Plurale Sommerakademie Workshops 2023
General Information
The workshops are at the heart of our summeracademy. Our aim is to provide you with an intense and in-depth learning experience, which is why you will participate in one workshop throughout the academy. As you can see in the schedule, the programme consists of 6 workshop sessions including interdisciplinary exchange and wrap-up.
The workshops are designed in a way to provide an entry point into the respective strand of economic thought. Therefore, apart from a general interest in economics, no prior knowledge or training is required. So don‘t worry if you have never heared about complexity economics or institutional economics – all you need is the desire to engage with a specific school of thought.
Workshop 1: Introduction to Feminist Economics
Ines Heck (University of Greenwhich)
Standard economics often neglects the perspective of women by predominantly recording and evaluating paid gainful employment in economic models and key figures. Feminist economics provides new perspectives by understanding work not only as gainful employment, but also often includes unpaid care and reproductive work. It also sheds light on how the disposition of income, power, or labor relations and distribution are related to gender. In this workshop, Ines Heck will introduce the topic of feminist economics and take a closer look at the concept of work and division of labor.
Language: German
Workshop 2: Development Economics
Dr. Pooja Balasubramanian (German Institute of Development and Sustainability)
Development economics and development policy approaches need to be measured against the challenges of the Global South and examined for their ideological backgrounds and historical effectiveness. This workshop will provide a critical examination of various current trends and agendas in the field of development economics, paying attention to global economic policy imbalances. Individual microeconomic approaches and their implementation will be framed within macroeconomic linkages and dynamics. The workshop will focus on aspects such as financialization, debt and social reproduction and how development discourse (mis)treats these issues.
Language: Englisch
Workshop 3: Political Economy according to Marx
Moritz Zeiler (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung)
The workshop offers an introduction to the critique of political economy following Karl Marx. On the first day there will be an introduction to the basics of the critique of political economy. This will primarily refer to "Das Kapital. Critique of Political Economy". On the second day, based on this introduction, specific topics such as class, state, crisis and ecology will be developed on the basis of Marx's perspective.
Language: German
Workshop 4: Decolonizing Economics
Michelle Meixieira Groenewald (North-West University, South Africa)
This workshop seeks to embolden participants to ask questions, rather than to provide definitive answers. It will fundamentally ask whether we can, or even should use the word ‘decolonising’ in our pursuit of a better economics? Both participants and lecturers, will also be encouraged to reflect on their own situatedness in how they have come to “know”.
It will advocate for participants to think through the process of co-creating the theoretical ideas, and practical implications of what it might mean to decolonise economics. It must be emphasized that this should not be seen as a prescriptive set of rules that must be followed. Rather, this is an opportunity for broader points of discussion on decolonising; to reflect context specific realities (Chelwa, 2016 & Bassier, 2016), to de-centre Western ideas in economics (Alves and Kvangraven, 2021), to “[democratise] knowledge from its current rendition in the singular into its plural known as knowledges” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018) – to name but a few.
In drawing from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, this workshop seeks to actively reconsider existing power hierarchies, including those in a ‘classroom’ setting. As such, instead of all the content being chosen solely by the lecturer, participants will be encouraged to also add a participant-chosen-topic to the week’s lecture materials. So too, in the spirit of co-creating, participants will actively be able to choose what form they would like their workshop output to take.
Whilst other disciplines have engaged far more deeply with the debates and contestation around what it means to decolonise, the economics discipline has barely begun to grapple with this vitally important topic. Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela (2004), argue that postcolonial thought could provide a “cross cutting ‘frame’ in which we may rethink a variety of important heterodox traditions within Economics”. This idea will be explored further in this workshop, as an opportunity for deeper engagement.
Language: English
This workshop will be a hybrid! Michelle Groenewald will give the workshop via zoom.
Workshop 5: Ecological Economics
Nicholas Fitzpatrick (NOVA-Universität in Lissabon, Portugal)
What is ‘the economy’? For ecological economists, the economy is a subsystem embedded in society, which itself is embedded in the biosphere. This summer series offers an introduction to ecological economics and degrowth in relation to social-ecological transformation. Following this series, you will be able to understand how a critical ecological economics perspective differs from mainstream economics, especially in relation to power relations, social provisioning systems, and strategies. A discussion that will extend to the why, what, and how of degrowth. So if you want to practise economics as if the planet and people matter, you have come to the right place!
