2017 Annual Workshop: Today's Future - Challenges & Opportunities Across the Social Sciences

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w o r k s h o p

2017

Today’s Future Challenges & Opportunities Across the Social Sciences

21st & 22nd June 2017 Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam

TODAY’S FUTURE Challenges & Opportunities Across the Social Sciences To our historic peers, the Future was a progressive place, a period to which everyone looked forward in anticipation of, for example, better medicine, improved social and economic prosperity, enhanced human rights – a fairer, more predictable world. But the Future does not look so bright from the first part of the twenty-first century. Trapped between narratives of the past in which Western hegemonies triumph and experiences of upheaval caused by heightened political instability, a global refugee crisis, increased poverty, war and extinction – Today’s Future collapses back upon us, threatening to be worse. So what is social science doing to prepare?

Social science is often considered to be too slow, too unwieldy and not robust enough to compete with ‘hard’ sciences, maths and economics. But the fact that social science is many things is precisely what makes it so adaptable, flexible and creative. Through cross-disciplinary critique - anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, geography, archaeology social science helps us to understand contemporary issues from the perspective of multiple temporalities. How does globalisation look from the hyper-temporality of climate change? How successful has the project of decolonisation been when we see imperialism re-emerging in Russia, China and the Middle East? What is there to celebrate about neo-liberal capitalism from the perspective of those who must compete for basic resources such as food, water and clean air? What are we doing to tackle issues associated with unrest and over-crowding in our towns and cities? Through better understanding the ways in which people find meaning and value in the world, social science perspectives improve our chances of surviving the coming storms to live peacefully and sustainably on the small planet that we all call home.

At this, the fifth, annual ISRF workshop our theme asks: what are the practical ways in which the work we variously do as social scientists may be considered to take on the major challenges facing us in the twenty-first century? We invite participants to present their work whilst considering the ways in which it functions as a catalyst for or advocate of change. How does social science

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES expose the fissures of power relations manifest in the world today? How do we assess different paradigms of value when there is increased competition for resources? How can we better apply the work we do to hold governments, politicians, corporations and other powerful elite, to account? What can we look forward to? How may Today’s Future be characterised?

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WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS Sarah Amsler Sarah Amsler is a sociologist, critical theorist and Reader in Education at the University of Lincoln.

She works at the intersections of the sociology of knowledge, political economy, and pedagogies and processes of social and epistemic change. Her research centres around the politics and political economy of education and knowledge production, the relationship between learning and social movements, the nature of learning within struggles for social change as well as in institutions, and the relationship between formal and informal modes of learning.

Her current research focuses on counter-capitalist and radical-democratic movements within and beyond cultural institutions; specifically, how movements of resistance to neoliberal colonization within schools, universities and autonomous communities are constructing new forms of subjectivity, knowledge, and collective political agency which enlarge spaces of conceptual and political possibility. She is also exploring issues of intercultural, international and inter-epistemological learning and research, and the use of popular education and creative methodologies for research and capacity-building in such contexts. She is committed to articulating education as a site of political trans/formation which is central to the critique and overcoming of dominating social relations and rationalities.

Nishat Awan Nishat Awan, Lecturer in Architecture at University of Sheffield, is an academic and spatial practitioner whose research interests include the production and representation of migratory spaces and border areas. She explores how these issues can be addressed through spatial practice, in particular thinking about maps as topological entities. After completing a post-doc at TU Berlin, she returned to University of Sheffield as a lecturer,

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES from where she also holds a PhD (2011). She has taught at a number of architecture schools in the UK and has previously worked in architectural practice. Currently, she is a member of OPENkhana, a collaborative that works between architectural, computational and artistic practice. She is author of Diasporic Agencies (Ashgate, 2016), co-author of Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Trans-Local-Act (aaa-peprav, 2011).

András Bozóki András Bozóki is Professor of Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. His research interest are comparative politics in East Central Europe, democratization, hybrid regimes, political ideas, and the role of the intellectuals. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), Ars Politica (2007), Virtual Republic (2012) and others.

His articles appeared in Comparative Sociology, Perspectives on Politics, East European Politics and Society, European Political Science, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Praxis International, East European Constitutional Review, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Osteuropa, Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, Central European Political Science Review, Czech Sociological Review, Mediations, Athenaeum: Polish Political Science Studies, Hungarian Political Science Review, Transit, Baltic Worlds, and Europaische Rundschau.

András was chairman of the Hungarian Political Science Association and also was a member of the board of the European Confederation of Political Science Associations. He has been a founding editor of the Hungarian Political Science Review. He was winner of the 1992 Ferenc Erdei Prize of the Hungarian Sociological Association, and the 2009 István Bibó Prize of the

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TODAY’S FUTURE Hungarian Political Science Association.

Ivano Cardinale Ivano Cardinale is Lecturer in Economics at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was previously the Mead Fellow in Economics (Junior Research Fellow) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He studies foundational issues at the interface between economics, political economy, and social theory. In economics, he studies how structural representations of the economy often question received results of micro and macro analysis. In political economy, he uses those representations to unveil largely unexplored conflicts of interest – and possibilities for cooperation. In social theory, he is developing a theory of how agency and structure interact within human action; he uses it to understand institutions, technology, and choice under uncertainty. He also deploys this theory in a political economy context, to understand how political-economy structures influence decisions and are shaped by them in turn. These projects are part of a broader programme, which can be described as “Structural Political Economy”: studying how the mutual shaping of human action and social and economic structures can help understand economic interests, their political representation, and the political-economy paths open to societies.

Annelien de Dijn Annelien de Dijn is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam, and the author of French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008, paperback edition October 2011, Chinese translation forthcoming). Her research focuses on the history of political thought in Europe and in the United States from 1700 to the present. She has a particular interest in the fraught and contested history of freedom and in Enlightenment political thought.

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Annelien has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Cambridge University, the Remarque Institute at NYU, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of California at Berkeley. A past recipient of Fulbright and B.A.E.F. fellowships, she was educated at the University of Leuven in Belgium and at Columbia University.

Jeroen de Kloet Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) at the University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on cultural globalisation, in particular in the context of East Asia. He is the principal investigator of a project funded by the European Grant Council (ERC), titled “From Made in China to Created in China.

A Comparative Study of Creative Practice and Production in Contemporary China.” In 2010 he published China with a Cut - Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music (Amsterdam UP). He wrote, together with Yiu Fai Chow, Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image (Intellect, 2013) and edited, together with Lena Scheen, Spectacle and the City – Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture (Amsterdam UP, 2013). With Anthony Fung he published Youth Cultures in China (Polity 2017). See also www.jeroendekloet.nl

Bregje de Kok Bregje de Kok is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches medical anthropology and is a member of the Health, Care, and the Body research group She is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work straddles the domains of anthropology, sociology, psychology and public health. Bregje received a PhD in psychology (2007) from the University of Edinburgh, where she worked as postdoctoral researcher in Sociology from 2006 to 2008, funded by an interdisciplinary ESRC-MRC fellowship.

Key themes in Bregje’s research are the normative and moral dimensions of reproductive and

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TODAY’S FUTURE maternal health in Malawi and other African settings, and how normativity and morality affect the use and provision of care and the functioning of health systems. To explore these aspects Bregje uses an innovative combination of ethnography, discursive psychology and conversation analysis.

In 2012 Bregje was awarded an early career fellowship by the Independent Social Research Foundation to study providers’ and community members’ interpretations of accountability and blame in relation to reproductive loss (e.g. miscarriages, abortions, infertility) and maternal mortality in Malawi. Through this project she seeks to contribute to our understanding of accountability ‘from below’ and people-centred health systems and generate insights for the development of policies and programmes grounded in local realities.

Jurgen De Wispelaere Jurgen De Wispelaere is a former occupational therapist turned political theorist and policy scholar. He is an ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow and a Policy Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research (University of Bath). In 2016 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Tampere (Finland), and in this capacity formed part of the Kela-led research team preparing the upcoming national basic income experiment in Finland. Before that he worked at universities in Montreal, Barcelona, Dublin and London and was a visiting researcher at Oxford, ANU, UCLouvain, amongst others.

His major research interest is the political analysis of basic income, which was the topic of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Tampere. The current ISRF project is an extension of this research agenda. Jurgen De Wispelaere has published extensively on basic income in leading international journals, including most recently Journal of Social Policy, Journal of Public Policy, Politics, Political Studies, International Social Security Review and Social Service Review, as well as specialist edited volumes. He is a founding co-editor of the journal Basic Income Studies and recently co-edited Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research (Wiley 2013). In addition to basic income, he is interested in disability rights, organ donation, and adoption, and

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES has published on all these topics.

Dave Elder-Vass Dave Elder-Vass is a Reader in Sociology at Loughborough University. His early work, notably in his books The Causal Power of Social Structures and The Reality of Social Construction, addressed broad questions in social ontology and social theory, arguing for a realist – but also constructionist – ontology of the social world. More recently, he has brought this perspective to bear on issues in economic sociology, beginning with the role and nature of gifts. His most recent book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, develops a realist political economy of practices and uses it to analyse the economic structures of some of the best known organisations in the contemporary digital economy.

His ISRF Political Economy Research Fellowship project is concerned with the construction of value in the finance sector. As the global financial crisis has demonstrated, market-oriented theories of financial asset values are bankrupt. This project aims to develop and apply an alternative theory, arguing that the value of assets like money, shares, and derivatives is socially constructed: demand for financial instruments is created by narratives that generate expectations of future value, by institutions that bolster these expectations, and by persuading other financial actors to accept them as facts. While such values are often stabilised, they are potentially highly precarious, generating massive risk for our economic system. A clearer understanding of how that risk is generated can help us to develop a finance sector that prioritises social benefit rather than private profit regardless of the consequences.

Building on Dave’s earlier work on social ontology, the project will use publicly available evidence to examine three cases that exemplify the argument: venture capital investments, the digital currency Bitcoin, and the complex derivatives that sparked the 2008 financial crisis. In employing tools from the philosophy of critical realism and the sociology of social construction, the project breaks with existing frameworks for explaining economic phenomena. Instead it develops

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TODAY’S FUTURE the approach introduced in Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, which argues that we can understand the economy best as the site of many interacting complexes of practices. This is a framework that allows us to integrate insights from multiple disciplines including economics itself but positions conventional market theory as a description of only one of the many mechanisms that influence economic events.

Alessandra Gribaldo Alessandra Gribaldo is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Education and Humanities at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She obtained her PhD in 2004 at the University of Siena with an ethnographic research on reproductive technologies in Italy.

Her main interests are gender and feminist theory, anthropology of kinship and reproduction, the intersection of image and gender, intimate partner violence, migration and identity, contemporary Italy, ethnography.

Over the past ten years she has been involved in a number of collaborative research projects with the ethnographic analysis of contemporary Italian society, including low fertility (Brown University, USA/Cattaneo Institute, Italy), women’s safety and right to justice (European Union), migration, reproduction and identity (University of Trento, Italy).

Alessandra’s ISRF project is aimed at finalizing a book on legal testimonies by women victims of domestic violence in Italy, addressing the issue through the lens of gender and subjectivity theories, anthropology of law, and ethnography.

Adam Leaver Adam Leaver is Professor of Financialization and Business Analysis at Alliance Manchester Business School. He has published a number of co-authored books and international peer-reviewed

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES academic journal articles on the financial services sector, financialization and financial crisis.

He was previously a researcher at the Centre for Research in Socio-cultural Change (CRESC).

His current research focuses on three areas. Adam is using social network analysis to map the relationships within certain complex securities markets. He employs the concept of ‘social network risks’ to consider the sociological character of systemic risks. He is also involved in a project on the sociology of metric gaming within the financial services sector. Finally he is interested in revisiting theories of the firm after financialization, exploring the growing importance of law and accounting providers in the de- and re-temporalisation of income and costs.

Ian Loader Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. Ian arrived in Oxford in July 2005 having previously taught at Keele University and the University of Edinburgh, from where he also obtained his PhD in 1993. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Ian is the author of six books, the most recent of which, Public Criminology?, was published by Routledge in 2010 (with Richard Sparks) and has recently been translated into Mandarin. He has also edited six volumes, including Justice and Penal Reform (with Barry Goldson, Steve Farrall and Anita Dockley, Routledge, 2016), Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration (with Albert Dzur and Richard Sparks, Oxford UP, September 2016 ) and The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing (with Ben Bradford, Bea Jauregui and Jonny Steinberg, Sage, 2016). Ian has also published theoretical and empirical papers on policing, private security, public sensibilities towards crime, penal policy and culture, the politics of crime control, and the public roles of criminology. Ian is Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice.

His project works at the curiously under-explored interface between criminology and political theory with the aim of developing the intellectual tools and resources needed to fashion a better politics of crime. Using theories of ideology and work in the history of ideas in novel ways, the study aims to understand crime control via an analysis of the political concepts that

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TODAY’S FUTURE are at issue (justice, authority, freedom etc.); as an inescapable site of ideological conflict and change, and as a field of policy and practice constituted through political thinking. The study will assemble and subject to close analysis a whole range of relevant materials from political parties, parliamentarians, policy-makers, think-tanks, campaign groups, commentators, and criminal justice agencies, as well as by criminologists and political theorists. In so doing, it will reconstruct and appraise the crime-relevant claims of the range of ideological positions whose proponents compete over the question of how to think about, and act upon, problems of crime and social order – from liberalism, conservatism and social democracy, to populism, technocracy, feminism and green political thought.

The study aims to transcend the orientation towards critique, and the gloomy, dystopian disposition, that has come to dominate the social scientific analysis of crime and punishment in recent years. Instead the focus is on reconstruction – the search for principled, plausible visions of just ordering. The study will provide a careful work of ideological clarification that teases out what is at stake when crime is under discussion in ways that shed new light on the prospects and possibilities of creating social and penal institutions that can contribute to the realization of safer and more cohesive societies.

Emanuele Lobina Emanuele Lobina is Principal Lecturer in the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) at the University of Greenwich Business Faculty. Emanuele joined PSIRU in 1998 to further PSIRU’s research and policy work on water service reform. Taking the urban water sector in developed, transition and developing countries as reference, his research connects two separate but interrelated themes: the relative efficiency of public and private enterprise; and the policy process of water service reform. He has regularly acted as a consultant for and policy advisor to international organisations, central and local governments, professional associations, trade unions and social movements. His work has been translated into Catalan, French, German,

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. His experience with applied research has led Emanuele to growing dissatisfaction with the dominant rational choice theories of government failure, such as public choice and property rights theory, and competing perspectives such as market failure theory. In fact, the evidence does not support the predictions of all these theories. This dissatisfaction constitutes the motivation for Emanuele’s current theoretical work.

His ISRF-funded project aims to address the explanatory limitations of the conventional theory of the economics of organisation. While government failure and market failure theories respectively predict the necessity of private and public efficiency, both fail to predict the public and private inefficiencies which are empirically pervasive. This failure of prediction is due to deductive reasoning that insulates explanatory claims from the real-world duality of agency and institutions.

Oliver Williamson lays the foundations for recognising organisational failures of all kinds, by acknowledging this duality, but remains hamstrung by the limits of deductive reasoning.

To resolve this impasse, the project develops a theory of organisational failure that illuminates the multiplicity of the possible organisational efficiency outcomes, explaining how public and private water utilities become more or less efficient under varying circumstances, and reveals the social and economic factors leading to these outcomes. It does so by revisiting Williamson’s comparative institutional analysis from a critical realist vantage point, using inductive reasoning as a method of theorising, adopting multiple rationality as agency model and the duality of agency and institutions as the key to explanation.

Keir Martin Keir Martin is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Prior to this he was a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and has previously been a research fellow at the University of Aarhus (Denmark), the Australian National University, and the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology (Germany). He has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province since 2002. This research was focussed on the reconstruction

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TODAY’S FUTURE and resettlement of the inhabitants of the town of Rabaul and neighbouring villages following the volcanic eruption of 1994. This research has led to a number of publications, most notably his 2013 monograph, The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain, published by Berghahn Books. This monograph was described by American Anthropologist as, ‘A fascinating, plainspoken new ethnography… the start of a new Melanesian sociology’, and by Pacific Affairs as, ‘A groundbreaking ethnography: brilliantly conceived, clearly written and utterly convincing’. The work focuses on the emergence of new forms of social stratification in Papua New Guinea and the rise of contested assertions of individual autonomy and freedom from customary obligation as a key constituent of that emerging stratification.

Martin is author of thirty other peer-review publications and is a former winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award for research, ‘of outstanding quality and likely to make an important contribution to Social Anthropology’. His recent work has developed the conceptual apparatus used to analyse the rise of contested individualism in the South Pacific to more general analyses of contested incidents of individual personhood. In particular, his work has looked to interrogate the nature of the corporation as a legal person, particularly in the UK and to ask what the changing nature of debt in the 21st century might mean for the kind of ‘person’ that the corporation might be turning into. Martin’s work applying insights from South Pacific ethnography to contemporary capitalism has also appeared in the public arena, with articles using this material to question assumptions of rational markets appearing in The Financial Times and The Guardian. In addition to this work, he also conducts research on the global spread of psychotherapy. He is a qualified psychotherapist and is the editor of a forthcoming volume on the relationship between psychotherapy and anthropology in the 21st century to appear with Karnac Books in 2018.

Nina Moeller Nina Moeller is Independent Social Research Foundation Fellow in the Department of International

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Development at University of Oxford. Nina’s academic background is in philosophy, sociology and anthropology (PhD 2011, Lancaster University: ‘The Protection of Traditional Knowledge in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Critical Ethnography of Capital Expansion’). She has worked in Latin America and Europe – amongst other things as a consultant to indigenous organisations, NGOs and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

She is particularly interested in the politics of Access and Benefit Sharing; the material dimension of different knowledge systems; seeds and property relations; food sovereignty; autonomous development; the Amazon; and open source methodologies.

Her ISRF project re-launches her explorations of the ‘local’ complexities of ‘global’ socioecological change, and of the ‘local’ manifestations of ‘global’ discourses. It is entangled with her quest to understand how non-market relations and practices are fostered or undermined in today’s world.

Vincent Ni Vincent Ni is a journalist at the BBC World Service and a fellow at Britain’s Royal Society of Arts. At the BBC, he mainly covers China and its emerging role in international affairs. Most recently, he reported from the United States on the 2016 presidential election, and Myanmar on its historic elections in 2015. Until 2014, Vincent was a foreign correspondent for Caixin Media in Washington, DC, New York and London. Among other topics, he covered the 2012 US presidential election and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. During the 2011 revolution in Egypt, he was one of the few Chinese journalists reporting from Tahrir Square. In 2011, he won runner-up in the London Foreign Press Association’s annual awards in the category of “Financial/Economic Story of the Year.” He holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where he was the recipient of the Hoare Family/China-Oxford Scholarship in the field of social science.

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Nyíri Pál Nyíri Pál is Professor of Global History in an Anthropological Perspective at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His current research focuses on newly mobile Chinese elites and their engagement with the world. He is the author, most recently, of Reporting for China: How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World (University of Washington Press, 2017, based on research supported by ISRF) and co-editor, with Danielle Tan, of Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia: How People, Money, and Ideas from China are Changing a Region (University of Washington, 2016).

Martin O’Neill Martin O’Neill is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York. He works on a number of topics in moral and political philosophy. He is especially interested in equality, inequality and social justice; freedom and responsibility; and a number of issues at the intersection of political philosophy and public policy (including taxation, monetary policy, financial regulation, corporate governance, and labour unions). He is a Commissioning Editor of Renewal: a Journal of Social Democracy.

Oche Onazi Oche Onazi is Lecturer in Law at the University of Southampton. He has degrees from the University of Edinburgh (Ph.D), the University of Warwick (LL.M in Law in Development) and the University of Jos-Nigeria (LL.B). He is also a qualified (but non-practising) Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria.

Oche’s ISRF project aims to demonstrate the role that can be played by African legal theory or legal philosophy in forging and grounding a new response to exclusions suffered by Africans with

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES disability as a matter of justice. The project is a response to the neglect of an African account of disability in African ethical, moral, social, legal and philosophical thought and more generally in the literature on disability justice. In doing so, the project explores how an African-inspired theory or philosophy of law can extend the reach of issues central to contemporary disability justice discourse and also shed new light on issues such as the meaning of disability itself, the nature of obligations owed to disabled persons and the type of institutional responses necessary to achieve the ideal of disability justice in Africa.

Julie Parsons Julie Parsons is Lecturer in Sociology at Plymouth University. She has a first in Sociology from the University of the West of England (1994), an MSc in Sociology from the University of Bristol (1996) and a PhD (Sociology) from Plymouth University (2014). She has worked as a sociologist at Plymouth University since 1996, in a range of roles including Programme Manager for the MSc in Social Research (2010-14), Deputy Director for the Centre for Methodological Innovations (201316), Associate Head of School for Teaching and Learning (2014-15) and as a Sociology of Health and Illness Foundation Mildred Blaxter research fellow (2015-16).

Her research interests centre on social divisions and participatory approaches to research that give ‘voice’ to participants. To date this has been articulated through research that explores the intersectionalities of gender with class in the field of everyday foodways, narratives of weight loss surgery, photo-elicitation amongst users of a homeless centre and commensality (eating together around a table) as a tool for health, well-being, social inclusion and community resilience at a rural land-based prisoner resettlement scheme (RS).

Julie’s ISRF research fellowship will enable her to conduct a Photographic e-Narrative (PeN) pilot project with current and former prisoners (referred to as trainees) at a local RS. In order to foster a sense of social inclusion, the trainees will take photographs and develop narratives around these in order to engage with the wider community of supporters via a closed blog. The project

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TODAY’S FUTURE aims are twofold, to work as a personal development tool for trainees, whilst fostering dialogue between trainees and supporters in order to challenge social exclusion.

Murray Pratt Murray Pratt is Dean of Amsterdam University College (AUC) and holds a chair at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam as Professor of Contemporary Literature and Culture. Born and raised in the West of Scotland, he graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA (Honours) in English and French, and a obtained a D.Phil from the University of Oxford for his thesis on contemporary autobiography and sexuality. Murray researches and publishes on aspects of contemporary literature and culture in French, European and international contexts.

His most recent publications include essays on Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Soumission, set during a fictionalised future French presidential election, and on Jo Nesbo’s detective series as global literature.

Murray first worked as a lecturer and tutor in French Studies at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick, before moving to Australia where he established and led the department of European Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, and served as Deputy Director of the Institute for International Studies. From 2010 to 2015, Murray was Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University, where he also held a chair in French and International Studies.

During these appointments, and now at AUC, his work on educational innovation within the Liberal Arts has been motivated by a focus on collaborative and participatory initiatives that provide contemporary and relevant student learning opportunities in global and city based contexts. Murray was a recipient of the 2015 Guardian educational innovation prize for a project on digital and city learning.

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Patrick Overeem Patrick Overeem is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam. His specialization is in political theory and government ethics. Broadly interested in the quality of and interplay between what Aristotle called politeia (form of government) and politikos (politician), he has published on, among other things, public values (especially constitutional/regime values), statesmanship, integrity, and virtue ethics. Currently, he is conducting his ISRF research project on the practice and ethics of political compromise-making, specifically in multi-party democracies under conditions of polarization and populism. Besides research and teaching at the Department, Patrick is coordinator for Political Science at the VU’s newly started bachelor program Philosophy, Politics, Economics (PPE). Until recently, Patrick has worked at Leiden University, where he co-founded the Centre for Public Values & Ethics, a platform for research on public sector integrity. He has taught courses in political philosophy, government ethics and public values, and the philosophy of social science and was awarded a fellowship at the Leiden Teachers’ Academy. In his doctoral dissertation (2010), he provided a theoretical analysis of the historical meaning and constitutional relevance of dividing between politics and administration in modern states. Patrick holds degrees in both Political Science and Public Administration.

Sherrill Stroschein Sherrill Stroschein is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Political Science at University College London, and Director of the Master’s Program on Democracy and Comparative Politics (since 2005). Previously she was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and an Assistant Professor at Ohio University.

Her research emphasises two main questions. First, why and how do individuals mobilise along lines of identity in politics – particularly ethnic identities? What do such mobilisations mean for coexistence? Second, what are the implications of mobilised ethnic identities within democratic

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TODAY’S FUTURE institutions? The politics of ethnic enclaves, where demographics are reversed at the local level, is the focus of her current research project.

In addition to journal articles, she has published Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence, and Democratization in Eastern Europe (Cambridge 2012), and the edited volume Governance in Ethnically Mixed Cities (Routledge 2007). She is associate editor of the journal Problems of Post-Communism and is involved in planning for the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). Much of her research has focused on Eastern Europe, and she has a working knowledge of several European languages.

Gabor Scheiring Gabor Scheiring is a Research Associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.

Gabor is a multidisciplinary political economist combining theoretical innovation with empirical rigour benefitting from unconventional methodologies to reduce social hardships and to advance human development, health and democracy. Gabor regards social research as a tool that can help people make better sense of social dilemmas, understand the dynamics of social change and design solutions to real world problems.

As an economic sociologist he has published extensively on the political economy of health, the political economy of democratisation, and on the role of social movements in the policy process. In his doctoral research at the University of Cambridge he investigated the impact of deindustrialisation and privatisation on mortality and the collusion of class and identity in the everyday experience of the transition. In his doctoral dissertation Gabor carried out a multi-level empirical analysis of the socioeconomic factors behind the post-socialist mortality crisis of the early transition years in Hungary, the growing inequalities in mortality during the 2000s and the individual strategies of survival amongst increased stress in industrial towns.

Parallel to his studies Gabor was a nationally and internationally active member of NGOs during 2000s campaigning for sustainability and social rights. As co-founder of a local progressive green

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES party he was elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 2010 and served as the shadow minister of finance for his party. From September 2014 he has been the Chairman of the Progressive Hungary Foundation. During his years of active involvement in oppositional politics in Hungary Gabor has witnessed the gradual erosion of democracy, as the ruling Fidesz party took control of an increasing number of social spheres. This led him to re-evaluate the transition policies followed prior to 2010 and question some of the assumptions of the theories of democratisation.

Institutional guarantees of freedom, even in a member state of the European Union, can be attacked and eroded quickly if they are built on a shaky socio-economic foundation. His research proposal submitted to the ISRF is built on this experience.

James Symonds James Symonds is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA. His research focuses on the archaeology of the modern world (c.AD 1450-present) and includes work on capitalism, colonialism, landscapes of improvement and diaspora and the archaeology of poverty.

James studied prehistory and archaeology at the universities of Sheffield, and Oxford, and previously worked at the University of York. James has undertaken field research projects in the Isle of South Uist (Western Isles, Scotland), Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island (Canada), and Lapland (Finland). He is currently working on two research projects in the Czech Republic. The first examines the changing nature of the Iron Curtain between the 1950s and 1980s, and the second explores the impact of the Thirty Year’s War on rural settlements in 17th century Bohemia.

Symonds holds visiting academic positions at the Boston University (USA), Oulu University (Finland), and the University of West Bohemia (Czech Republic). He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (London), a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (Scotland) and a member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (UK). His books include: The Historical Archaeology of the Sheffield Tableware and Cutlery Industries (BAR, 2002); South Uist: Archaeology & History

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TODAY’S FUTURE (Tempus, 2004); Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions (Springer, 2005); Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives (Springer, 2010); Table Settings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700-1900 (Oxbow, 2011); Historical Archaeologies of Cognition: Historical Archaeologies of Faith, Hope, and Charity (Equinox, 2013).

Naema Tahir Naema Tahir is one of Holland’s most well-known and acclaimed authors. She was born in the United Kingdom to Pakistani immigrants and grew up in the United Kingdom, Pakistan and the Netherlands, migrating five times before the age of fifteen.

Tahir read Law at Leiden University. She practised law from 1996 to 2006, specializing in human rights law, with a special focus on social and economic rights. She served for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the UNHCR, the Dutch Competition Authority, and finally, she became a permanent staff-member of the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg, France.

Throughout her career, Tahir has been responsible for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, migrant workers protection, child protection and women’s rights.

In 2006, Tahir decided to devote herself to writing. She rapidly developed into a key figure in Dutch literature, opinion making and media. She blends in her writing her legal expertise with her extensive knowledge of the crucial challenges of our multicultural society. She has authored numerous books and articles on such issues as identity, migration, integration, empowerment of immigrant women and the sense of belonging. Tahir’s latest novel, Letters in Urdu, tells the story of Pakistani families torn apart by migration. Her current research focuses on human rights and the arranged marriages of British Pakistani women.

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Danielle van den Heuvel Danielle van den Heuvel is an Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. Before coming to Amsterdam, she held research fellowships at Girton College and the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge, after which she taught at the School of History of the University of Kent (Canterbury). Her research has an interdisciplinary focus and centres around two main themes: the impact of institutions on groups in the margins of society, and life in city streets before industrialisation. In this context she explores topics such as the informal economy, women’s work, food markets, and gendered urban space. She is PI on the NWO-funded research project ‘Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Europe and Asia (1600-1850)’. Among her publications are Food Hawkers. Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present (2016) (co-edited with Melissa Calaresu) and the prizewinning Women and entrepreneurship. Female traders in the Northern Netherlands c.1580-1815 (2007).

Jay Wiggan Jay Wiggan is Lecturer in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to moving to Edinburgh, Jay lectured in social policy at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research interests lie in the field of labour market policy, principally the transformation of social security and employment policy and administration to support labour activation. Jay’s work in this area has focused on the discourse surrounding ‘welfare reform’; the politics of contemporary active labour market schemes and the varied nature of marketisation reforms in employment services in Britain and Ireland.

Jay’s ISRF project applies a ‘bottom up’ analysis of labour market activation reforms in Britain.

Drawing on an Autonomist Marxist theoretical approach, the study seeks to foreground the antagonistic class relations underpinning policy innovation and evolution in social security and employment service provision since the late 1980s.

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THE CONVERSATION From April 2017, the ISRF began a pilot partnership with The Conversation. Josephine Lethbridge is The Conversation’s Interdisciplinary Editor, funded by the ISRF. Josephine’s role includes working with scholars at The Conversation’s member universities, as well as past and present Fellows of the ISRF, to bring interdisciplinary social research to millions of readers worldwide.

Josephine will encourage researchers to write short newsworthy articles, working with them to produce pieces with journalistic flair but no loss of academic rigour. The ISRF hopes that, by promoting inter-disciplinarity through this partnership with The Conversation, the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches will reach broader audiences, and that knowledge of such work will spread beyond the confines of academia.

Josephine Lethbridge Josephine Lethbridge became Interdisciplinary Editor at The Conversation after over three years as the UK’s initial Arts + Culture Editor. As well as articles on new research, she also commissioned academics to write commentary on popular culture news and to review films and art exhibitions.

Josephine has an MA in English Literature from the University in Glasgow, and since autumn 2015 has also been studying part-time towards an MSc in Science, Technology and Society at UCL, which she will complete in September 2017. She is mostly looking at the history of the idea of going to war on global warming and visions of geoengineering the climate. These diverse interests mean that she is thrilled to have become The Conversation’s first Interdisciplinary Editor.

In her spare time, Josephine enjoys going to the cinema and exploring London’s industrial history.

She is also a trustee of the Queille Trust, which organises a biennial arts festival in the south of France and aims to support the careers of emerging performers. She lives in south east London.

Josephine is attending the whole of the ISRF Workshop and any Fellows wishing to know more about the commissioning process or simply have a chat about pitching an article should speak with her directly or contact her on josephine.lethbridge@theconversation.com

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THE EXHIBITION SPACE The Exhibition Space will feature:

• Nishat Awan’s installation from her recent exhibition on ‘Migrant Narratives of Citizenship’ Grounded in original field research, Nishat Awan’s ‘Migrant Narratives of Citizenship: A Topological Atlas of European Belonging’ presents a collection of maps which follow the borders of Europe, particularly along the Black Sea. The original exhibition - at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, November 2016 - traced a route through the borderlands of the ‘refugee crisis’ narrating stories of migrant journeys and the clandestine crossing of borders. This timely project, developed in collaboration with artist Cressida Kocienski, took as its starting point the historical connection between the way states represent themselves through maps and how citizens and non-citizens are defined. Nishat considers maps to be world-making entities traditionally created by those in power, rather than as visualisations of an already existing world.

• Ivano Cardinale’s ‘Economics: past, present and future. An interview project’ Economics education has been debated for a long time, but since the Global Financial Crisis it has come under public scrutiny. This project aims to provide an accessible way for new generations of economics students and scholars, as well as the general public, to get acquainted with different schools of economic thought and their bearing on economics teaching. We have interviewed distinguished economists who are deeply aware of the plurality of analytical traditions in economics and have built upon them in their own work.

The interviews range from long-standing debates to current issues, and provide first-hand access to the thought of key contemporary economists.

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• Erin Kavanagh’s film about deep mapping Cardigan Bay, ‘Layers in the Landscape’ Erin Kavanagh is an interdisciplinary academic based in the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Her research concentrates upon the space between multimodal perspectives, where narrative is transformed. This encompasses geomythology, art’chaeology, theory, poetry as method and site specific performance.

Erin led a team of diverse specialists, headed by Dr Martin Bates (also of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter), to deep map Cardigan Bay. Concentrating upon process rather than product, ‘Layers in the Landscape’ engaged with the challenges of ethnographic practice across the ontological turn, exploring established binaries relating to art and science, fact and fiction, knowledge and belief. Recorded in film, the seven participants were observed through a wide-angle palimpsest in an attempt to see past the chaos of flooding, to 120,000 years of climate change.

• Nina Moeller’s digital maps Nina Moeller exhibits analogue and digital maps and photos to visualise her ethnographic field work in the Upper Napo region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, home to the Kichwa people (or the Napo Runa as they also call themselves) and one of the birth centres of the global, indigenous movements that arose in the 1960s and 1970s; once a stronghold of Amazonian culture, now territory subsumed by Chinese-led capital.

Using a new university “in the Amazon, for the Amazon” as prism, Nina explores recent changes in the area - the drastic transformations of market expansion and the false promises of the mainstream green economy.

• Images from photographer Matthew Smith’s ‘Exist to Resist’ project Matt Smith (http://www.mattkoarchive.com/, Instagram: @mattkosnaps) works out of Bristol and the West Country - he began making images of British culture in the latter part of the

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 80’s and has not stopped since.

Educated at North Staffs Poly, London College of Printing, Photographers at Duckspool and the University of Life, his personal brand of diary documentary work was born out of opposition to the mainstream mass media portrayal of travellers, free parties and festivals, as rave united the people of the UK in a massive social phenomenon that provoked Government into outlawing DIY entertainment and housing.

Politicised by - and involved in the response to - that process, he has won awards, been published in magazines and exhibited his work. First published by DIY-media organisations like Squall and Schnews, as well as The New Statesman, Matt’s work charts rave from its origins, through criminalisation, to the internationally successful creative industry that thrives today.

Matt has been the photographed ISRF workshops since 2015, and has recently self-published a social history book of his work called Exist To Resist. The book was funded by a very successful Kickstarter campaign gaining widespread public support and worldwide media attention.

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THE 2018 ISRF ESSAY COMPETITION Economic Thought The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and the Cambridge Journal of Economics (CJE) intend to award a prize of €7,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘What is the place of Digital Information Technology in the Economy?’ This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field.

The impact of digital information technologies throughout society, and in particular the economy, is one of the most critical issues of our time. They are rapidly transforming practices of capitalist production and provision of services everywhere. But the impact is uneven and uncertain. Jobs are being lost while profits for many are increasing. And while technology advances rapidly, with anticipated exponential changes in areas like artificial intelligence and robotics especially, existing organisations are often able to adjust only slowly, whilst the acquisition of relevant skills can take time. What are the dominant trends? What really is going on? Some say that ongoing developments herald a workless society. Others maintain that they undermine markets and herald the end of capitalism. Are these mere speculations? What can we discern from informed investigation and analysis? Essays are welcome that address these or a related theme.

The essays will be judged on their originality and independence of thought, scholarly quality, their potential to challenge received ideas, and the success with which they match the criteria of the ISRF and the CJE. The successful essay will be intellectually radical, orthogonal to existing debates, and/or articulate a strong internal critique across the fields of economic research. Its challenge to received ideas will have the potential to provoke a re-thinking of the topic.

The ISRF is interested in original research ideas that take new approaches and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems.

The CJE provides a forum for theoretical, applied, interdisciplinary, history of thought and

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CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES methodological work, with strong emphasis on realistic analysis, the development of critical perspectives, the provision and use of empirical evidence, and the construction of policy.

The submitted essays will be judged by an academic panel (the ISRF Essay Prize Committee) and the winner will be decided by unanimous vote. The panel’s decision will be final, and no assessments or comments will be made available. The result will be notified to applicants by email by the end of July 2018 and will then be announced by posting on the websites of the ISRF and of the CJE. The ISRF and the CJE reserve the right not to award the prize, and no award will be made if the submitted essays are of insufficient merit.

The winning essay, and any close runners-up, will be accepted for publication in the Journal; authors may be asked to make some corrections before publication. Other applicants may receive encouragement to revise and then re-submit their essays to the CJE.

Essay Topic: ‘What is the place of Digital Information Technology in the Economy?’ This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field.

Essay Length: Approximately 7500 words.

Essay Format: Follow the CJE Author Guidelines, available on the CJE website.

Language: English Submission Deadline: 28th February 2018 Submissions should be made online at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cje Queries: Telephone +44 (0) 20 7262 0196 or email essayprize2018@isrf.org

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Organising Committee:

Louise Braddock Bregje de Kok Rachael Kiddey Pál Nyíri Patrick Overeem James Symonds Danielle van den Heuvel