ESA Research Networks
Critical Political Economy
Call for Papers'Beyond the Crisis of the European Project? The Political Economy of EUrope and the Political Economies in Europe in (post-)disciplinary perspectives'
31 August – 2 September 2006, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
The workshop brings together critical scholarship on the political economy of the European Union and European capitalist economies. It seeks to contribute to an understanding of the crisis of the European project by moving beyond disciplinary and theoretical boundaries.
It seems that the neo-liberal project goes on unabated in the actual European policy-making. But at the same time this project generates less and less support and indeed faces increasing outright opposition and resistance, in part voiced by mainstream political parties, even sometimes when in government.
Neo-liberal governance in Europe in particular seems to face its limits as in the context of the post-referendum blues the legitimacy crisis of the European project that had been looming for years has become visible for all. This legitimacy crisis has in fact a multi-level nature as national states find it equally hard to sustain popular consent and national governments often blame Europe in the process.
Invited speakers:
Alan Cafruny (Hamilton College, NY, US)
Bob Jessop (Lancaster, UK)
Dorothee Bohle (CEU Budapest, Hungary)
Hans-Jürgen Bieling (Marburg, Germany)
Magnus Ryner (Birmingham, UK)
We invite papers dealing with the topic of the workshop from different thematic and theoretical perspectives. The abstracts (circa 400 words) should be sent to the network coordinator at jan.drahokoupil@gmail.com before 31 March 2006.
Funding for PhD students:
There is an application for a contribution to cover some of the expenses for PhD students and young scholars pending. Please indicate if you wish to apply for this funding. Students from Eastern Europe will be preferred.
Jan Drahokoupil (network coordinator)
and
Bastiaan van Apeldoorn & Laura Horn (local organizing committee)
Call for participation in the ESA Political Economy Research Network
Political-economy scholarship has proven a fruitful perspective in understanding recent transformations of capitalism and capitalist societies. Many European sociologists and scholars from other disciplines work on projects that investigate European societies from a variety of political-economy perspectives. However, we lack a platform to promote and facilitate such research endeavours, to reassert the political economy perspective in the European Sociology and European social science in general, and to promote critical and emancipatory scholarship in Europe.
Therefore, we call interested scholars to participate in the Political-Economy Research Network of the European Sociological Association. Given the inherently inter-disciplinary nature of political-economy perspectives, we do not limit this call to sociologists. On the contrary, we wish to address scholars working within different disciplines, who employ political economy perspective in its broad sense in the study of Europe. Political economy has been traditionally defined as a particular field of study focusing on the relationship between the state and the economy. It understands the political and the economic as mutually co-constituted, the economic relations are seen as power relations involving a struggle over various scarce and valuable resources. Thus, we would like to bring together people employing neo-Marxist, neo-Gramscian, Regulationist, cultural political economy, world systems, constructivist, sociological institutionalist and other heterodox institutional and evolutionary political economy perspectives.
The primary activities of the network will include:
1. Facilitating the exchange of information, ideas and dialogue [mailinglist, website, newsletter]
2. Establishing contacts that might lead to new research projects or bids for funding for research projects
3. Organizing paper sessions and workshops at the ESA conferences
4. Organizing special seminars and conferences
The founding meeting of the research network took place at the ESA conference in Torun, 9-13 September 2005.
At the Torun Conference, the following persons were elected to serve the network:
Jan Drahokoupil (CEU Budapest) as the Network Co-ordinator; E-mail: jan.drahokoupil@gmail.com
Stuart Shields (Manchester) as the Secretary; E-mail: stuart.shields@man.ac.uk
Claes Belfrage (Birmingham) as the Treasurer; E-mail: claes.belfrage@spray.se
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