In this ambitious and impressive new book, journalist Howard French seeks to excavate the long elided central importance of the African continent as the “linchpin of the machine of modernity.” In the story of modernity, he writes, the role of Africa is diminished, trivialized, and erased, and by filling in some gaps in this story, he retells the story of modernity.

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary contains over one hundred essays on transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values.

Oft werden Universitäten mit neutraler Wissenschaft verbunden und das von Dozierenden vermittelte Wissen als Abbildung der Realität wahrgenommen. Nur selten ist es Gegenstand kritischer Auseinandersetzungen. Wissenschaft findet jedoch in keinem neutralen Raum statt, sondern ist von Machtstrukturen und somit auch oft von diskriminierenden Denkweisen geprägt. Genau hier setzt unser Projekt an, mit dem wir einen Beitrag zur kritischen, interdisziplinären Auseinandersetzung mit Rassifizierung und Diskriminierung an der Universität Bayreuth und darüber hinaus leisten wollen. Unser Interesse am Thema Rassifizierung im Kontext universitärer Lehre und Forschung entstammt dabei der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den Lehrinhalten der Vorlesung „Ökonomik der Entwicklungsländer“ von Prof. Dr. Martin Leschke sowie mit dem begleitenden Lehrbuch „Ökonomik der Entwicklung – Eine Einführung aus institutionenökonomischer Sicht“. Als uns Themen und Begriffe auffielen, die unserer Einschätzung nach in ihrer Verwendung nicht dem aktuellen Umgang mit postkolonialen Machtverhältnissen und Eurozentrismus entsprachen, kam uns die Idee, eine kritische Begleitschrift zu besagtem Lehrbuch zu verfassen.

This course will fundamentally ask whether we can, or even should use the word ‘decolonising’ in our pursuit of a better economics?

In this essay the authors argue for a wider concept of care work that includes community building, civic engagement and environmental activism. On the basis of the case of Cargonomia, a grassroot initiative in Budapest, they show that such a wider concept of care work could allow for different narratives that promote sustainable lifestyles with a milder environmental and social impact on the planet and its communities.

Approaching the law of nature that determines all forms of economy. The bulk of economic theory addresses the economic process by setting out on a catalogue of aspects, seeking the laws in the aspects and hoping to get together a reliable view of the whole.

By conducting a discourse analysis (SKAD) in the field of academic economics textbooks, this paper aims at reconstructing frames and identity options offered to undergraduate students relating to the questions ‘Why study economics?’ and ‘Who do I become by studying economics?’. The analysis showed three major frames and respective identity offerings, all of which are contextualized theoretically, with prominent reference to the Foucauldian reflection of the science of Political Economy. Surprisingly, none of them encourages the student to think critically, as could have been expected in a pedagogical context. Taken together, economics textbooks appear as a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible action” (Foucault), therefore, as a genuine example of Foucauldian power structures.

The article pursues the two related questions of how economists pretend to know and why they want to know at all. It is argued that both the economic form of knowledge and the motivation of knowing have undergone a fundamental change during the course of the 20th century. The knowledge of important contemporary economic textbooks has little in common with an objective, decidedly scientifically motivated knowledge. Rather, their contents and forms follow a productive end, aiming at the subjectivity of their readers.

This panel is about discussing the international development discipline from a critical perspective, exploring how the current practice entangles with Eurocentric/neo-colonial thoughts and how can we move beyond them.

Feminist economics focuses on the interdependencies of gender relations and the economy. Care work and the partly non-market mediated reproduction sphere are particularly emphasised by feminist economics.

Thirty-years of economic transformation has turned China into one of the major players in the global capitalist economy. However, its economic growth has generated rising problems in inequality, alienation, and sustainability with the agrarian crises of the 1990s giving rise to real social outcry to the extent that they became the object of central government policy reformulations.

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