Join us for a week of critical exchange, fresh perspectives, and collective learning in the Swiss Alps. At this year’s Rethinking Economics Summer School Switzerland, we critically examine how hegemonic economic structures are reproduced. In response, we propose care as an organising principle of an alternative economic system. How can we collectively build power to reorganise economies so they sustain people, communities, and ecosystems?
Whether you’re deeply engaged or just curious, coming from economics, activism, the arts, or any other field, this space is for you.
Here's a quick overview of our schedule (scroll left / right). This year, the Summer School is one day longer! Have a look at the program section for descriptions of the various activities, and check your email for a complete version with workshop details:
Surbhi Kesar is a development and political economist and currently serves as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at SOAS University of London. Her research focuses on labour and the informal economy, and the reproduction of economic dualism alongside high economic growth, centring the dimensions of dispossession as embedded in the capitalist growth process. Her work also engages with the relationship between identities and social exclusion in India, the political economy of crises, critical approaches to social reproduction theory, and efforts to decolonise the field of economics. Her research is grounded in Marxian political economy and South-centric critical frameworks. She is an Associate Editor of Oxford Development Studies and serves on the editorial board of the Review of Radical Political Economics. She has also previously served on the editorial board of the Review of Political Economy. She is a Steering Group member of the Diversifying and Decolonising Economics initiative
Feline Tecklenburg is a political economist specialising on the relationship between the economy and care work. She is co-director of the think-and-do-lab Wirtschaft ist Care (Economy is Care), where she promotes research, advocacy and networking around a care-centred economy. She has studied political science, sociology, economics and gender studies at universities in Germany and Switzerland, and has experience in teaching, research and the management of international projects. Her non-fiction book "Das Wir in Wirtschaft. Wer Care-Arbeit aufwertet, sichert Wohlstand und Demokratie" will be published in October 2026. ©Grit Siwonia
Lara Monticelli is an economic sociologist and co-founder of the SASE Network I: “Alternatives to Capitalism,” established in 2017. She has over a decade of experience at world-class institutions, including Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), and, most recently, University College London (UK). She is currently Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the ESRC/UKRI Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol. Her work is inspired by, and engages with, prominent contemporary thinkers within the interdisciplinary field of “capitalism studies” and centres on the urgent need to foster transitions toward more just, equitable, and sustainable futures. Her current research agenda advances this vibrant field of scholarship by moving beyond critique to examine how imaginaries of alternative futures are prefigured, contested, and negotiated in relation to contemporary capitalism by a wide range of social actors. She has pursued this agenda through the prestigious EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship project EcoLabSS – Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change, as well as through several field-defining publications on prefigurative movements and prefigurative politics. She co-edits the book series “Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century” with Bristol University Press. She is currently working on several new publications and projects, including the monograph Prefigurative Social Movements: Politics in Practice, in which she develops a novel Marxian, Polanyian, and Fraserian framework for the study of social movements, and a major grant proposal examining how powerful corporate actors, particularly Big Tech corporations, not only engage in speculation, but also enact forms of reactionary prefiguration that shape dominant imaginaries of the future and of capitalism itself.
... and you!