This new Political Studies Association specialist group focuses on the field of political economy in both contemporary and historical perspective. The group's objectives are (a) to organise high profile conference and workshop activities, (b) to provide a high quality information and discussion tool for the political economy community, (c) to stimulate graduate work in political economy, (d) to actively link political economists in UK political science with cognate scholarship in other fields and other parts of the world and (e) to raise the profile of the PSA in established political economy research networks globally.

Monday 22 September 2008

PSA Conference 2009 - Call for papers

Material States

Co-convenors:
Angus Cameron – Leicester University
Ian Bruff – Edge Hill University

Panel abstract:
The rejection across the critical social sciences of environmental determinism in all its guises means that the material foundation of politics has tended to be sidelined. Theoretical and empirical priority has, as a consequence, been given to processes of structuration, social construction, planning, autopoesis, dialectics and so on. Whilst material processes are implied in many of these narratives, the nature of materiality itself is not always explored or accorded agency. Despite this emphasis, the political, economic and social domains continue to be shaped and constrained – historically and contemporaneously – by the material. This can include the physical aspects of life (e.g. biofuel vs. food) and the wider physical environment (climate change, hurricane Katrina, etc.) but also includes other non- or less physical material orders (money, virtual materials and places, spiritual domains, etc. (Miller 2007)). The purpose of this panel is to explore critically both the political economies of materiality and the materialities of political economies.

Topics of relevance might include:
The nature of political materiality
The material construal of political possibilities
Political economies of artefacts
Virtuality and virtualism vs. materiality

Please send abstracts (200 words or less) to awgc1@le.ac.uk by 25th September 2008.