EVENTS
Book launch: Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice
Book launch: Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice
By Joan Martínez-Alier in conversation with Dr Paula Serafini (CLaSP)
This ground-breaking book makes visible the global counter-movement for environmental justice, combining ecological economics and political ecology. Using 500 in-depth empirical analyses from the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), Martínez-Alier analyses the commonalities shared by environmental defenders and offenders respectively. The book reveals the enormous “entropy hole” at the centre of the industrial economy, and traces “ecological distribution conflicts” at the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal. It also serves as a textbook on Global Comparative Political Ecology based on the EJAtlas, a collection of “ecological distribution conflicts” (EDC) that began in 2012 and reached 4,000 entries by March 2024.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com
About the author: Joan Martinez-Alier is an Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History, and senior researcher at ICTA UAB. He was awarded a Balzan prize in 2020 and the Holberg prize in 2023 as a scholar of ecological economics, political ecology and environmental justice. He was a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford between 1963 and 1973, and 1984-85. He published Ecological economics: energy, environment, and society (1987); Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997) with Ramachandra Guha; and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2003). He co-edited the textbook Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (2013) and directed the EJOLT project (2011-15). He has co-directed about 40 doctoral theses as mentor of the Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology. He was co-founder (1990) and president of the International Society for Ecological Economics (2006-2007). In 2016, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice, and he co-directs the Atlas of Environmental Justice.
The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop
The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop
This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to explore the spatial, social, environmental, and embodied geographies of pain and anaesthetics.
Identifying pain as a zone of interface between the body and the world, this workshop will investigate the meaning, role, and dynamics of pain, affliction, and suffering in the context of planetary crisis and contemporary capitalism. Thinking of pain as unevenly distributed, differentially experienced, and historically and socially produced, the workshop begins from the premise that a great variety of academics and practitioners have a stake in improving our understanding of pain, and how it is made and unmade in and between bodies.
The workshop will have two parts:
The first part (Thursday, 30 May 2024, 16:00 -20:00) will be an interdisciplinary forum, bringing people together to discuss different understandings of pain. We seek perspectives from the biomedical sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, as well as from health practitioners, trade unionists, artists, activists, performers, and more. The workshop will be open, informal, and discursive. We seek to create new conversations and collaborations around pain and its social, spatial, and embodied circulations.
The second part (Friday, 31 May 2024, 9:00 - 17:00) will focus on the relationship between pain, global capitalism, space, and environments. We invite short research papers from across disciplines on the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics:
Pain and suffering in historical and contemporary systems of labour, production and social reproduction;
Analyses of pain and suffering at the intersection(s) between the biomedical and social sciences, the humanities, and ecology and the environment;
Geographical studies of pain and suffering;
The relations between race, caste, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and pain;
Interdisciplinary approaches to the history, science, use and misuse of painkillers, analgesics, and opioids;
Critical perspectives from across disciplines and spheres of practice on the treatment of pain;
Interdisciplinary approaches to the epistemology and ontology of pain.
Please submit a 200-word abstract to a.davies@qmul.ac.uk. If you would like to contribute to the second part of the workshop in a different medium (visual art, performance, case study, etc), you would be welcome to do so. Please email the organisers with any further questions.
Please register here to attend. You are invited to come to all or part of the workshop.
A small number of travel and accommodation bursaries will be available for early career / unwaged researchers and practitioners. Workshop organised in association with the QMUL School of Geography, the Centre for Labour and Sustainable Production, and the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.
Sustainable Work and Just Transition
Sustainable Work and Just Transition
Please join us for a Masterclass on Sustainable Work and Just Transition with Dario Azzellini, Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico. The masterclass will be held on the 11th of June between 3 and 5pm in the Graduate Center building, room GC201, in Mile End Campus.
There is a scientific consensus on the need to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Governments and capital focus on changing consumption and production patterns, but want to keep everything as it is. In production, the focus is on the “technological fix”. Technology and recycling are important for socio-ecological transformation. However, they have already failed as a solution to the environmental crisis. Changing production and consumption patterns alone will not lead to the necessary socio-ecological transformation. Employment and labour markets are already changing, and we need to ensure that work itself becomes sustainable in all its aspects.
What is sustainable work? First of all, “sustainable work” is part of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN for 2030, adopted in 2016, which should be included in global, EU-wide and national policies, but this is not happening with regard to sustainable work. Sustainable work is a holistic approach. It involves looking at economic, social, and environmental issues as an interrelated whole. Moreover, in order for the socio-ecological transition to be a just transition, different levels need to be taken into account. These include social security for those directly affected by job loss, as well as class, North-South relations, and gender. If workers do not take a central role in defining and practicing the transformation, it will not happen.
Dario Azzellini is Political scientist, sociologist, author, and filmmaker at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (Zacatecas, Mexico). He lived in different Latin American countries and is now based in the USA, Mexico and Berlin. His studies focus on labour, social movements, self-management, sustainability and just transition and global political economy. He has conducted research into social transformation processes for more than 30 years with a special focus on Latin America and Europe. He has published 11 films, and more than 20 books and 100 journal articles and book chapters, many of which have been translated into various languages. He authored Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill 2017), co-authored Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over(forthcoming), and co-edited the Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (2023). More information is available on his personal website at: www.azzellini.net.
Who are the Experts? Co-Research with workers and communities
Who are the Experts? Co-Research with workers and communities
Please join us for a Masterclass on Co-researching methods with workers and communities with Dario Azzellini, Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico. The masterclass will be held on the 11th of June between 3.00 to 5.00 pm in PP1, in Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London.
Co-research, action research, participatory research and several more terms refer to research in which the researcher engages supposedly with some kind of collective knowledge production. But what is what, and what makes sense for whom? How can they be intertwined with methods as observation and fieldnotes, oral history, interviews (individual and focus group), and visual methods? Furthermore, there are several issues that I would like to consider and we as researchers should hold as constant questions throughout all of our work and discussions. These issues are those of class, “race,” gender relations, power, position, subjectivity and ethics. Methods are inherently relational and, as such, they are produced through and embedded in hierarchies of class, race, gender, ethnicity and nationality that should be reflexively addressed, though they can never be “resolved.” These hierarchies will produce tensions, and how you deal with those tensions will define your work. I will be giving insights from my experience with participatory research.
Dario Azzellini is Political scientist, sociologist, author, and filmmaker at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (Zacatecas, Mexico). He lived in different Latin American countries and is now based in the USA, Mexico and Berlin. His studies focus on labour, social movements, self-management, sustainability and just transition and global political economy. He has conducted research into social transformation processes for more than 30 years with a special focus on Latin America and Europe. He has published 11 films, and more than 20 books and 100 journal articles and book chapters, many of which have been translated into various languages. He authored Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill 2017), co-authored Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over(forthcoming), and co-edited the Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (2023). More information is available on his personal website at: www.azzellini.net.
Workers' struggles and capitalist strategies: Perspectives from Africa and South America in an age of 'sustainability'
Workers’ struggles and capitalist strategies:
Perspectives from Africa and South America in an age of ‘sustainability’
Workshop organised by Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production
17 and 18 June 2024 at Queen Mary University of London
Programme:
June 17th
10.30 to 13.00: Structures of capital in agriculture, logistics and manufacturing in Africa and South America
15.00 to 17.30: Workers’ creativity, education and the co-production of knowledge of capital
June 18th
10.00 to 13.00: Contours of strategy and struggle from below
14:00: Walking tour by Edward Legon and Jack Sargeant
Even as a sustainability agenda is being mainstreamed across business and policy-making, it is defined predominantly through environmental considerations. This is important but it overlooks the critical social dimension of sustainability. Through a range of events and workshops in recent years, the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) has emphasized the need to combine perspectives on ecology and labour for a sustainability agenda that is transformative and not piecemeal and status-quoist.
Building on this past work, the Centre’s end-of-year event in 2024 will focus on an open-ended analysis of struggles and strategies by the ‘labouring classes’ in the contexts of shifting capitalist strategies and varied ecological crises, from global heating to localised crop disease; in other words, it will focus on rethinking structures of capital from below. It will focus on Africa and South America as two of the largest regions of the global South, which is already being disproportionately impacted by climate change, and on varied sectors like agricultural, logistics and manufacturing within them.
We ask: how is environmental change impacting workers across different sectoral and regional contexts? How are the strategies of capital transforming in response to environmental change and demands for just transition? How are workers and their organizations/unions responding to these changes? What kinds of historical legacies of collective action/struggle are shaping their response? What possibilities and contradictions emerge with the loss of key sites of organised working class power as a result of 'sustainability transitions'? What kind of (dis)articulations exist between formal trade unions and informal grassroots organizing and between production and social reproduction? What dilemmas and opportunities exist in building solidarities with subaltern communities who may not see themselves as part of the labouring classes? Finally, what are the strategies for workers’ education being used, what can be learned from different contexts and how can bridge struggles and build wider solidarities?
Held over two days at Queen Mary University of London, the event will consist of two panels on Monday 17 June from 10.30 to 17.30, and a roundtable on 18 June from 10.00-13.00, ending with an East London walking tour at 14.00. We are keen that attendees engage actively in this event. As such, we recommend that people attend both days because the format is designed to build iteratively on each other and maintain continuity in discussions.
Speakers include:
Angela Dziedzom Akorsu, School for Development Studies. University of Cape Coast, Ghana
Maurizio Atzeni, CEIL/CONICET Argentina and Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
Dario Azzellini, Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico.
Jörg Nowak, Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil
Rose Omamo, General Secretary, Amalgamated Union of Kenya Metal Workers, Kenya
Julia Soul, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, CEIL/Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales, TEL/Taller de Estudios Laborales, Argentina
Dzodzi Tsikata, Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London
Attendance is free and in-person only, please register in advance here:
Socio-Ecological Infrastructures and Finance
This two-day workshop will bring together diverse scholars working at the intersection of finance, sustainability, and infrastructures, broadly defined to include both physical infrastructure and wider social and ecological dynamics. Invited speakers will lead debate on the entanglements of finance, race, gender, and colonial legacies in contemporary forms of economic and ecological crisis.
Programme and locations
Day 1: 19th March, 2-5pm at WCH Garrod: 2.35, Turner St, London E1 2AD
Day One of the workshop will explore how these scholars have brought different critical perspectives to bear on themes encompassing infrastructure imaginations, socio-ecological impacts of transnational flows of infrastructure investment, the global political economy of climate finance and governance, and everyday experiences of debt and structural dispossession, in communities across Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Day 2: 20th March, 3-5pm at Graduate Centre: GC604, Mile End Campus, QMUL, London E1 4NS
Day Two of the workshop will explore methodologies for the study of these processes, drawing on the experiences of our key speakers, and of ECR scholars at QMUL currently engaged in empirical research on finance and socio-ecological infrastructures across different geographies.
Confirmed speakers Dorothy Tang (Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore) and Keston Perry (Assistant Professor, UCLA)
Organisers: Isadora Cruxên, Mary Robertson and Jessica Sklair
We hope to see you there!
Book Launch: ‘Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar’ by Benjamin Neimark
CLaSP, Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) and the POLLEN London-Node invite you to the book launch of Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar.
About the book:
Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth.
This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.
Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/hottest-of-the-hotspots
Special Guest Discussant: Professor Sian Sullivan, Bath-Spa University
Chaired by: Shreya Sinha
Sponsored by: Centre for Labour and Sustainable Production (CLaSP), School of Business Management, Queen Mary, University of London, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and Political Ecology Network, POLLEN, London-Node
About the Author:
Benjamin Neimark is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, and a Fellow at the Institute of Social Science and Humanities (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. Benjamin is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of biological conservation and resource extraction, high-value commodity chains, ‘green’ precarious smallholder production, and agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. His current research looks at the US military as a global climate actor and, more broadly, the environment footprints of the world’s militaries.
Sian Sullivan is Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University. She is interested in discourses and practices of difference and exclusion in relation to ecology and conservation. She has carried out long-term research on conservation, colonialism and cultural heritage in Namibia (www.futurepasts.net and www.etosha-kunene-histories.net), and also engages critically with the financialisation of nature (see www.the-natural-capital-myth.net). She has co-edited Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power (2000), Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-embodiments (2016), Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation: Creating Values that Matter (2018), and Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis (2021).
You can also join via Zoom, please register here: https://bit.ly/3SKM4vk
Sustainability for finance: situating green bonds in the financialization of Brazilian agriculture
Green bonds are financial instruments similar to fixed-income securities, with the specificity of being issued to finance environmentally sustainable activities, products and assets, such as forest recovery, energy efficiency projects, storage of greenhouse gas emissions, conservation of water resources, etc. In her presentation, Vanessa Perin will discuss the state of the agribusiness green bond market in Brazil, as well as its connection to the recent coming together of agricultural financing and the capital market in the country. The talk will explore how the very possibility of issuing green bonds related to Brazilian agribusiness is embedded in a longer trajectory of financialization of its agriculture, and how this has been shaping the notion of sustainability mobilized by these financial instruments.
Vanessa Perin holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. Her research addresses technical and financial mechanisms that have been enabling the expansion of agribusiness ventures in Brazil, particularly in the soybean supply chain.
Me(a)tabolism and political ecology: labour, land & beef extract
In this presentation of work in progress, Archie will explore the interconnections between the emergence of the global meat industry, and the political ecology of metabolism. Tracing the history of metabolic thinking to Justus von Liebig and his meat extract company, the talk will explore how British imperialist private land-ownership and an emerging international division of labour defined the internationalisation of meat in the early 20th century.
Archie Davies is a cultural and historical geographer working across the fields of political ecology and the history and philosophy of geography. His research addresses food, hunger, nature, race, and embodiment. He has written about the coloniality of infrastructure, the racial division of nature, the history of landscape thinking, and the idea of socio-ecological metabolism. He also works on the history of Brazilian geographical ideas, and his book Josué de Castro and the History of Geography was published by Liverpool University Press in 2022. He is a translator of Brazilian radical ideas, and his collaborative translation with Christen Smith and Bethania Gomes of the Black feminist Beatriz Nascimento's collected works has just been published by Princeton University Press as The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento. He is currently working on a global history of meat extract.
Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt
Drawing on thirty months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts of the South Indian state of Kerala, Plantation Crisis explores the collapse of the plantation system and the abandonment of its workforce during the recent crisis in the Indian tea economy. The colonial era plantation system in India – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, were at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. A major argument of Plantation Crisis is that the economic crisis connected with global developments has intensified what may be described as non-economic cultural processes in the continuing abjection of plantation Tamils.
This event is co-organized with the Agrarian Change Seminar Series, convened by the Journal of Agrarian Change
Jayaseelan Raj is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Development at King's College London, and a Fellow in the GRNPP at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022), and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India (Pluto Press, 2017). His research and writings focuses on plantation system and labour, caste, class, gender and ethnicity, agrarian capitalism and migration, and state and Dalit question in India.
Bringing in the capitalist state: critical agrarian studies, crisis tendencies & progressive strategy in the imperial core
Internationalist strategy and praxis remain crucial in our times of perma-crisis across the heartlands and peripheral spaces of global capital. Key barriers to an internationalist politics that takes sovereignty and self-determination for all peoples seriously are those centres of overwhelming resistance to progressive transformation within the imperial core: agricultural producers and communities. For self-determination to be possible in the capitalist peripheries, the agricultural systems of the core will require transformation. First, we examine the ways in which developed capitalist agricultural sectors’ emerging ‘green transition’ strategies attempt to draw on state powers and resources to support re-invigoration of their conditions of production. Second, we can look to how these strategies meet the existing socio-ecological care labour frameworks and state forms that have emerged in response to earlier regimes of accumulation. The paper concludes with some reflections on what these dynamics may imply for programmatic political agendas, looking beyond capitalist agricultural sectors toward organising coalitions across formal and informal movements, and into the state.
Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Her research centres on the political economy of climate change, particularly focusing on the intersections of theories of the state, non-human nature and value.
Workers’ Inquiry and Co-Research: History, theory & practice
This workshop co-hosted by CLaSP and the Notes from Below collective, will focus on the historical and theoretical developments, and political implications of militant workers’ inquiry.
Developed first by Marx and other members of the International Workingmen’s Association of the 1860s as a tool for information gathering, solidarity, and political transformation of the oppressed classes, it became a practice of militant coresearch between workers and militant intellectuals in Italy’s industrial north almost a century later.
Join us to engage with Francesca Ioannilli (Un cane in chiesa. Militanza, categorie e conricerca di Romano Alquati 2020), Clark McAllister (Karl Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry: International History, Reception and Responses 2022), Gigi Roggero (Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method 2023), and Jamie Woodcock (Troublemaking: Why You Should Organise Your Workplace 2023) who will discuss the historical roots, theoretical shifts and political implications of this set of practices.
Carbon Fetishism: Towards a Critical Theory of Climate Capitalism by Steffen Böhm
The global climate crisis, which is now stark and clear to see, has brought together an alliance of social movements, NGOs, policymakers and progressive people within corporate sectors to instigate a transition towards ‘climate capitalism’. Climate capitalism’s response to the climate crisis is to commodify nature, in this case, carbon dioxide and a range of other greenhouse gases (GHG), buying and selling the commodity for profit. In this paper, I analyse these developments through the lens of the term ‘fetishism’, which plays an important role in Marx’s understanding of the workings of capital as well as in Freud’s analyses of the human psyche. Critical theorists such as Benjamin and Adorno have been keen to synthesise Marxian and Freudian analyses for a long time, and this paper is the latest attempt to make such historical analyses relevant to today’s moment of crisis. What we are currently witnessing is the attempt to change capital’s accumulation as well as enjoyment practices, away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy, ‘net-zero’ and other ‘green growth’ imaginaries. This paper aims to develop concepts to help us understand and historically position these capital developments in the age of climate capitalism.
Steffen Böhm is Professor in Organisation & Sustainability at University of Exeter Business School. He was previously Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University of Essex. He’s also held visiting positions at Uppsala University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, as well as at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and St Andrews University, Scotland. His research focuses on the political economy & ecology of the sustainability transition. He has published six books: Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave), Against Automobility (Wiley-Blackwell), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (Mayfly), The Atmosphere Business (Mayfly), Ecocultures: Blueprints for Sustainable Communities (Routledge), and Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis (Open Book Publishers). The book Climate Activism (Cambridge) is forthcoming. More details at steffenboehm.net
Book Launch: When Nothing Works: From cost of living to foundational liveability
CLaSP and Accounting & Accountability Research Group (AARG) at the School of Business and Management, QMUL jointly invite you to the book launch of When Nothing Works.
In 2023, the United Kingdom has unaffordable essentials, failing public services, rising inflation, and industrial unrest. When Nothing Works is both our national dilemma and the title of this new book which breaks with the assumptions of the left and the right and seeks to change what is economically visible and politically actionable.
When Nothing Works diagnoses chronic foundational failure when all the pillars of household liveability are failing as residual income is squeezed, services collapse, and social infrastructure decays. It proposes a political practice of 'adaptive reuse' that works around the constraints that frustrate mainstream policies of growth and higher wages.
At this event, chaired by Andrew Pendleton, Professor Julie Froud (University of Manchester and one of the authors of When Nothing Works), will outline the book's key arguments, before a panel discussion.
Speakers:
The event will be followed by a short drinks reception to which all attendees are welcome. Discounted copies of the book will be sold after the event.
Development on Credit: Financialisation and its effects across the international development agenda
This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of development researchers, to look critically at the current state of play on financialised development and the private financing of development across a range of geographical contexts. In particular, it will examine the effects of these recent trends on development beneficiaries from a comparative perspective, identifying emerging patterns – and emerging forms of resistance – as the financialisation of development and associated cycles of credit and debt become embedded within diverse state, private sector and philanthropic initiatives.
This is an in-person event, supported by QMUL’s Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) and its Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP). If you would be interested in attending this workshop, please contact Dr Jessie Sklair at j.sklair@qmul.ac.uk
CLaSP End of Year Event: Labour in the Green Transition
With the climate crisis firmly upon us, it is clear, now more than ever, that mainstream solutions centred on the market and technology have done little to move us along a sustainable ecological transition. Even the disruptions of the pandemic proved temporary, and global production and extraction have continued apace. At the same time, struggles of working people have mushroomed across the globe around their conditions of work and life and around questions of racial, gender, ethnic, inter-generational and environmental justice. While not all these struggles are linked to the climate crisis, they reflect deep unrest with business-as-usual and an urgency towards progressive transformation.
This end-of-year event seeks to centre the labour-nature relation, and the multiple sources and trajectories of alienation within capitalism, in thinking through the climate crisis and the green transition. It will explore the varied manifestations of workers’ struggles as ecological struggles and seeks to reposition labour in its plurality at the centre of the green agenda.
It asks: What is the place and role of labour in the green transition? What kinds of class struggles can be and should be organized in the short-term? What can we learn from history, i.e., from past struggles and debates on sustainability, environment and the climate crisis? Is there space for a 'thin-green-line' to reconcile global classes of labour across their multiple axes of fragmentation (race, gender, ethnicity, age, geographical location etc.)? Is it possible to envisage a green transition that does not lose sight of labour, one that reconfigures (potentially, challenges) global capitalism to save the people as much as it saves the planet?
The event will be followed by a reception.
Labour Regimes and Ecology: A workshop
This workshop proposes a research agenda on the labour regime-nature-ecology nexus and debates new approaches to the study of global production that centres labour in discussions of climate and biodiversity crises and socio-ecological transformations. Inspired by possibilities of bringing together labour regime analysis and environmental labour studies, this workshop includes research on the processes and mechanisms that inscribe regimes of labour control and modes of regulation in the ecological metabolisms of production and social reproduction.
Participants:
Sam Ashman (University of Johannesburg), Elena Baglioni (Queen Mary University of London), Mads Barbesgaard (Lund University), Nicholas Beuret (University of Essex), Liam Campling (Queen Mary University of London), Gavin Capps (Kingston University), Carlo Inverardi-Ferri (Queen Mary University of London), Felipe Irarrazaval (University of Chile), Hyunjung Kim (Queen Mary University of London), Vasiliki Krommyda (National Technical University of Athens), William Monteith (Queen Mary University of London), Suravee Nayak (Centre for Policy Research, India), Zafer Ornek (Queen Mary University of London), Shreya Sinha (Queen Mary University of London), Adrian Smith (University of Sussex)
This is a closed, in-person workshop, but if you are working on this area and would like to attend, please email Liam Campling (l.campling@qmul.ac.uk) with a brief outline of your own project and we will try to provide space for you to attend.
Uneven geographies of electricity capital
Uneven geographies of electricity capital
Please join us for a Masterclass on critical approaches to political ecology with our Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Prof Matthew Huber (Syracuse University, US).
The masterclass will be held on 05 June between 13:00 - 15:00 at GC 101 Mile End Campus and will focus on “Uneven geographies of electricity capital.”
Contesting Policy: towards a Just Transition
Please join us for the final Masterclass on eco-feminism with our Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Prof Ariel Salleh (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa).
The masterclass will be held on 01 June between 15:00 - 17:00 at Bancroft Building 2.40 and will focus on “Contesting Policy: towards a Just Transition.”
PLEASE NOTE: If you are planning to attend this event, please write to clasp-info@qmul.ac.uk for a programme of readings.
Epistemic Foundations: The Totality of Natural Relations
Please join us for the second of three Masterclasses on eco-feminism with our Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Prof Ariel Salleh (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa).
The second masterclass will be held on 25 May between 15:00 - 17:00 at Bancroft Building 2.40 and will focus on “Epistemic Foundations. The Totality of Natural Relations.”
The third masterclasses will be held on 01 June. See our upcoming events for more details.
PLEASE NOTE: If you are planning to attend this event, please write to clasp-info@qmul.ac.uk for a programme of readings.
Social Metabolism: Extractivisms, Existences, and Extinctions
Please join us for the first of three Masterclasses on eco-feminism with our Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Prof Ariel Salleh (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa).
The first masterclass will be held on 18 May between 15:00 - 17:00 at Bancroft Building 2.40 and will focus on “Social Metabolism: Extractivism, Existences, and Extinctions.”
The second and third masterclasses will be held on 25 May and 01 June. See our upcoming events for more details.
PLEASE NOTE: If you are planning to attend this event, please write to clasp-info@qmul.ac.uk for a programme of readings.
Regional Value Chains and Governance of Decent Work in Sub Saharan Africa
Invited speaker: Matthew Alford, University of Manchester
Global value chain (GVC) research has long examined private governance by Northern lead firms. Analytically the literature has shifted from examining lead firm governance towards examining power relations under more diverse forms of governance involving public and private actors. A parallel literature highlights expanding domestic and regional value chains (DVCs/RVCs) that intersect with GVCs, and increasing role of Southern lead firms in shaping governance. However, we have limited understanding of the implications for the relation between public and private governance of decent work within expanding DVCs and RVCs within the global South. This presentation draws on cross-country and sectoral analysis of horticultural and garments DVCs/RVCs in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on horticultural production in South Africa and Kenya, and garments production in South Africa, Eswatini and Lesotho. The following questions are addressed: What are the implications of expanding DVCs and RVCs in SSA for public-private governance of decent work? Who or what are the drivers of governance across expanding DVCs and RVCs in SSA?
Matthew Alford’s research interrogates questions of development in the context of globalization, transnational trading networks and labour. More specifically, he focuses on the role of nation states in governing labour, and how public regulations interact with lead-firm driven private codes of conduct and civil society initiatives across geographical scales. Another strand of research explores labour agency, and the evolving strategies adopted by workers in contesting their conditions in global production networks (GPNs). He has investigated these issues in the context of agricultural and garments value chains spanning Sub-Saharan Africa. I earned his PhD in International Development from the Global Development Institute (GDI), and am currently employed as Senior Lecturer in International Business and Management at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS), University of Manchester.
Financialised capitalism and the subordination of emerging capitalist economies
Invited speaker: Jeff Powell, University of Greenwich
The variegated experiences of financialisation in Emerging Capitalist Economies (ECEs) require a theory of global structural transformation in which these appearances can be located. Such a transformation can be found in the substantive advancement of the internationalisation of the circuits of capital, marking the passage into a new stage of financialised capitalism. In this new stage, finance has taken the concrete form of a US dollar market-based system, while production is carried out through global production networks. The confluence of these new realities has impacted both the size and the nature of the transfer of value from subordinate regions. An increasing share of this transferred value is captured by finance, both as reward for services rendered and as opportunities for expropriation have proliferated. In financialised capitalism, ECEs are cast in a subordinate position in relation to the extraction, realisation, and ‘storage’ of value, and the agency of their public and private agents is severely constrained.
Jeff Powell is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Greenwich. He is a member of the Institute of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability (PEGFA) and the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre (GPERC), as well as a founding member of Reteaching Economics.