.

The study of the welfare state in the global south is still under development, in particular with regard to the systematic use of typologies used by the consolidated literature. There are an increasing number of case studies and country-based analyses, but comparative work, especially across continents, remains relatively underdeveloped. What we do know is that over the last two decades or so, many developing countries in East Asia, South Asia, Latin American and Africa have made significant strides in rolling out and expanding a wide variety of social programs and basic public goods, such as the ones highlighted in the literature on the so called Pink Tide in Latin America. These have departed from various historically constructed policy legacies and in many cases produced innovative programs and policies. These transformations are all the more remarkable because they took place in a context of a global neo-liberal economy, increasing precarity and inequalities, deindustrialization and under a wide range of regime types. In many cases, the expansion of the welfare state has been driven by social movements and has taken the form of right-based claim making, while in others it has reinforced heritages of state corporatism. Similarly, while in some cases national systems enhanced vertical integration with increased social participation, in other cases transformations reinforced political centralization and even authoritarian tendencies. Therefore, it is clear that the forms and depth of the global south welfare state are highly varied.

From conditional cash transfer programs to new social insurance schemes for the informal sector, programs targeted at redressing gender and racial exclusions, experiments with basic income grants, new formats of public housing provision or urban service delivery, how the global south welfare state is developing is becoming a critical social science question. Understanding these new policies, their transformations and their impacts is critical to understanding the prospects for tackling inequality, social exclusion, racial and gender disparities and informality in the global south. This mini-conference is directly inspired by the theme of the conference. The challenges of contemporary disruptions – climate change and environmental degradation, threats to democracy, challenges to social rights and the displacement of labor by new technologies – are all inextricably tied to the fate of the welfare state and its crucial role in managing disruptions and mediating the relationships between States and their societies.

The conference would focus on three interrelated questions all designed to promote comparative discussion and analysis. First, what form are the global south welfare states, and more broadly Social Protection Systems, taking? Moving beyond the classic categories of Esping-Anderson and later contributions from Southern Europe, how can we typologize the global south welfare state both within and across continents? What groups, sectors or categories do they target and are they driven by logics of poverty reduction, redistribution and/or rights enhancement? Second, what has driven the expansion and transformation of welfare states? Are these state driven projects from above, the result of redistributive party-based politics or a response to broad-based movements for social inclusion? What has been the role of politics in its multiple simultaneous levels (local, sub-national and national) in their formation and transformations? Third, what impact did the expansion and recent transformations of welfare states have on a range of possible outcomes including but not limited to inequality, precarity, social exclusion and the possibilities for more effective responses to climate change?

In bringing together scholars who work on these questions across the global south our hope is that the conference can stimulate more comparative thinking and analysis.

MC 9: Rethinking Science in Latin America at the End of Times: Policies, Controversies, and Futures

Organizers: Juan Felipe Espinosa, Carla Fardella, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Discussions about science and its role in modern societies were foundational to much of the heterogeneous, diverse, and stimulating community of scholars interested in socioeconomics. Central to these discussions was the role of the state in fostering both human capabilities in science and technology as well as systems of innovation aimed at demonstrable, scalable impacts on the economy and society. These traditions, found in both innovation economics, evolutionary approaches to innovation, institutional scholarship of entrepreneurship, organizational and industrial psychology, and a variety of other subdomains remains relevant until today.

Yet despite this strong history, discussions about the intersections of science, public policy, and the institutions where knowledge is constituted have lost steam. This is particularly true in regions like Latin America where science and technology policies have lost their position in both the academic and political landscape, having become a memory of a past geared towards a particular form of economic development. From Chile and Brazil to Colombia and Mexico, science policies are now under flux, requiring a renewed discussion about their shape, objectives, and limits.

In this mini conference, we seek to bring together scholars from across disciplinary fields to discuss science policies in Latin America. Taking advantage of the location of the conference, we seek to foster a discussion about the current state and future challenges of the science, technology, and innovation sectors in the region. But more than simply taking stock of where we stand, the mini conference seeks to be a space for rethinking some of the possible futures of science in Latin America during a time of ecological collapse, climate crises, and sociopolitical uncertainty. What kind of science do we have? And what kind of science may we need in confronting the challenges of the immediate future?

We thus invite scholars interested in the following and related topics to contribute to our conversation:

Science funding and evaluation and their effects on knowledge production
Scientific careers in the context of austerity and precarity
Epistemic and evaluative diversity
Institutional ecologies of knowledge production and dissemination
Structural constraints of innovation systems in the context of the climate crisis
Rethinking scientific innovation policies for climate change and economic uncertainty
Regional cooperation regimes
Brain-drain and North-South responsibilities in technology transfer

MC 10: Studies on Informal Activity and Policies for Its Reduction / Estudios sobre la Actividad Informal y Políticas para su Reducción

Organizers: Javier Baquero, Danielle Carusi Machado, Rodrigo Chávez, Jesuswaldo Martínez Soria, Valéria Pero, Jésica Lorena Pla, Clemente Ruiz Durán

In terms of informal activity, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. The dynamics observed in formal and informal markets differ from those observed in previous economic crises. Often, when formal activity falls, its informal counterpart plays a countercyclical role, and its level increases or at least decreases with less intensity. However, in this crisis, both formal and informal economic activity experienced a pronounced contraction, the latter more intense than the former. Mobility restrictions, a consequence of the sanitary nature of the crisis, prevented the development of informal activities, which are generally nourished by social interaction in population centres. For this reason, informal markets have not served as a corrective tool for the contraction of formal exchanges. For its part, once the worst moments of the crisis have been overcome, the partial recovery of the economy has been driven by the growth of informality in the regions where this type of activity has a significant presence.

From this perspective, it should also be noted that, within informality, it is women, young people and people with lower qualifications who have been most affected by this contraction, given the unequal impact of the crisis on income and the effects of the economic recession on poverty levels.

To illustrate this global problem, we can use as a prime example the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the regions with the highest levels of informality. In 2020, this region recorded a contraction in the level of economic activity in the order of -7 per cent. This drop is more than double that of the world and is the largest of all regions. Most of the productive sectors dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises felt the impact of the crisis. And, according to ECLAC, no less than two million micro and small enterprises in the region have closed their doors for good. The drastic reduction in the level of activity had an impact on employment with an intensity also unprecedented in the region. The employment rate in 2020 fell by 10 per cent compared to the previous year, a steeper drop than GDP. The fall in the number of people employed at the onset of the economic crisis understates its impact to the extent that there was a simultaneous fall in the number of hours worked by those who remained employed. In some countries of the region, the reduction in hours doubles or triples the fall in employment.

In this scenario, it is necessary, even more than in the past, to adopt a comprehensive, consensual and far-reaching human-centred policy agenda to support the creation of more formal employment, protect micro and small enterprises, and guarantee income and social protection for workers and families in vulnerable conditions. Otherwise, in this perspective, we must take into account that the impacts of the crisis will be prolonged, deeper and longer lasting.

In this mini-conference, we intend to discuss the phenomenon of illegal and informal labor markets from different prisms and dimensions.

On the one hand, moving from the perspective that points to the topic of this XXXIV SASE Conference, an alternative paradigm for a new world order, we will try to interpret the phenomenon of informality, within the developing theoretical field of Socioeconomics. This requires a multidisciplinary effort between different areas of the field of Social Sciences to offer us alternative tools to the conventional models dominant in recent decades, to interpret this widespread phenomenon.

And, on the other hand, expanding the territory of empirical socioeconomic research, at both the micro and macro levels, on a phenomenon with effects as outstanding as they are ignored by the public authorities and conventional science.

Consequently, for the realization of this mini-conference, papers that fall within the following thematic areas will be considered:

Interpretative paradigms for socioeconomic informality.
Informality as an object of study. Cross-sectional analysis. Impacts of informality: economic, social, political, environmental, etc. Trends and prospects for the future of informality.
Trends in informal markets during the COVID-19 crisis. Recovery and uneven behaviour of formal and informal markets.
New expressions of informality from Socioeconomics. The emergence of remote work through digital platforms.
State-led policies to reduce informality.

* * *

Por su parte, en términos de la actividad informal, nos encontramos en una situación que no cuenta con precedentes. La dinámica observada en mercados formales e informales difiere de la observada en crisis económicas anteriores. Con frecuencia, cuando cae la actividad formal, su contraparte informal tiene un papel contracíclico, y su nivel aumenta o al menos disminuye con menor intensidad. Sin embargo, en esta crisis tanto la actividad económica formal como la informal experimentaron una contracción pronunciada, más intensa la última que la primera. Las restricciones de movilidad, consecuencia de la naturaleza sanitaria de la crisis, impidieron el desarrollo de las actividades informales, que generalmente se nutren de la interacción social en los núcleos de población. Por esta razón, los mercados informales no han servido como herramienta correctora de la contracción de los intercambios formales. Por su parte, una vez superados los peores momentos de la crisis, la recuperación parcial de la economía ha sido impulsada por el crecimiento de la informalidad en las regiones donde este tipo de actividad tiene una presencia importante.

Desde esta perspectiva, también cabe señalar que, dentro de la informalidad, son las mujeres, los jóvenes y las personas con menor cualificación quienes se han visto afectados de en mayor medida por esta contracción, dados los impactos desiguales de la crisis en los ingresos y por los efectos de la recesión económica sobre los niveles de pobreza.

Para ilustrar este problema global, podemos utilizar como ejemplo principal el caso de América Latina y el Caribe, una de las regiones con mayores niveles de informalidad. En 2020, esta región registró una contracción en el nivel de actividad económica del orden de -7 por ciento. Esta caída es más del doble que la del mundo y es la mayor de todas las regiones. La mayoría de los sectores productivos dominados por pequeñas y medianas empresas sintieron fuertemente los impactos de la crisis. Y, según la CEPAL, nada menos que dos millones de micro y pequeñas empresas de la región han cerrado sus puertas para siempre. La drástica reducción del nivel de actividad tuvo un impacto en el empleo con una intensidad también sin precedentes en la región. La tasa de empleo en 2020 cayó un 10 por ciento en comparación con el año anterior, una caída más pronunciada que el PIB. La caída en el número de personas ocupadas al comienzo de la crisis económica subestima su impacto en la medida en que se produjo simultáneamente una caída en el número de horas trabajadas por quienes permanecieron ocupados. En algunos países de la región, la reducción de horas duplica o triplica la caída del empleo.

Es necesario, en este escenario, incluso más que en el pasado, adoptar una agenda de políticas integrales, consensuadas y de gran alcance, centradas en el ser humano, para apoyar la creación de más empleo formal, proteger a las micro y pequeñas empresas, y garantizar los ingresos y la protección social de los trabajadores y familias en condiciones de vulnerabilidad. De lo contrario, en esa perspectiva, hay que tener en cuenta que los impactos de la crisis se prolongarán y serán más profundos y duraderos.

En esta mini conferencia pretendemos debatir acerca del fenómeno de los mercados ilegales y los mercados informales de trabajo desde distintos prismas y dimensiones.

Por un lado, moviéndonos en la perspectiva que apunta el tópico de esta XXXIV Conferencia de la SASE, un paradigma alternativo para un nuevo orden mundial, trataremos de interpretar el fenómeno de la informalidad, dentro del campo teórico, en desarrollo, de la Socioeconomía. Ello requiere un esfuerzo multidisciplinar entre diferentes áreas del campo de las Ciencias Sociales que nos ofrezca herramientas alternativas a los modelos convencionales dominantes en las últimas décadas, para interpretar este fenómeno tan ampliamente extendido.

Y, de otro lado, ampliando el territorio de la investigación socioeconómica empírica, en el nivel tanto micro como macro, sobre un fenómeno con efectos tan destacadas como ignorados por los poderes público y la ciencia convencional.

En consecuencia, para la realización de esta mini conferencia se considerarán los trabajos que se encuadren en las siguientes áreas temáticas:

Paradigmas interpretativos para la informalidad socioeconómica.
La informalidad como objeto de estudio. Análisis transversales. Impactos de la informalidad: económicos, sociales, políticos, ambientales, etc. Tendencias y perspectivas hacia el futuro de la informalidad.
Tendencias de los mercados informales durante la crisis del COVID 19. Recuperación y comportamiento desigual de los mercados formales e informales.
Nuevas expresiones de la informalidad desde la Socioeconomía. Surgimiento del trabajo remoto a través de plataformas digitales.
Políticas dirigidas por el Estado para reducir la informalidad.

MC 11: Theories and Practices of Racial Capitalism: Race, Ethnicity, and Migration during Periods of Transition

Organizers: Nabila Islam, Mishal Khan

Building on last year’s mini-conference on economic racism, ethnic chauvinism, and racial capitalism, we welcome papers that examine theories and practices of racial capitalism from diverse perspectives. We especially seek to showcase research that explores connections between race, ethnicity, migration, and the economy during historical and contemporary periods of transition.

In recent years, there has been an explosion in literature drawing on racial capitalism as an analytic across a wide range of disciplines and subfields including historical sociology, political theory, economic history, labor economics, law, human geography, American Studies, and Black Studies. Much of this conversation has been linked to contemporary concerns around racial violence and the crisis of capitalism and wealth inequality in the United States. Scholars studying non-US contexts too are engaging – even if critically – with the key tenets of the racial capitalism literature, while migration scholars are exploring how economic crisis, global patterns of accumulation, and racial structures direct and stymie migrant flows across the planet. In this mini-conference we seek to take stock of these conversations to collectively reflect on what theorizations of racial capitalism bring to some of the urgent questions that confront us today. How does a reconsideration of slavery, race, and capitalism from beyond the Atlantic shift our ability to tackle the truly global scale of the multiple crises – wars, pandemic, climate change, authoritarianism, economic stagnation – that confront us? How have the interactions between race, ethnicity, migration, and capitalism contributed to the shifting of extant paradigms in the past and present and how have they been reshaped by such transitional periods?

We invite submissions that build on a body of work in race, gender and sexualities, racialized organizations, the racial wealth gap, racialized property regimes, the historic relationship between race and capitalism in different geographic contexts, colonial and ongoing extraction of labor from the Global South, and work that highlights alternative genres of social difference (gender, caste, kinship, et cetera), among others. Papers using global and transnational perspectives and de/post/anticolonial and intersectional approaches are welcome. Submissions that explicitly link to the SASE 2023 theme “Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order,” are encouraged.

An explicit goal of this mini-conference is to showcase contributions from scholars from diverse backgrounds, from across disciplines and who use various empirical settings and methodological and theoretical approaches to advance an expansive – but also more precise – understanding of racial capitalism.

MC 12: Sources of Power in Illegal Markets

Organizers: Matías Dewey, Gabriel Feltran

Social change, disruption and crisis situations are fertile soil for the emergence of illegal markets. Inflation, war, political turmoil and far-reaching technological innovations have typically provided the conditions for different actors—not only “organized criminals”—to mobilize resources for illegal transactions.

The proposed mini-conference seeks to shed light on the phenomenon of power in illegal markets. From a sociological perspective to illegal markets, the focus lies on the sources of power as the elements different actors can mobilize to exercise power to conduct illegal transactions. Illegal market actors such as organized criminals, consumers, brokers, corrupt government and state actors extract power from different sources. For instance, different criminal groups have gained legitimacy among poor populations and territories, offering them both material resources extracted from illegal markets and a matrix of discursive justifications for accepting or tolerating criminal governance. In different territories in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the power of criminal organizations coexists with state sovereignty and different levels of social acceptance.

Drawing on the concept of illegal markets as arenas of exchange of goods or services whose production, distribution or consumption is legally banned (Beckert and Dewey 2017), we argue that economic exchanges can effectively take place if the actors involved mobilize various sources of power. The illegal accumulation of capital within illegal markets is now transnational and can be residual in some national economies but represent a good share of GDP in poorer countries. Actors that control the accumulation of resources could also become relevant political actors.

Our mini-conference’s topic refers to the sources of power that enable market actors to effectively carry out unlawful exchanges. The organizers have identified four sources of power in illegal markets: 1) regulations and enforcement, 2) technology, 3) morality (social perceptions, ideologies, values) and 4) the unequal distribution of resources including capital and the use of force.

Regulations and enforcement: actors in illegal markets manipulate regulations and enforcement in order to camouflage their actions and/or protect themselves or others. On the one hand, actors in illegal markets take strategically advantage of both prohibitions and gaps in regulations. Similarly, they take advantage of enforcement mechanisms, for example, bribing state officials, evading checks, being attentive to police’s tolerance, etc. to protect themselves or others. On the other hand, governments and state actors can also manipulate the enforcement to sell protection to criminals i.e., commodifying enforcement, eliminate some market actors, etc.

Technology and infrastructures: actors in illegal markets can use technology to make illegal economic exchanges possible. There are different technologies that actors can mobilize to pursue their ends. There are well-known physical technology devices or infrastructures such as the container, cellphones, or postal service that actors use to make transactions. Now, digital technologies and infrastructures have brought illegal markets to a new level. Social media and messaging apps enable the creation of semi- and full-private marketplaces, digital payment services facilitate quick and anonymous transfers of money, and food delivery apps make distribution easier.

Morality and social perceptions: morality and people’s perception about commodities and the side-effects of their exchange are elements that can be used for the justification of illegal exchanges. Counterfeited products are a good example: generally speaking, compared to other markets such as hard drugs or child pornography, they are quite accepted, and that social acceptance is used by people to justify and keep consuming this type of products. Equally important is ignorance or the perception that one is acting lawfully. This type of perceptions is crucial to understand the workings of markets such as the one for stolen auto parts where knowledge is scarce and fragmented.

Unequal distribution of resources: actors can take advantage of the unequal distribution of resources to create illegal markets. Crises and war situations are good examples of this: some actors with access to scarce goods are in an excellent position to satisfy people in need, for instance, of food stuff or medicines. Durable inequalities (Tilly 1998) have also created the conditions for the emergence of illegal markets, a situation intensified by a lacking sense of belonging of vulnerable groups. Profound economic inequality, therefore, can be exploited by groups capable of producing wealth in illegal markets and become de facto rulers of marginal populations. In consequence, the hybridization of political orders based on unequal resources for force and accumulation seems to be a trend in several highly developed criminal contexts (Steputtat 2013, Arias and Barnes 2013, Feltran 2020).

This mini-conference aims to address all of these sources of power within and around the rapidly changing illegal global markets. We expect a min-conference that showcases a wide variety of illegal markets.

References

Arias, E. Desmond, and Barnes, Nicholas. 2017. “Crime and plural orders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil”. Current Sociology, 65(3), 448–465.

Beckert, Jens and Matias Dewey. 2017. The Architecture of Illegal Markets. Toward an Economic Sociology of Illegality in the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Feltran Gabriel de Santis. 2020. The Entangled City: Crime as Urban Fabric in Sao Paulo. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Stepputat, Finn. 2013. Contemporary Governscapes: Sovereign Practice and Hybrid Orders Beyond the Center. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tilly Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Featured Events

Featured Speakers

Glass Ceilings, Brick Walls and Sticky Floors: Feminist Economics’ Insights into Labor Markets

Date/Location: Thursday July 20, 10:30-12, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

This presentation will use a feminist economics framework and insights from different disciplines to address various barriers to mobility in labour markets across the Global South, barriers that are manifested in the widely observed horizontal and vertical segmentation of labour market hierarchies.

Speaker: Naila Kabeer

Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and International Development at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. Her research focus has been on gender, poverty, livelihoods and labour markets, social protection and collective action. She is a member of the International Association For Feminist Economists and is on the editorial board of Feminist Economics as well as Development and Change and Gender and Development. She had over 30 years of experience in research, training and advisory work. Relevant publications to her presentation to the 35th Annual SASE Meeting include Material barriers, cultural boundaries: A mixed-methods analysis of gender and labour market segmentation in Bangladesh; Women’s access to market opportunities in South Asia and the Middle East&North Africa: constraints, opportunities and policy challenges; ‘Paradigm shift or business as usual: workers’ perspectives on multi-stakeholder initiatives in Bangladesh’ in Development and Change; and Organizing women in the informal economy: beyond the weapons of the weak (Zed Press, 2013).

Transforming the State to Promote Citizenship and Development

Date/Location: Friday July 21, 15-16:30, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

Esther Dweck

Esther Dweck has been the Minister of Management and Innovation in Public Services since 2023.

Previously, she served in the governments of President Dilma Rousseff at the Ministry of Planning as Chief of the Economic Assessment of Budget and Management (2011-2014) and, in 2015, as head of the Federal Budget Office.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Esther Dweck graduated from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Economic Sciences. She did her Ph.D. at the same university and participated in a Doctoral Exchange Program at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in Pisa, Italy 2006.

Esther has had a long career as a professor, having taught at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), at the National Public Administration School (ENAP), and, since 2009, as a professor at the Institute of Economics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

In recent years, she has been an active voice in the defense of the State as an inducer of economic development. Author of several scientific articles and book chapters, she was responsible, in 2018 and 2020, together with other researchers, for organizing two books with various authors to denounce the dismantling of the Brazilian State and provide alternatives with new economic, social, and environmental development paradigms.

In 2021, she received the Woman Economist Award, granted by the Federal Economic Council of Brazil (Cofecon).

Speaker: Esther Dweck

Esther Dweck has been the Minister of Management and Innovation in Public Services since 2023.

In 2021, she received the Woman Economist Award, granted by the Federal Economic Council of Brazil (Cofecon).

The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

Date/Location: Thursday July 20, 13:15-14:45, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

Will green capitalism save us from the climate crisis? “Clean” technologies and renewable energy are certainly growing sites of capitalist investment, with government policies playing a key role in making these sectors profitable. But the supply chains that produce the technologies pose vexing dilemmas for the energy transition. These dilemmas are most dramatic at the extractive frontiers of green capitalism: where the natural resources needed to manufacture electric vehicles and build windmills are extracted. In this talk, we will unpack these challenges through the lens of lithium, a so-called “critical mineral” essential for its role in decarbonizing one of the most polluting sectors: transportation. With forecasters predicting an enormous surge in lithium demand exceeding existing supplies, Global North governments and downstream firms scramble to “secure” lithium, resulting in a new state-corporate alliance and the return of vertical integration. Meanwhile, environmental and Indigenous movements contest the rapid expansion of extraction, defending ecosystems, livelihoods, and waterways already under pressure from global warming from a new boom in mining. It is in the play of these forces, unfolding amidst geopolitical rivalry and economic turbulence, that the energy transition will be forged. To conclude, we will explore the possibility of a less mining-intensive pathway to zero carbon transportation.

Speaker: Thea Riofrancos

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2023). She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and the coauthor of Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). She is currently writing Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton)

Relational Inequalities

Date/Location: Friday July 21, 8:30-10, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

Relational Inequality Theory (Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt, 2019 Oxford) is a robust alternative to individual and societal level approaches to the generation of inequalities. It is at once an Actor-Organization-Institutional model and a challenge to human capital and varieties of capitalism approaches. This talk outlines the theory and presents a series of qualitative, historical and quantitative cross-national exemplars from the rapidly expanding published research using a relational inequality framework.

Speaker: Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Director of the Center for Employment Equity. He also convenes the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN), which includes thirty-plus scientists from fifteen countries exploring organizational inequalities with longitudinal linked employer-employee data. His work has won numerous awards and has held visiting faculty appointments in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, and Denmark. He is currently doing research on organizational inequality variation, intersectional wage gaps, and developing theoretical and empirical models based on relational inequality theory. Recent publications from these projects have appeared in PNAS, PLosOne, Socio-Economic Review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology. He has published four monographs, including Recapitalizing America: Alternatives to the Corporate Distortion of National Policy (Routledge, 1983), Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Cornell, 1993), Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). His most recent monograph, with Dustin Avent-Holt, Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (Oxford, 2019), won the best book awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association.

Presidential Address

Work in a world in transition: breaking lines and alternative paradigms for a new world order.

Date/Location: Friday July 21, 13:15-14:45, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

Work in a World in Transition: breaking lines and Alternative Paradigms for a new world order

Santos M. Ruesga

SASE President

“The world is in transition, and transitions are frightening, messy”, said Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock, a few weeks ago, and indicated some fault lines, such as demographic winter, social fragmentation, the energy crisis, inflation, and populism. These factors show the need for profound change in our current sociopolitical and social model.

In this sense, the symptoms of disruption within the dominant paradigm are numerous and are increasing in intensity. But the question is: Is the world in transition, and we must therefore tear down old ways of thinking and create alternative paradigms to navigate this changing landscape? Or is this just a new wave in the traditional crises of capitalism, which, one way or another, due to growth cycles, will be overcome with time?

The challenges we face are at different levels, but a fundamental one is the survival of the planet Earth itself. We do not seem to have a solution within the paradigm that has governed our destinies in recent centuries. The continuous growth of the world’s economies, inherent to the capitalist economic model, does not seem to have an end. With it, there are no limits to the gradual deterioration of the natural environment on which human survival depends.

However, the disruptive symptoms we have observed do not mean that the current socioeconomic model is finished. Quite the contrary, as Colin Crouch pointed out years ago, the “strange death of neoliberalism”, preached from some academic settings, continues to hinder the emergence of a new socioeconomic paradigm that reflects substantial changes in human thought.

From this perspective, it is necessary to advance a new social, economic, and political paradigm that illuminates alternative paths for productive organization and models of consumption which allow us to maintain a stable balance with the natural world in which we live. This highlights the need to go beyond traditional limits and assumptions to develop innovative ways of understanding and addressing these complex challenges, overcoming the anthropocentrism that has dominated Western thought in recent centuries.

I will focus my reflections on a society in transition in the world of work. First, I will observe what is happening in the current configuration regarding the use of (commodified) human labour. The more recent changes in the world of labour relations are part of a process that has, for some decades, tried to make labour relations and employment more flexible/deregulated, highlighting the postulates of the neoclassical approach. This approach emerged as dominant in the developed world -and by extension/imposition in emerging countries- in the 80s of the last century. New forms of organization of the appropriation of labour in the capitalist system respond to needs that arise in capital accumulation/economic growth at a given historical moment: reducing labour cost (unit) with flexible forms of work organization. Thus, the labour institutions that emerged intensely in Western countries at the beginning of the last century and particularly after World War II (unions, collective bargaining, employment protection laws, etc.) are called into question.

In this transition, there is the enormous contribution of new digital media and organizational and productive technologies –ICTs, robotization, AI, etc.– which are, without a doubt, central actors in this leap towards flexibility that we are experiencing in the world of work. This is how phenomena such as teleworking, the expansion of self-employment in services, platform economies, etc., are developing.

Secondly, I will extract some of the trends that point toward the immediate future in the field of labour relations from the previous considerations.

Finally, I will introduce some reflections on what could be expected in the event of a radical change in the socioeconomic paradigm, contemplating a gradual decommodification of work in response to the planetary emergency we are already experiencing.

(Spanish versión)

Trabajar en un mundo en transición: líneas de ruptura y paradigmas alternativos para un nuevo orden mundial.

Santos M Ruesga

Presidente SASE

“El mundo está en transición, y las transiciones son aterradoras, desordenadas”, dijo Larry Fink, CEO de Black Rock, hace unas semanas, e indicó algunas fallas, como el invierno demográfico, la fragmentación social, la crisis energética, la inflación y populismo. Estos factores muestran la necesidad de un cambio profundo en nuestro actual modelo sociopolítico y social.

En este sentido, los síntomas de disrupción dentro del paradigma dominante son numerosos y aumentan en intensidad. Pero la pregunta es: ¿Está el mundo en transición y, por lo tanto, debemos derribar las viejas formas de pensar y crear paradigmas alternativos para navegar en este paisaje cambiante? ¿O se trata simplemente de una nueva ola en las crisis tradicionales del capitalismo, que de una forma u otra, debido a los ciclos de crecimiento, será superada con el tiempo?

Los retos a los que nos enfrentamos son de distintos niveles, pero uno fundamental es la supervivencia del propio planeta Tierra. No parecemos tener solución dentro del paradigma que ha regido nuestros destinos en los últimos siglos. El continuo crecimiento de las economías del mundo, inherente al modelo económico capitalista, no parece tener fin. Con ella, no hay límites al deterioro paulatino del medio natural del que depende la supervivencia humana.

Sin embargo, los síntomas disruptivos que hemos observado no significan que el actual modelo socioeconómico esté acabado. Muy al contrario, como señaló hace años Colin Crouch, la “extraña muerte del neoliberalismo”, pregonada desde algunos escenarios académicos, sigue obstaculizando el surgimiento de un nuevo paradigma socioeconómico que refleja cambios sustanciales en el pensamiento humano.

Desde esta perspectiva, es necesario avanzar en un nuevo paradigma social, económico y político que ilumine caminos alternativos de organización productiva y modelos de consumo que nos permitan mantener un equilibrio estable con el mundo natural en el que vivimos. Esto pone de relieve la necesidad de ir más allá de los límites y supuestos tradicionales para desarrollar formas innovadoras de entender y abordar estos complejos desafíos, superando el antropocentrismo que ha dominado el pensamiento occidental en los últimos siglos.

Centraré mis reflexiones en una sociedad en transición en el mundo del trabajo. En primer lugar, observaré lo que sucede en la configuración actual en cuanto al uso del trabajo humano (mercantilizado). Los cambios más recientes en el mundo de las relaciones laborales son parte de un proceso que desde hace una década intenta flexibilizar/desregularizar las relaciones laborales y el empleo, poniendo en valor los postulados del enfoque neoclásico. Este enfoque surgió como dominante en el mundo desarrollado -y por extensión/imposición en los países emergentes- en la década de los 80 del siglo pasado. Las nuevas formas de organización de la apropiación del trabajo en el sistema capitalista responden a necesidades que surgen en la acumulación de capital/crecimiento económico en un momento histórico dado: reducir el costo (unitario) laboral con formas flexibles de organización del trabajo. Así, se cuestionan las instituciones laborales que surgieron con intensidad en los países occidentales a principios del siglo pasado y particularmente después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial (sindicatos, negociación colectiva, leyes de protección del empleo, etc.).

En esta transición se encuentra la enorme contribución de los nuevos medios digitales y las tecnologías organizativas y productivas –TICs, robotización, IA, etc.– que son, sin duda, actores centrales en este salto hacia la flexibilidad que estamos viviendo en el mundo del trabajo. Así se desarrollan fenómenos como el teletrabajo, la expansión del autoempleo en los servicios, las economías de plataforma, etc.

En segundo lugar, extraeré de las consideraciones anteriores algunas de las tendencias que apuntan hacia el futuro inmediato en el campo de las relaciones laborales.

Finalmente, introduciré algunas reflexiones sobre lo que podría esperarse ante un cambio radical en el paradigma socioeconómico, contemplando una paulatina desmercantilización del trabajo en respuesta a la emergencia planetaria que ya estamos viviendo.

Speaker: Santos Ruesga

Santos Ruesga is Professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has taught in numerous academic centers in multiple countries in Europe (Spain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, etc.), North America (Mexico and USA), Latin America (Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, etc.), and Asia (China and Japan). As a researcher in socio-economics, he has specialized in the study of labor relations, the informal economy, and Latin American economies, from macroeconomic and empirical perspectives. On these topics, he has published a large number of books and articles in academic and professional journals and has participated in more than a hundred international and national scientific congresses. He is also a prolific organizer of scientific events, serving on numerous scientific councils at international congresses and meetings, and participating in more than a dozen editorial and advisory boards of scientific journals in various countries.

Likewise, he dedicates a significant intellectual effort to the work of knowledge transfer, having given numerous lectures, written several hundred newspaper articles, carried out technical reports (European Union, Spanish Government, World Bank, etc.), advised public and private organizations, and organized multiple informative events.

He was a member of the Superior Council of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy for ten years (2000-2010) and was Vice Chairman of the Menéndez Pelayo International University of Spain (200-2004). Currently, he leads a Research Group named Labour Socioeconomics, which brings together researchers from various countries.

He has been a member of the SASE since 2006; served on SASE’s Executive Council between 2012 and 2018; founded and coordinated its Ibero-American regional meetings (UNAM-Mexico-2013; UFRGS-Porto Alegre-Brazil, 2015; UTB-Cartagena de Indias – Colombia, 2017; UNC-Costa Rica- 2019; UNMSM-Peru-2021); served as local organizer of the 22^nd SASE Annual Meeting (Madrid, 2011); and has been co-organizer of Network M (Spanish Language) since 2010.

Featured Panels

For a Public Sociology of Money

Date/Location: Thursday July 20, 15-16:30, New York I (top floor)

Speaker: Nina Bandelj

Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is an economic sociologist interested in how relational work, emotions, culture and power influence economic processes and has published widely, including in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Social Forces and Socio-Economic Review. Her books include From Communists to Foreign Capitalists (2008); Economic Sociology of Work (2009); Economy and State (with Elizabeth Sowers, 2010); The Cultural Wealth of Nations (with Frederick F. Wherry, 2011); Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged (with Dorothy Solinger, 2012); and Money Talks (with Frederick F. Wherry and Viviana A. Zelizer, 2017). Her newest book on The Emotional Economy of Parenting is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.
Bandelj is Past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and elected member of the honorary Sociological Research Association. She was Vice-President of the American Sociological Association, longtime and first woman editor of Socio-Economic Review and the inaugural associate vice provost for faculty development at UC Irvine.

Speaker: Frederick F. Wherry

Frederick F. Wherry is Sociology Associate Professor at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming an Assistant and then an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Hi research analyzes the cultural bases of markets, opportunity structures in cultural markets, the role of identity in shaping market decisions and opportunities, and globalization. His articles have appeared in Politics & Society (2012), Sociological Theory (2008), The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science (2007), Ethnic and Racial Studies (2006), Journal of Consumer Culture (2006), and International Review of Sociology (2004). He is the sole author of The Culture of Markets (2012), The Philadelphia Barrio: The Arts, Branding, and Neighborhood Transformation (2011), and Global Markets and Local Crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica Compared (2008). He is also editor (with Nina Bandelj) of The Cultural Wealth of Nations (2011). He serves on the editorial boards of American Sociological Review (2013-2016) and American Journal of Sociology (2011-2014). He also serves on the Committee on Awards for the American Sociological Association (2013-2016) and on the Viviana Zelizer Book Award Committee (2013).

Speaker: Viviana Zelizer

A specialist in culture and economic processes, Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has published books on the development of life insurance, the changing value of children, the place of money in social life, and the economics of intimacy. A collection of her essays appears in Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010). In 2017 Princeton University Press published a new edition of her book The Social Meaning of Money, with a preface by Nigel Dodd and Columbia University Press published a new edition of Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States, with a preface by Kieran Healy. Her most recent book is Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (Princeton University Press, 2017) co-edited with Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry. Her books and articles have been translated into multiple languages She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 2019, she received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from Sciences Po University in Paris and in 2020 she was an inaugural recipient of the Ibn Khaldun Distinguished Career Award from the Comparative Historical Section of the American Sociological Association.

Speaker: Ariel Wilkis

Ariel Wilkis has a PhD in Sociology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the University of Buenos Aires. He is a Researcher at CONICET, professor at the National University of San Martín and Dean of School of Interdisciplinary Advanced Social Studies in the same university.

He is the author of Las sospechas del dinero (Paidos, 2013), The Moral Power of Money (Stanford University, 2017) and is coauthor of Dollar: How the U.S. Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina -1930-2019 (New Mexico University Press, 2023).

Featured Authors-Meets-Critics

The Economic Sociology of Development

Date/Location: Friday July 21, 10:30-12, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

Economic sociology and the sociology of development live in virtual isolation from each other. Economic sociologists tend to focus on high-income countries, bracket the origins of their prosperity, and operate at the “micro” level of firms, families, and individuals. In contrast, development sociologists tend to focus on low-income countries, address the origins and consequences of their poverty, and operate at the “macro” level of states, classes, and collectivities. The Economic Sociology of Development tries to foster a mutually beneficial dialogue between the two subfields by bringing the tools of economic sociology to bear on the problem of international inequality in the twenty-first century.

The book begins with an exploration of the split between the two subfields, and the ghettoization of the Global South in particular, before addressing: the social construction and performativity of development indicators, like GDP per capita and the Human Development Index; the differences between “structural” and “exchange” mobility in the world-system, and the inevitability of “unequal exchange” in a warming world; the organizational and cultural roots of national development trajectories in different regions and time periods; the roles of individual identity, elite closure, and social capital in the reproduction of inequality within countries; and the extent to which competition, coercion, professional norms, and mimicry influenced the origins and diffusion of “neoliberal” development policies in the late twentieth century. It goes on to offer an alternative approach to the breakdown of neoliberalism—and the concomitant growth of populism, protectionism, and xenophobia—in the early twenty-first century by taking the mismatch between people’s values and social valuations seriously. When individuals lose faith in existing institutions, the book argues, they adopt “contrarian” strategies that include exit (e.g., emigration, disinvestment, sabotage) as well as voice (e.g., strikes, protest), and in so doing open the door to imitation, contagion, and large-scale social transformation. And it concludes by asking whether and how development policy might differ if sociologists had as much influence in international donor organizations and national governments as economists.

The book is historically sensitive, methodologically catholic, and theoretically sophisticated. Insofar as it speaks to both economic and development sociologists, moreover, it offers both a comprehensive introduction to the economic sociology of developing countries and a bridge between micro- and macro- approaches to the study of development more generally.

Speaker: Andrew Schrank

Andrew Schrank is the Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Political Science, the Population Studies and Training Center, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He studies the organization, regulation, and performance of industry, especially in the United States and Latin America. Schrank is best known for his work on the origins and remediation of “network failures” in global supply chains, the differences between the “Anglo-American” and “Franco-Latin” approaches to labor law enforcement, and the conceptualization and measurement of red tape, corruption, and the rule of law. His research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. He is currently a CIFAR Fellow in Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity. He has consulted for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the US and Japanese governments, and various United Nations agencies. And he co-edits the Cambridge Elements series on Politics and Society in Latin America. Schrank is the co-author (with Michael Piore) of Root-Cause Regulation: Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press 2018), as well as articles in leading journals in political science, sociology, and economic development. His most recent book is The Economic Sociology of Development (Polity 2023).

Speaker: Mariana Heredia

Mariana Heredia is a Specialist in sociology of the elites and historical sociology of recent Argentina. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris.

She is a CONICET researcher at the Institute of Interdsiciplinary Higher Social Studies in the University of San Martin (EIDAES-UNSAM), where she also serves as a graduate and postgraduate professor.

In addition, she coordinates the Economic Sociology Degree and is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and University of San Andrés.

He published numerous articles in national and foreign journals, and the books A quoi sert un économiste (Paris, 2014) Cuando los economistas alcanzaron el poder (Buenos Aires, 2015) and ¿El 99% contra el 1%? Por qué la obsesión por los ricos no sirve para combatir la desigualdad (Buenos Aires, 2022).

Speaker: Jason Jackson

Jason Jackson is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Director of the Political Economy Lab. Jason’s research is broadly concerned with the relationship between states and markets in processes of economic development and social transformation. Jason is currently engaged with projects on the role of anti-colonial economic nationalism in development; the rise of the digital economy and the future of work; and the governance of public health.

Speaker: Ken Shadlen

Ken Shadlen is Professor of Development Studies in LSE’s Department of International Development. He was Head of Department (2017-2020). From 2011-2020 Ken was a Managing Editor of the Journal of Development Studies.

Ken received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his arrival at LSE in 2002, Ken was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Brown University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.

Ken works on the comparative and international political economy of development. Currently, his main areas of research include the global and cross-national politics of intellectual property (IP), and the politics of pharmaceutical assistance and health regulation. He is the author of Coalitions and Compliance: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Patents in Latin America (Oxford Univ Press, 2017) and multiple articles on the globalization of pharmaceutical patenting from the 1990s to the present. During the COVID-19 pandemic he published articles in The Lancet, Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, and Issues in Science and Technology on innovation, production, and access to vaccines and therapeutics, and he is currently investigating the political economy of technology transfer for pharmaceutical production.

Existential Risks, International Politics, and National Agendas

Date/Location: Saturday July 22, 15-16:30, New York I (top floor)

Abstract

Despite an awareness that existential threats such as climate change, pandemics, nuclear risk, and the possible threats posed by Artificial Intelligence should be addressed at the global level, there has been little progress – if not a clear backslash – with respect to global governance. Be that as it may, the risks are real, and policy decisions by national governments in response to these risks deserve careful examination not only to assess their successes and failures, but also to call attention to the limitations that domestic policies face both internally and internationally.

This panel will discuss how the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the Amazonian ecosystem, and Artificial Intelligence have figured in domestic policy agendas and consider their entanglements with international politics.

Speaker: Fernando Filgueiras

Fernando Filgueiras is an associate professor at the School of Social Science, Federal University of Goiás (UFG). Professor of PHD Professional Program in Public Policy at the National School of Public Administration (ENAP). Affiliate faculty at Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University. Researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology (INCT)–Digital Democracy, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Fellow of the National Council of Scientific and Technology Development (CNPq). Filgueiras has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro (Iuperj).

Speaker: Mariana Heredia

Mariana Heredia is a Specialist in sociology of the elites and historical sociology of recent Argentina. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris.

She is a CONICET researcher at the Institute of Interdsiciplinary Higher Social Studies in the University of San Martin (EIDAES-UNSAM), where she also serves as a graduate and postgraduate professor.

In addition, she coordinates the Economic Sociology Degree and is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and University of San Andrés.

Speaker: Carlos Milani

Carlos R. S. Milani holds a PhD in Development Studies from the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1997). He is Full Professor of International Relations and Vice-Director at the Rio de Janeiro State University’s Institute for Social and Political Studies. He is also Senior Researcher with the Brazilian National Science Council (CNPq/1-B) and Senior Fellow with the Brazilian Centre for International Relations (CEBRI). He directs the World Political Analysis Laboratory (LABMUNDO-Rio) and coordinates the Interdisciplinary Observatory on Climate Change (OIMC). His research agenda includes regional powers’ foreign policy, international development cooperation,and the international politics of climate change. His latest books, articles, course syllabi and research projects can be found at www.carlosmilani.com.br.

Speaker: Elisa Reis

Elisa Reis is Ph.D in Political Science (MIT,1980), Professor of Political Sociology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) Brazil, and chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for the Study of Social Inequality (NIED). She is former vice-president of the International Science Council and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. She has received scholarships, from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq.), the Research Council of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), The Fulbright Commission, the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, to carry out research in a number of countries. Her major research interests are elite perceptions of poverty and inequality; current transformations of nation-states; and the evolving patterns of interaction between state, market, and civil society. She received the Life Career Prize of the Brazilian Sociological Association in 2017, and the Prize for Excellence in Research of the Brazilian National Association for the Social Sciences (ANPOCS) in 2021.

Artificial Intelligence and the New Digital World of Social Relations

Date/Location: Saturday July 22, 10:30-12, New York I (top floor)

Speaker: Nitsan Chorev

Nitsan Chorev is the Harmon Family Professor of Sociology and International & Public Affairs at Brown University in the US. Chorev was previously a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow at the UCLA International Institute. Among other publications, she is the author of Remaking U.S. Trade Policy: From Protectionism to Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2007) and of The World Health Organization between North and South (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her most recent book, Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and Local Pharmaceutical Production in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda was published by Princeton University Press in 2019.

Speaker: Vili Lehdonvirta

Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK, and Professor of Technology Policy at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland. He is the author of Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT Press, 2014) and Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control (MIT Press, 2022), translated to Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. He is currently leading an ERC-funded research project on the geopolitics of cloud computing.

Speaker: Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, co-founder of the Computational Social Science program at UCSD, and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations. In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), for example, he examines the organizational and political tensions at play in developing some of the key infrastructures of British and American stock markets that automated trading in the late twentieth century. By looking at how experts in telecommunications created novel niches within stock exchanges, Automating Finance shows how these technical workers slowly transformed both the devices and cultures of their organizations, enabling the transition from trading floors to purely electronic exchanges. Automating Finance combines insights across fields, from the theoretical insights from science and technology studies and the analytical lenses of institutional theory, to anthropological discussions of relations and the economic metaphors of market design. Shifting emphasis to processes of marketization in higher education, his most recent book, The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences, studies labor markets in the British academia, demonstrating how market-like interventions of quality assessment introduced in the 1980s transformed the practices, career structures, and disciplines of anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists working in the United Kingdom. The book is based on a methodological innovation that synthesizes computational techniques with the ethnographic logic of the extended case study. Juan Pablo was trained in physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the University of California San Diego. Juan Pablo’s work has been published in Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Societies, Cultural Sociology, Theory & Society, and the British Journal of Sociology.

Speaker: Akos Rona-Tas

Akos Rona-Tas is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego where he is also founding faculty of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute. For many years, he was a senior research associate at INRA, Paris, and he was the President of SASE in 2018-2019.

He has written two books on market creation. Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: Demise of Communism and Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary, was published by Michigan University Press, the second one, co-authored with Alya Guseva, Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries, by Stanford University Press.

He has published articles on the post-communist transition, on small entrepreneurs, consumer credit, and payment card markets in journals including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Research on Sociology of Organizations, Journal of Comparative Economics, Research in the Sociology of Work, as well as various chapters in edited volumes. He is currently working on the problem of rationality and uncertainty in two different contexts: credit assessment and the use of science in risk management.

Akos Rona-Tas has been a member of SASE since 2005. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the Finance and Society Network, served on the Executive Council between 2012 and 2015, as Treasurer between 2015 and 2018, and as SASE President in 2018/19.

Social Sciences for the Real World (SS4RW)

Date/Location: Saturday, 22:00-23:15 22 July 2023, New York I – Top Floor

Abstract

Entrepreneurship in the Global South in the Post-Liberal World Economy

Social Sciences for the Real World 2023

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This year’s Social Sciences for the Real World (SS4RW) session in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, brings together a practitioner and academics who deal with the crucial role of entrepreneurship in emerging economy contexts in an era where discourses emanating from Western economies are increasingly scrutinized. With the changes currently underway in the global order – from the war in Ukraine to increasing tensions between the West and China to emerging strategic independence under new leadership in Brazil and Saudi Arabia – the notion of entrepreneurship, including its desired outcomes and the development of ecosystems to support entrepreneurial efforts, may also be revised to incorporate a wider range of views.

Our panel seeks to seek to bring together practitioners, academics, and interested members of the public to engage in a constructive dialogue about this crucial issue and about how societies in the Global South might adapt to such changes both at the macro level of international relations but also in terms of the micro-level frameworks and solutions that they deploy to assist their citizens in obtaining economic independence and in improving their lives.

Panelists

Luiz Schulze a self-employed tour guide in Rio. Luis has had a unique and varied career and can speak from experience on the labor and economic challenges in developing countries. Luiz can speak English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Prior to working as an entrepreneur in the tourism industry, Luis served for nearly three decades in planning and communications roles for IBM in France, the United States, and Brazil.

Kathryn Ibata-Arens is an expert on innovation and entrepreneurship in Asia, science, and technology policy, women’s economic empowerment, and inclusive innovation. Ibata-Arens’ recent research explores technology leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurial ecosystem development in biomedical industries in Asia. Her award-winning 2021 book Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System is Broken and How We Can Fix It analyzes international competition in new drug discovery and access to essential medicines. Her 2019 book, Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia (Stanford University Press), analyzes national policy and firm-level strategy in China, India, Japan, and Singapore. From 2012 to 2013, she served on the METI-State Department Japan-US Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council, served on the Board of Directors of the Japan-America Society of Chicago, and was a member of the U.S.-Japan Council (USJC).

Casey Frid, a faculty member at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, MN. Casey lived for 5 years in Brazil before graduate school and faced unique labor market challenges there as a foreigner. His research draws on social movement theory to examine how organization creation can drive positive social change through collaborative strategies, including an ongoing research project in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He has also studied how craft brewers’ collective identity shapes both collaborative and competitive actions, as well as how their individual role identities have evolved over time within the craft beer segment. His research also examines the actions of nascent entrepreneurs as they work to create new organizations.

Moderators

Imran Chowdhury

Gerhard Schnyder

SS4RW Organizers

Imran Chowdhury

Gerhard Schnyder

Speaker: Kathryn Ibata-Arens

Kathryn Ibata-Arens is Vincent de Paul Professor of Political Economy, DePaul University. A scholar of innovation and entrepreneurship, science and technology policy, and economic development, her award-winning 2021 book Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System is Broken and How We Can Fix It analyzes international competition in new drug discovery and access to essential medicines. Ibata-Arens is also researching the moral economy of patents over living matter, particularly that taken from indigenous communities. Her 2019 book Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia uses the lens of venture start-up firms in China, India, Japan, and Singapore, finding a new “networked techno-nationalism” guiding national policy and firm-level strategy supporting competitive growth in frontier technologies. In her journal articles, blogs, policy briefings, podcasts, and books, Ibata-Arens employs such methods as historical-institutional, policy and social network analysis, and original fieldwork-based case studies, contextualized within global politics and markets.

Speaker: Imran Chowdhury

Imran Chowdhury, Ph.D., is Dean and Saleeby Professor of Business Administration at the Ketner School of Business at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. Dr. Chowdhury previously held the Diana Davis Spencer Chair in Social Entrepreneurship at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and served as a tenured Associate Professor at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York City. He has held international visiting positions at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany); Montpellier Business School (France); CEFAM Business School (France); and ESSEC Asia-Pacific (Singapore).

Chowdhury’s teaching encompasses courses in entrepreneurship, strategic management, and international management across undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, online, global, and executive programs. His writing examines the development of ecosystems for entrepreneurs with a social impact focus, and how companies work to balance economic and social demands simultaneously. He also has a strong interest in management education, particularly as it relates to issues of sustainability and social entrepreneurship. Dr. Chowdhury’s research has been published in leading outlets including Academy of Management Learning & Education, Advances in Strategic Management, Agriculture and Human Values, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, Organization Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Social Networks, and has been recognized with invited keynotes both internationally and within the United States. Along with his colleagues Jordi Vives Gabriel, Wim van Lent, and Hugo van der Merwe, Dr. Chowdhury received the 2023 JBE Best Business Ethics Paper award at the Academy of Management (AOM) annual meetings.

Chowdhury’s engagement with the business and academic communities builds on both his academic expertise and his early career working at a leading entrepreneurial biotechnology company in New York and in Uganda. He is a member of the Minority Business Council of the Rowan County Chamber of Commerce and the Strategic Advisory Board for the Mansfield Bio-Incubator, and has been invited to share his expertise at the national level on entrepreneurship- and economic development-related issues. Dr. Chowdhury was elected as Program Evaluation Coordinator (2023-2026) for the AOM’s Management Education Division and has co-organized the “Social Sciences for the Real World” track at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics annual meetings since 2019. His editorial work includes service on the Editorial Board of Academy of Management Learning & Education.

After graduating from Stuyvesant High School, Dr. Chowdhury earned his undergraduate degree in anthropology and geography from Hunter College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of an Athena Scholarship. He completed graduate studies in France, obtaining a master’s degree at L’Institut européen d’administration des affaires (INSEAD), and a Ph.D. from L’École supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales (ESSEC Business School).

Speaker: Gerhard Schnyder

Gerhard Schnyder is a Reader (Associate Professor) in International Management at the Institute for International Management at Loughborough University London and research associate at the Centre for Business Research (CBR), University of Cambridge and at the London Centre for Corporate Governance and Ethics (LCCGE). Prior to joining Loughborough London, he worked at King’s College London, SOAS, University of London, and the University of Cambridge, UK. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland (2008).

His current research focuses on comparative capitalism and comparative corporate governance. Gerhard is interested in the impact of institutional, political and historical factors on the organisation of national corporate governance and business systems. In particular, he investigates the interrelationship between legal and corporate changes and the role of agency in institutional change more broadly.

Speaker: Luize Schulze

Luize Schulze is a self-employed tour guide in Rio. Luis has had a unique and varied career and can speak from experience on the labor and economic challenges in developing countries. Luiz can speak English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese and is not the “average” tour guide, having previously served in planning and communications roles for IBM in France, the United States, and Brazil.

Speaker: Casey Frid

Casey Frid, a faculty member at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, MN. Casey lived for 5 years in Brazil before graduate school and faced unique labor market challenges there as a foreigner. His research draws on social movement theory to examine how organization creation can drive positive social change through collaborative strategies, including an ongoing research project in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He has also studied how craft brewers’ collective identity shapes both collaborative and competitive actions, as well as how their individual role identities have evolved over time within the craft beer segment. His research also examines the actions of nascent entrepreneurs as they work to create new organizations.

2023 Local organizing committee

Marta dos Reis Castilho [chair] (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Mithaly Correa (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Carolina Dias (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Annelies Fryberger (SASE Executive Director)
Mayra Goulart (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Marilia Bassetti Marcato (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Josué Medeiros (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Cristiano Fonseca Monteiro (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
Lucilene Morandi (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
Valeria Pero (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Frederic Rocha (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Rodrigo Salles Pereira dos Santos (PPGSA-Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Julia Torracca (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Ana Urraca Ruiz (Universidade Federal Fluminense)

Program

The updated program can be found here: Program • SASE Rio de Janeiro 2023 (oxfordabstracts.com)

A pdf version of the program is also available – the sessions listed are current as of June 23. The pdf program includes maps of the conference location.

SASE 2023 Conference in Rio de Janeiro

Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order

Mini-Conferences

Featured Events

Featured Speakers

Presidential Address

Featured Panels

Featured Authors-Meets-Critics

2023 Local organizing committee

Program

Featured Speakers

Joseph Wong

Michelle Holder

Erin A. Cech

Joseph Wong

Michelle Holder

Sponsored by the SASE Women and Gender Forum

Erin A. Cech