The HRC is organising a workshop on Wednesday 17^th May 2023 on the theme of ‘Biographical Turns’. We invite colleagues from the full range of departments and research centres in the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences to express interest in presenting a paper at this event.

A seminar with Emma Teng, MIT

Between Racial Bar and Class Exceptionalism: US Detention of Chinese Students, 1905

speaker: Emma Teng, MIT

In the FAB and online in the DAHL Events Teams channel.Link opens in a new window

In the FAB and online in the DAHL Events Teams channel.Link opens in a new window

‘Making Prometheus’

Dear all,  

We warmly invite you to our hybrid seminar this week as part of our Applied Linguistics Seminar Series - Language. Culture. Matters. On 17th May (Wed), we have three speakers: Prof. Paul Seedhouse, from Newcastle Unvisersity.

Place:

• Online MS Teams: Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window
• Room A0.23

Time:

• 4-5 pm, 17 May (Wednesday)

• More information (including speaker bio and abstract) will be updated here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/events/seminarseries/ 

In a paper published in the British Journal of Sociology, the French economist Thomas Piketty claims that his work on inequality should be located in a tradition of social scientific thought personified by Pierre Bourdieu. This claim has not convinced a number of those in France who claim allegiance to Bourdieu. Indeed, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Didier Eribon, and Frédéric Lordon have all denounced Piketty’s work, claiming it manifests an adherence to ideas of meritocracy and economic liberalism characteristic of the failings of the French ‘second left’. Having clarified the reasons for this hostility to the ‘second left’ in Bourdieusian circles, this paper offers a reading of Piketty’s Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013) and Capital et idéologie (2019) alongside Bourdieu’s earlier La Distinction (1979) and La Noblesse d’État (1989). The paper argues that Bourdieu and Piketty’s work can indeed be seen as complementary. In short, Bourdieu plots shifts in the form and structure of capital possessed by the dominant fraction of the dominant class at a moment when France found itself on the cusp of its transition from post-war Fordism to financialised globalisation. Bourdieu’s analysis of these shifts anticipates Piketty’s account of the increases in socio-economic inequality characteristic of a period of full-blown financialisation, when ‘r’ is once again greater than ‘g’, to use his celebrated formula. The paper shows that these developments have led Piketty to renounce the faith in meritocracy and liberal economics that was indeed once the hallmark of those ‘second left’ circles from which he has emerged. The paper concludes by pondering the political significance of Piketty’s status as a disillusioned meritocrat.

Jeremy Lane is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, on the reception of jazz in interwar France, and on representations of the post-fordist workplace in contemporary France. He is currently pursuing two projects, the first on Jacques Rancière and the social sciences and the second on the ways in which responses to Covid may have exacerbated existing tendencies to precarity, surveillance, control, and socio-economic inequality.

Wednesday 17th May: Jeremy Lane (Nottingham), ‘From Bourdieu to Piketty: tracing the emergence of a “nouveau capitalisme patrimonial”’

Decarbonising the Downturn: The Contradictions of Green Capitalism Today

Calling everyone in the Arts interested in the challenges we face in responding to global warming!

Organisers from English and PAIS welcome you to a hybrid talk by Jack Copley titled, ‘Decarbonising the Downturn: The Contradictions of Green Capitalism Today’.  

As Copley describes: “Avoiding catastrophic global warming requires the decarbonisation of the world economy. But this green transformation faces a series of intersecting obstacles posed by capitalism’s long-run developmental tendencies, including entrenched economic stagnation and the proliferation of surplus populations. Pursuing decarbonisation in this context will test the ability of capitalist states to govern while maintaining their liberal form.”

Copley completed his PhD at Warwick with PAIS in 2018 and is now Assistant Professor in International Political Economy in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. He is the author of Governing Financialization: The Tangled Politics of Financial Liberalization in Britain (Oxford, 2021).

To register, please state whether you will attend in-person or online by emailing will.berrington@warwick.ac.uk 

Once registered, a Microsoft Teams invite will be emailed to you closer to the time.

For any questions, please email the same address.

Yara Staets (Warwick): Presentation of PhD project on ‘Coming to Terms with the Present: Non-Realist Representations of War in early post-1945 German Literature’