Global Political Economy Special Seminar Series

Welcome to our first Roundtable with some of the leading figures in the field in the UK.

As part of the brand new Masters Programme in Global Political Economy at POLIS we will be hosting a series of seminars on contemporary issues in political economy.

Title: The financialisation of climate change: why global political economy is essential to avert dystopia

Abstract:

Climate finance is the neoliberal 'fix-it' to solve the problem of climate change. But how can finance help solve this challenge, and in what ways can we understand environmental harm or care as something that can be 'financialised'? Most commentators assume that green finance can solve the dissonance between ecological and financial value production in capitalism. But the actual effects of green investing on climate change remain empirically unclear. A material solution lies only in changing global structure of political economy.

Speaker: Professor Sarah Bracking, King’s College London.

Sarah Bracking is Professor of Climate and Society at King’s College London, UK. She is editor of Corruption and Development (Palgrave, 2007); author of Money and Power (Pluto, 2009) and The Financialisation of Power: How Financiers Rule Africa (Routledge, 2016); and co-editor with Sian Sullivan, Philip Woodhouse, and Aurora Fredrikson of Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation: Creating Values that Matter (Routledge, 2019). She is currently researching climate and development finance, climate insurance and the wider political economy of development in southern Africa. 

Title: Can GPE be revolutionary?

Abstract:

In a time of sharp social oppressions and crises of the environment, health, the economy and democracy, I will discuss the relationship between political research and radical social change. The use of revolutionary theory has been central to liberation struggles including pan-African, anti-colonial and civil rights movements. However, contemporary activist movements in the Global North often lack these intellectual currents and cultures, instead drawing on research that reinforces the existing power relations and mystifies the underlying causes of the injustices they seek to redress. Thus advocacy for the rights of migrants and refugees often lacks attention to the global apartheid-type system that displaces people, creates human rights abuses and exploits migrant workers. Drawing on lessons from movements in the Global South and elsewhere, this talk assesses to what extent theoretical tools in political economy can open up new paths in migration and labour advocacy.

Speaker: Dr Hannah Cross, University of Westminster

Hannah completed her PhD on migrants, borders and global capitalism in West Africa and Europe at the University of Leeds in 2011 and has published many articles and books in this area, including the recent book Migration Beyond Capitalism (Polity, 2020). She is a senior lecturer in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and chair of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy. 

Title: Embodying Global Political Economy

Abstract:

The study of global political economy more often than not is concerned with interactions between governments, corporations and international organisations. Yet, as feminist political economists have long highlighted, households and communities play a key role in sustaining the global economy as a result of the social reproductive labour that is performed, overwhelmingly by women. In my talk, I will demonstrate how the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the detrimental impact of decades of neoliberal economic restructuring on social reproduction and its implications for social justice and equality. I will then outline an embodied global political economy approach, which problematizes and critically scrutinizes the current global economic system by taking the welfare of the human body as a starting point.

Speaker: Professor Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick

Nicola Pratt is a professor in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. She teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist and decolonial approaches and a focus on ‘politics from below.’ She has written and co-edited a number of books on women and gender in the Middle East. Her most recent monograph, entitled, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, was published by University of California Press in fall 2020. She has also written extensively on Egyptian ‘politics-from-below’ and is currently co-authoring a book on popular culture and the contested meanings of the 2011 Egyptian revolution; which is also the subject of a multimedia, digital archive that she co-curated: https://egyptrevolution2011.ac.uk/ 

Joining details

The seminar series is open to the public and other institutions.

The event will be held on Zoom, please use the link below to join:

https://universityofleeds.zoom.us/j/87550544912

For further information contact Owain Williams: O.D.Williams@leeds.ac.uk