CfP: 16th Symposium of the International Consortium for Social Development

This is just a quick note to bring to your attention the call for papers for the 16th Symposium of the International Consortium for Social Development. This academic conference is jointly organized by University of Southern California and Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon and is going to take place from 27th to 31st July 2009 at Monterrey, Mexico.

All relevant information and further details on the 16th ICSD Symposium can be found at:
http://www.fts.uanl.mx/_symposium/

Contact:

Héctor Cuadra Montiel (PhD)

h.cuadra.montiel@gmail.com
hcuadra@facts.uanl.mx

Subdirección de Estudios de Posgrado
Facultad de Trabajo Social y Desarrollo Humano
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Ciudad Universitaria C.P. 66451
San Nicolás de los Garza,
Nuevo León, México

phone: (+52)(81) 83521309 ext. 103
fax: (+52)(81) 83769177 ext. 129

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.

The 2008 Warwick RIPE Debate: ‘American’ versus ‘British’ IPE

On Monday May 12th 2008 the Department of Politics and International Studies hosted the first of what will become the annual Warwick RIPE Debates. It took place in front of an audience in excess of one hundred, comprised of staff and graduate students from around fifteen different institutions. The 2008 debate featured Professor Benjamin Cohen of the University of California, Santa Barbara, talking about his new book, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 2008). It was chaired by Mark Blyth of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who is one of the editors of the Review of International Political Economy, and it also involved two members of PaIS, Richard Higgott and Matthew Watson. The focal point of the debate was a discussion of Professor Cohen’s identification of two distinct schools of IPE, one of which he labels the ‘American School’ and the other the ‘British School’. It followed a recent exchange in RIPE after Higgott and Watson published a response to Professor Cohen’s original outline of those categories.

A recording of the debate can be found here.

More about this debate and the Warwick RIPE Debates series in general can be found at the website.

New Political Economy 2008/9 Graduate Student Prize Paper Competition

New Political Economy invites submissions to the 2008/9 Graduate Student Prize Paper competition. We would welcome submissions from graduate students working across the
field of political economy, from all relevant disciplinary backgrounds and on any topic consistent with the overall aims and remit of the journal. The prize is £500 (GB sterling) and publication of the paper in New Political Economy. The closing date for submissions is Friday 5 December 2008.

Papers submitted to the competition must be no longer than 10,000 words in length, including all endnotes. Papers should be submitted according to the usual submission guidelines, and candidates should indicate clearly in the title of the e-mail that the paper is intended for submission to the Graduate Student Prize Paper Competition. All submissions must be fully in NPE house style. All candidates must be currently registered as doctoral students at recognised institutions of higher education. All the relevant information – details of the aims and remit of the journal, submission guidelines and details of house style – can be found at: www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13563467.asp
The judges in the competition will be the editors of NPE. The outcome will be announced
by the end of March 2009 and the winner duly notified. The decision of the editors is final.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the pubhlication in 1983 of "Laws of Chaos: a probabilistic approach to political economy" by Emmanuel Farjoun and

www.probabilisticpoliticaleconomy.net

July 14 -- 17, 2008
Kingston University, UK

The publication of "Laws of Chaos" was an event of genuine theoretical innovation in the field of political economy. The book was a response to the impasse reached by the input-output method of representing an economy, in particular when applied to the theory of economic value.
Farjoun and Machover's innovations include the systematic introduction of probabilistic modelling, statistical mechanics, and probabilistic laws to the field of political economy. They rejected the adequacy of deterministic models to capture essential features of a dynamic and distributed market economy, which they viewed as a complex system characterised by a huge number of degrees of freedom.
Employing probabilistic arguments, Farjoun and Machover developed a broad model of the capitalist economy that, in contrast to deterministic approaches, had a more immediate connection to empirical reality and yielded important and theoretically distinct, macroeconomic conclusions, including probabilistic laws governing the relationship between price and labour-content, the distribution of the profit rate, and the tendency of labour productivity to increase.

The conference will concentrate on four main themes:
(i) "Laws of Chaos", a reflection on the reception and subsequent impact of Farjoun and Machover's book,
(ii) "Theory and methods", an exploration of the concept of statistical equilibrium in political economy,
(iii) "Models and empirical reality", investigations of specific non-deterministic, economic models and their relationship to empirical data, and
(iv) "Disequilibrium and out-of-equilibrium dynamics", examining the disequilibrium properties and empirical plausibility of non-deterministic models of capitalism.

Our aim is to reflect on the past and stimulate the next 25 years of the research programme of probabilistic political economy.

Final programme
==============
The final programme is now available, and may be downloaded from here.

The conference will open at 11.30 a.m. on Monday, July 14 and will continue through to a reception and gala dinner on the evening of Wednesday, July 16.

Papers and abstracts
=================
Abstracts of all contributions can be found here.

Participation
===========
Places are still available for participants; booking forms are available from the Kingston University conference web-site. The actual URLs for the forms are available here for pdf file and here for word document.
The core option includes all meals and refreshments during the conference, including the concluding reception and dinner, and three nights' accommodation (Monday, July 14 to Wednesday, July 16) together with breakfast on the morning of departure (Thursday, July 17). There will also be a daily registration rate for participants wishing to attend particular sessions.
Information about the Kingston Hill campus, including the residential accommodation, is available here. Information about Dorich House, Kingston University's own "stately home" and the venue for the closing dinner, is available here.

Keynote speakers
==============

• Emmanuel Farjoun, Professor of Mathematics, Einstein Institute of Mathematics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Moshé Machover, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, King's College London

Invited speakers
=============

• Masanao Aoki, Professor Emeritus of Economics, UCLA
• Paul Cockshott, Reader in Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Glasgow
• Allin Cottrell, Professor of Economics, Wake Forest University
• Jurgen Essletzbichler, Lecturer, Department of Geography, UCL
• Alan Freeman, Visiting Lecturer in Economics, School of Business and the Humanities, University of Greenwich
• Mauro Gallegati, Professor of Economics, University of Ancona
• Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance, University of Western Sydney
• Andrew Kliman, Professor of Economics, Pace University
• Paul Plummer, Professor of Geography, University of Calgary
• David Rigby, Professor of Geography, UCLA
• Michael Webber, Professor of Geography, University of Melbrourne
• Victor Yakovenko, Professor of Physics, University of Maryland

Organising committee
=================

• Julian Wells, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Kingston University, UK
• Eric Sheppard, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Minnesota, USA
• Ian Wright, Research Student, Department of Economics, Open University, UK

++++++++++++++++++++

Dr Julian Wells
Faculty web-page
Personal web-site

Senior lecturer
School of Economics
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Kingston University
Penrhyn Road
Kingston-upon-Thames
KT1 2EE

Public Debate on the Future of IPE

The Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick announces a public debate on the future of IPE, involving Professor Benjamin Cohen of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who will be talking about and promoting his new book, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 2008). The event originates in the publication in the Review of International Political Economy of Professor Cohen's recent article on the Transatlantic Divide in IPE. It will take the form of a roundtable, to be chaired by Mark Blyth of Johns Hopkins University and one of the current editors of RIPE, and in addition to Professor Cohen it will also involve Richard Higgott and Matthew Watson from the University of Warwick, who have published a response in RIPE to Professor Cohen's original piece.

There is no entrance charge for attending the debate, so this message constitutes an open invitation for all to attend. It will take place on Monday 12th May between 4.00 p.m. and 5.30 p.m. in Lecture Theatre MS.03 in the Zeeman (Maths) Building. The location of this building can be found on the University of Warwick campus map and it is building number 35 in zone F4. Information about how to get to the University of Warwick is also included in links from that web page. The University Bookshop, in collaboration with Princeton University Press, will create a stall in the lecture theatre in order to sell copies of Professor Cohen's new book throughout the afternoon.

We look forward to seeing as many people as possible at the event.

Call for papers - European Political Economy and Society in the World

This workshop, organised by the European Sociological Association's Critical Political Economy Research Network, takes place in Oxford on 12-14 September. Click here for the call for papers.

Join us

Wecome to the weblog of the brand new PSA specialist group on Political Economy. If you would like to join the group (there is at present no membership fee), then please go here to download the membership form.

This group will operate with a broad and inclusive understanding of political economy. The basic premise of any work labelled political economy is that the political and the economic are not discrete domains, but part of an interconnected whole. Politics and economics are thus inseparable analytically. Within this overarching definition, there is of course considerable space for theoretical debate and empirical specialisation. This diversity means that political economy work may be theoretical or empirical, historical or contemporary, international or comparative. Work conducted under the political economy banner is undertaken from a variety of theoretical perspectives and proceeds from a variety of methodological premises. Indeed, while some of the world’s primary political economists work under the banner of political science, many do not. As such political economy has the potential to act as an important interdisciplinary hosting metaphor.