Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.

Institute of Political Economy Annual Graduate Student Conference: Beyond Resistance

March 3, 2022 — March 4, 2022
Time: 9:00 AM — 5:00 PM

Location:zoom
Audience:Anyone
Contact Email:IPEgradconf@gmail.com

The Institute of Political Economy will be hosting a two-day event over zoom for this year’s annual graduate student conference. English Closed Captioning [auto-generated] will be available throughout. This event is open to the public, but registration is required [complete form below].

The theme of our conference is Beyond Resistance. We face an era of intertwined crises: climate, capitalism, and colonialism. Our social systems encompassing economic, political, ecological, gendered and racialized forms of oppression are changing at an unprecedented rate. We are in the midst of the sixth mass-extinction event in the planet’s history, yet leadership persists as if it’s business as usual, with policies of endless economic growth. Decolonial, anti-capitalist, feminist and labour struggles are gaining momentum, but as of now they lag behind the exploiters’ access to power, institutions and funds. Struggles for liberation unfold on numerous fronts, demanding the application of new tactics and alternative knowledge. We want to create a space to develop this knowledge.

Keynote Speaker: Visiting Professor, Denise DuRuiz

“Thinking about the Worker Family without Familialism”

Thinking beyond resistance entails thinking with people, as decolonial, anti-capitalist, feminist, and labour struggles have been doing for decades. However, colonized people, working classes, women, migrants, and refugees in “most of the world” in Partha Chatterjee’s words, who critical scholars and activists intend to think with, build their immediate relations of care, support, and solidarity by relying on a patriarchal, heteronormative, and biopolitical institution, namely the family. Analyzing ethnographic data on Kurdish and Syrian migrant worker families in Turkey, this talk attempts to unpack the familial relationships that produce both resilience and governability.

Dr. Duruiz received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and she is a sociocultural anthropologist working with Kurdish migrant farm workers and Syrian refugees in Turkey and in Europe. For her doctoral dissertation, she conducted ethnographic research both in the Kurdish region and at twelve different rural worksites (farms, greenhouses, charcoal production, public landscaping) in western Turkey. She is currently working on her book manuscript, which examines political violence in the Kurdish region and the resulting racialized and regionally divided class formation in Turkey through this migrant labor practice. Her postdoctoral research explores the Syrian experience of migration to Europe with a focus on labor. She is also the creator and the host of the Keyman Podcast and the co-organizer of The Colloquium on Refugees, Migrants and Statelessness at Northwestern University.

Conference Schedule:

Thursday, March 3, 2022

9:00am – 10:30am
Panel 1: Labor, Intersectionality and New Imaginaries

Moderator: Daiva Stasiulis
Prong, Alex: Doing Queer: Queer Temporal Theory, Imaginative Capacity, & Hopepunk
Suravee, Nayak:  Intersectional Inequalities and the (Un) Making of Labour in Coal Mines of Eastern India
Birks, Sophie : Solidarity with whom? Police violence and the labour movement’s complicity

11:00am -12:30pm
Panel 2: International Relations, Violence and the State

Moderator: William Walters

Akinlabi, Akinkunmi Afeez: Political Economic Implications of Foreign Military Bases: Djibouti as a Case Study
Clevenger, Michael:  The Political Economy of North and East Syria (Rojava) from a World-Systems’ Perspective
Kathen, Noah:  Pain and Power: The Political Economy of the US’s and Canada’s Prescription Opioid Crises

1:30pm – 3:00pm
Panel 3: Precarious Work and the Gig Economy

Moderator: Jane Stinson

López, Guillermo: Murcia Labour precarity: towards a consistent and operative concept
McIntosh, Alex: Towards a value theory of labour: a Weberian-Nietzschean analysis of the morality of work
Abernethy, Zoe: Beyond Mobilization: Evaluating Struggles for Gig Worker Rights in Ontario

3:30pm – 5:00pm
Panel 4: Gender and Labour

Moderator: Susan Braedley

Maudlin, Taylor: The Customer is Not Always Right: Sexual Harassment & Consent in Waitressing
Saj, Danielle: Social Reproductive Unions as Social Unions: The Case of Manitoba
Thompson, Kenya: Diverse Economies as Care Economies

Friday, March 4, 2022

9:00am – 10:30am
Keynote: Dr. Deniz DuRuiz

11:00am – 12:30pm
Panel 5: Climate (In)action

Moderator: David Hugill

Sterling, Julia:  Climate Solution or Climate Delusion?: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Solar Geoengineering
Becherer, Ariel:  An Ecosocialism at “British Columbia, Canada”
Beard, Matt: Transition Pathways in Canadian Concrete: CarbonCure, Carbicrete, and Competing Interests in Sustainable Innovation Transitions
Gometz, Jakob: Climate on the Horizon? Gothenburg dockworkers’ framings of their political horizon regarding climate change

1:30pm – 3:00pm
Panel 6: Settler Colonialism and Decolonization

Moderator: Jennifer Henderson

Boote, Emily Louise How can Structural Violence Theory be used to understand how inequality is maintained and why it persists in relation to Indigenous communities in Canada?
Prokipcak, Nathan A Policy Critique Perspective on Food Mail and Nutrition North
Fung, Amy The Long Memory of Mourning
Lucas, Kieran Morgan Marxism in the Colonial Context

3:30pm – 5:00pm
Panel 7: Finance and Technology

Moderator: Marc-Andre Gagnon

Lee, Madison:  Rise of the New Capitalists
Matheson, Katrina:  Nicole Blockchain in the Pacific: Economic Performativity and the Assetization of Trust
Carazza, Andre: Financial Citizenship in Brazil: the influence of International Financial Institutions and the possible contributions from Feminist Political Economy

Conference Registration - Beyond Resistance

  • Please provide your affiliation details for the purposes of the conference. Ex. Carleton University, Institute of Political Economy, MA Student; or Canadian Union of Public Employees, Research Department, Senior Research Officer
    When you register for the conference, you will receive links to all panels. This question is for planning purposes only.
  • Should you require disability-related accommodations to ensure your full participation in the conference, please let us know and we will follow up with you directly.

Conference Sponsors: