Program

This year's Summer School is all about utopias and transformation. The focus lies on labour, economic power structures and institutions. Together we want to reconsider what's possible and what insights can be gained from a pluralist perspective on transformation.

In the afternoon renowned researchers and experts are going to introduce us to different aspects and perspectives directly linked to this year's topic. In the morning, there are different workshop formats and collaborative spaces enabling a participatory knowledge production.

Schedule

Summary of our schedule for the week (scroll left / right). Check your email for the complete version with workshop details:



Speakers


Photo of Katharina Bodirsky

Katharina Bodirsky is a political and economic anthropologist who is currently teaching at the University of Konstanz. Among other research interests, she has turned in the past few years to studies of the commons and commoning as paths towards a post-capitalist future. She felt that research and education that exclusively engages with what goes wrong in our world today might end up demotivating us in our wish for transformation. This wish however does not preclude constructive criticism of attempts at transformation, and she engages with the potential of commoning in this spirit. Born and raised in a rural area in the South of Germany, Katharina lived in New York, Berlin, and Ankara before coming to Konstanz. Her perspective on the commons is informed by her experiences in these different places.

Photo of Jeff Althouse

Jeff is a research associate with the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. His academic research attempts to highlight the key macroeconomic obstacles to creating more harmonious human-nature relations and illuminate pathways forward. His work focuses primarily on how social power transforms environments in uneven ways across the globe, particularly at the expense of vulnerable and historically marginalized groups. He specializes in the role of monetary and financial institutions to both constrain and enable more sustainable outcomes. Jeff has worked as an economist for the World Bank and the Banque de France, where he conducted research to assess the macro-financial risks associated with intensifying environmental degradation and policies for the sustainability transition. Before this, he held teaching positions at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (USPN) and Sciences Po. He holds a PhD in economics from USPN and a joint master's degree in international economics from both USPN and the Berlin School of Economics and Law.

Photo of Tim Christiaens

Tim Christiaens is assistant professor of economic ethics at Tilburg University (Netherlands). His research focuses on the future of work with a particular interest in the impact of digital technologies on the labour process and opportunities for workplace democratisation. He has written a book on worker autonomy in the digital gig economy, called "Digital Working Lives" (2022), which discusses the pitfalls and opportunities for meaningful and autonomous work in the context of algorithmic management. Tim is also a research affiliate at the Platform Cooperativism Consortium of the New School for Social Research in New York, which investigates the opportunities for cooperatives to make use of platform technology.

Photo of Ana Carolina Cordilha

Dr. Ana Carolina Cordilha is an Associate Professor at the University of Rennes 2 in France. She holds a Ph.D. from the University Sorbonne Paris Nord, where she studied contemporary transformations in public health systems driven by the expansion of global finance. Her research focuses on how monetary and fiscal policies are influenced by financial globalization, and the impact of these changes on the financing of social security policies. Her analysis has an international scope, combining French Regulation Theory and Dependency Theory to investigate these transformations across central and peripheral economies. Her teaching activities include courses in International Political Economy, Economic Development, and Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences.

Photo of Jörg Metelmann

Jörg Metelmann is an associate professor of Culture and Media Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen (HSG). From 2009 to 2018 he served as program director of “Leadership Skills” in the Contextual Studies of the HSG, from 2015 to 2020 as academic director of the Coaching Program on Assessment Level, from 2023 on he’s co-directing the university’s public lectures program. Furthermore, he was program manager of the interdisciplinary Haniel Seminars (2009–2018) and the European Haniel Program on Entrepreneurship and the Humanities (EHP, since 2013), both in cooperation with the German Haniel Foundation. He has (co-)written and (co-)edited more than 20 books on various aspects of the cultural dynamics of modernity, with particular interest in narrativity, visuality, and identity. His recent research focuses on transformation processes both in Western societies in general, and management education in particular. One of the recent publications: Imagineering (co-edited with Harald Welzer), Fischer: Frankfurt 2020.

Photo of Elena Hofferberth

Elena Hofferberth is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne. Her research focuses on the macro-financial and political economy conditions for a post-growth economy. She holds a PhD in economic from the University of Leeds. Elena is part of the international Post-Growth Economics Network, the Lausanne Ecological Economics Lab and the Scientific Research group on Sustainable Money. She is keen to develop and discuss new economic approaches within and outside of academia.

Photo of Yanira Wolf

Yanira Wolf is a staff member at the trade union ver.di, Germany’s second-largest union with 1.9 million members, mainly in service jobs, including nurses, postal workers, teachers, and bus drivers. She understands trade union practice as part of social movements, but sees large gaps in culture and methods between union groups and activists. Therefore it's her goal to bring groups together to help them see their stated goals and build lasting coalitions, learning from each other and experimenting with methods and actions.

Photo of Thomas Telios

Thomas Telios is a social and political philosopher. He has studied Law, Music Performance (Piano and Chamber Music), Political Theory and Philosophy at the National University of Athens, the Anton-Rubinstein Akademie, Düsseldorf and the Goethe-University, Frankfurt/Main. Since February 2016 he works as a Lecturer for Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS) at the University of St. Gallen. His research agenda revolves around the concepts of collectivity, collective agency, collective forms of struggle (e.g., solidarity) and collective forms of imagining the future (e.g., utopia). To do so, he combines insights from social and political philosophy, political economy, political theory, queer theory, and intersectionality. He is currently working on the book-project "Common Sense: A Declaration of Dependence" where he recalibrates the concept of common sense as a robust political concept that can facilitate a radical redemocratization of democracy and can act as bulwark against the predominant atomistic and neo-liberal understandings of democracy. Forthcoming publications: “On Koinotopia: Reconstructing Utopia at the Era of Neo-Liberalism, Political Ecology, and Intersectionality.” (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2024); “Overdetermined Solidarity: Solidarity as Form of Agency, Set of Practices, and Normative Principle.” (Genealogy & Critique, vol. 9, no. 1 (2024)).


Basics workshops

The Basics on Pluralism (yellow slots in the schedule) equip participants with the tools and background knowledge on pluralism within economics. You will meet your Basics group at the beginning of the week and stick with them until you do the check-out on the last day. This means that you will spend some time in this group and get to know the other participants, discuss the preparation material and inputs with them, and hopefully even find some new friends. In terms of content there are three tracks.

Basics 1 starts on Sunday with an introduction of different ontologies of economics. From there we proceed with a comparison of different quantitative and qualitative research methods on Monday, and end with a discussion of the role of scientists in social transformation as well as the relationship between researchers and the people they study on Wednesday.

Basics 2 starts with an introduction to a variety of heterodox models on Sunday and proceeds with a discussion of empirical research approaches in their relation to theory on Monday. In the final session on Wednesday, we will reflect on the knowledge social scientists produce and the relationship of researchers to the people they study.

CoLab: For those participants that want to start a collaborative (research) project, there will be a space to do so at the same time as the basics courses. This space is reserved for participants that are either interested in starting a project or for participants that already joined our Summer School at least once (and are interested in doing collaborative research projects).

Participant workshops

On Tuesday and Thursday morning (orange slots in the schedule), participants are given the space to hold their own workshops or present academic and activist projects they are currently working on. Topics could look like: An introduction to different forms of cooperatives, a discussion on the specific challenges of implementing a degrowth economy in Switzerland, or different how-to-workshops (...e.g., how to organize your own Summer School or academic lecture series).

Participants interested in holding a workshop are not expected to be a researcher or expert on the topic. (After all this format is aimed at breaking hierarchies in the academic knowledge production.) Instead participants are expected to create a sound didactic concept: Preferably your workshop is designed as participative as possible and contains refreshing hands-on elements.

After we reviewed the applications, participants will receive more information as well as the opportunity to share their workshop ideas and concepts.

Preparation materials

To help you prepare for the Summer School, we made a podcast playlist. The podcasts introduce topics connected to the basics workshops and provide complementary food for thought. Have a look at the playlist here!

Workshops by participants and invited speakers also have recommended readings, which we shared via email.