Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar.
College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.
People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield). The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide. The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable.
Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering? Not really. But we鈥檙e not entirely powerless, either. Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world. Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide. Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination. These campaigns don鈥檛 exist in a vacuum. Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics. And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity鈥攆inancially, politically, or logistically. It does no good to say that 鈥渨e鈥 aren鈥檛 affected by what happens 鈥渢here.鈥
鈥淎t its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives 鈥 it [is] a powerful collective experience鈥.
Silvia Federici, 1984
News broke on the very last day of 2022 that members of the New School鈥檚 part-time faculty (PTF) union – ACT-UAW 7902 – had voted to ratify a new five-year contract, following what some are calling the longest adjunct strike in American history (Hamberg, 2022). A 鈥檛entative agreement鈥 was reached on December 10th, after almost a month of strike action where more than 1,600 PTF members had taken to the picket line. Their existing contract had expired, and there was no sign of a satisfactory renewal. The dispute was multifaceted, but primarily concerned poor pay, uncompensated labour time, general job security and health insurance coverage.
The agreement solidified a historic pay increase (the largest PTF at the New School have ever received), as well as an enhanced offer for paid family leave, improved terms for annualisation, compensation for labor performed outside of the classroom and improvements in health care access (Hamberg, 2022). Whilst there is much to be celebrated in these gains, for the New School community this was a month-long struggle marked with uncertainty, tension, and growing hostility. The disconnect between the university鈥檚 administration and its community of faculty and students was made painfully, publicly evident. Observers couldn鈥檛 help but call hypocrisy on an institution founded on radical values employing 鈥渃orporate union-busting tactics 鈥 antithetical to [its] progressive heritage鈥 (Hamberg, 2022).
Much can be gleaned from this contained episode: the state of higher education following a period of its incessant marketisation; the power of organised labour to rally against exploitation; the role higher education specifically can play in a wider workers鈥 movement. This blog post will attempt to place the New School鈥檚 recent ACT-UAW 7902 strike in its wider context, that of an (inter)national worker movement, both within the higher education sector and beyond. By doing this, I will elicit some of the unique contributions academics, other university workers and students themselves can offer such a movement.
Academia has always been political. On some occasions, it has been appropriated and deployed to meet political ends while in other occasions it has modelled itself to challenge politicisation. In their study of curriculum framework governing economics teaching in Brazilian higher education, Guizzo, et al (2021: 258) show how the idea of a pluralist education system is under threat from a 鈥渟trong disciplinary, institutional and wider political pressures with both domestic and global roots鈥. Indeed, the threats towards education systems in the global South often have global as well as local origins. These days, the threat of epistemicides – that is the killing of a people鈥檚 knowledge – has displaced and suffocated academic spaces in the global South (de Sousa Santos 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). This killing has taken both subtle and unsubtle forms. One way this has happened has been through dominant and domineering western oriented knowledge production institutions and systems which disregard approaches and writings from the global South.
In this discussion, however, I will use the case of the University of Zimbabwe to show how domestic roots have also contributed towards the suffocation of academic spaces. I argue in this piece that epistemicides work together with epistuicides (see Kufakurinani 2022) – a process where a people kill their own knowledge systems. The twin evils of epistuicides and epistemicides have suffocated knowledge production in the global south. Indeed, the problem of a dominant western centric gaze has been a subject of examination by decolonial thinkers. Mainstream journals in many disciplines have been known to promote certain perspectives and specific research approaches at the expense of others. It is in this context that there has been a huge global movement to decolonise and decentre knowledge systems and knowledge production in many disciplines. Admittedly, decolonisation has become a buzz word over the years to the point of losing meaning. For me, decolonisation is simply about elevating alternative and at times rare voices and perspectives, particularly those from the global south. These voices and perspectives may be parallel or even contradictory to dominant perspectives and voices.
Let鈥檚 start with a story. A friend asked me what my favourite genre of fiction is. I replied: microeconomics. If you get the joke, you would be laughing. Otherwise, you would be wondering why I said that. Well, that鈥檚 the truth. Take any standard economics textbook, we find ourselves in the fictional worlds of 鈥榣et鈥檚 assume there are two goods鈥 and 鈥榠f we move from point A to B鈥. It is true and well understood that these assumptions and imaginations are meant to break down complex phenomena. However, this entry point of supply and demand curves with the endless possibilities of hypothetical scenarios is not the only way to study/introduce economics. In this regard, I put forth the relevance of studying Wassily Leontief鈥檚 work and argue that it adds pluralism to economics education at least in three aspects: 1) methodology (philosophical and mathematical approach), 2) the unit of analysis (micro to macro and in between), and 3) ideas at the margins (reading thinkers like Piero Sraffa and other classical political economists). Now we shall deal with these three themes individually.
It is official: we are getting ready for another round of industrial action in the UK higher education sector. For those who may be wondering what the current is all about, a short recap may help. Higher education UCU members are striking because of planned pensions cuts that risk pushing academic staff into 鈥榬etirement poverty鈥; to fight against ever-growing labour casualisation in universities; and because of the growing inequalities of gender, race and class the UK higher education sector has nurtured in the last five decades. Colleagues at Goldsmith 鈥 to whom we shall extend all our support – are also fighting .
We 鈥 higher education workers and students – were on this picket before, so many times, fighting other policies deepening the process of commodification of education. We were on this picket fighting 鈥 which education workers are still experiencing. We were on this picket to fight against the . At SOAS, where I work, we were on this picket to , , against the on campus ground – an event which remains the darkest chapter of SOAS industrial relations and for which the university has not yet apologised in recognition of the harm caused to the and to all our community. We hope the school will acknowledge the need to do so, so that we can move forward, together.
We were at other demonstrations and on other picket lines, protesting against austerity, in the , , against racism and in support of against . The picket really is a sort of archive, which can be consulted backward to reconstruct a history of attacks to our rights – at work, at home, or both.
And if we consult this archive, we can clearly see a pattern emerging in the last decades, a pattern which in fact connects neoliberal Britain with many other places in the world economy, which have also experienced processes of neoliberalisation. All the pickets and demonstrations, become a sort of tracing route; we can reconnect the dots spread across a broader canvas. These dots design a specific pattern; that of a systematic attack to life and life-making sectors, realms and spaces.
, starting from the 1980s, has promoted a process of systematic de-concentration of resources in public sectors, and particularly in so-called 鈥socially reproductive sectors鈥, that is those that regenerate us as people and as workers. This attack has been massively felt in the home, which has become a major battleground for processes of . The withdrawal of the state from welfare provisions, the rise and rise of co-production in services (i.e. the incorporation of citizens鈥 unpaid labour in public service delivery;聽 a practice further cheapening welfare) – 聽and processes of partial or full privatisation of service delivery in healthcare and education have . These gaps have been filled through to others. 51本色s have become net users of market-based domestic and care services. The in-sourcing of nannies, au-pairs, and elders carers, from a vast number of countries in the Global south and transition economies have remade the home as a site of production and employment generation, at extremely low costs.
The Women and Development StudyGroup of the Development Studies Association (DSA) recently revisited Sally Brown and Anne Marie Goetz鈥檚 1997 Feminist Review 鈥榃ho Needs (Sex) When You Can Have Gender? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing?鈥. The article examines challenges to the concept of 鈥榞ender鈥 at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, including debates on its institutionalization and depoliticization, the tendency for it to be used as a synonym for 鈥榳omen鈥, and the conservative backlash against the very use of the concept itself. The retrospective value of doing this showed just how relevant these questions continue to be for Gender and Development policy, practice, research and teaching today.
For example, when teaching sex and gender, critical feminist theorising can sometimes lead students to feel that Gender and Development (GAD) approaches are too instrumentalized, too much like an industry and disconnected from reality. Moreover, the positionality of working as 鈥樷 in larger projects, where the gender component is often seen to stand alone with little connection to other intersectional dynamics, remains an ongoing challenge. The increasing and worrying trend of an anti-woke against feminist analysis and gender equality across the globe was also a recurring theme.
We also considered how 鈥榞ender鈥 as a concept is mobilised and used in food and agricultural studies specifically. In this blog, therefore, we examine what happens to the concept in food research, policy and practice, mapping out four broad trends. Firstly, the centring of the connection between gender, nutrition and mothering remains pervasive. Secondly, 鈥榞ender equality鈥 is often instrumentalized as a tool to increase marketized forms of agricultural productivity. Thirdly, while a focus on gender is obviously welcome, it can in fact obscure other important axes of oppression, such as race, class, sexuality, disability and nationality. Finally, it is consequently crucial to ground research, policy and practice in historical specificity and context in order to take into account multiple underlying oppressions and structural inequalities that influence the ability of a range of different actors in the food system to participate both socially and economically.
The Economics profession has long been too white, too male, too Western-centric, and too hostile to non-mainstream approaches. Today, a new tool 鈥 the D-Econ Database 鈥 is being launched to address this.
鈥淎ll the women were busy.鈥 鈥淭here are no people of color working on this topic.鈥 鈥淚t鈥檚 the male-dominated field that鈥檚 the problem, not this particular panel.鈥 We needed big names and all the big names just happen to be white men based in the Global North.鈥
We鈥檝e all heard these excuses many times over. Women, minorities, and scholars from the Global South are severely underrepresented in the field of Economics 鈥 and that makes putting together panels that do not simply reproduce the dominant identities in the field a challenge. The high concentration of a few dominant identities in the Economics field has rightly led to outrage against all-white and all-male panels .
It is becoming increasingly accepted that this underrepresentation is not simply an issue of fewer women, minorities, and scholars from the Global South聽choosing聽not to be a part of the field. On the contrary, research shows that there are systemic biases that make it more difficult for economists who are not white, not male, and not based in the Global North, to be heard. An additional layer of discrimination has to do with approach. Indeed, Economics is 鈥渦nique among the social sciences in having a single monolithic mainstream, which is either unaware of or actively hostile to alternative approaches鈥 (: 17).
What鈥檚 Wrong with Economics? The title of economic historian Robert Skidelsky鈥檚 latest book captures well a prevailing mood of popular disaffection with the dismal science. Many have come to associate the discipline with specific lines of political partisanship鈥攊ncluding forms of and the . Economics has also been widely criticised for its failure to grapple with actual, urgent economic problems. Within academic circles, the discipline has become widely regarded as of the contributions other fields of social and historical inquiry make to the study of economic life. Among the public at large, the has faced considerable scrutiny, even while individual by dissenting economists are and generally .
Recent political developments like the rise of the Movement for Black Lives and the #MeToo movement have helped broaden the sense of crisis in economics; encouraging examination of the discipline鈥檚 deeply problematic relationship with realties of race, gender, and other elements of people鈥檚 social identity. As a number of critics have noted, the problems are reflected most obviously in the profession鈥檚 basic institutional composition, which is grossly unrepresentative. In the United States women account for in PhD-granting departments. Of all doctorates conferred in the academic year 2015鈥2016, . This dismal performance was significantly worse than the 3 percent average across all STEM disciplines. That same year, only 3.6 percent of all full economics professors at PhD-granting institutions were Latino; a meagre 1.6 percent were Black.
The problem is also evident in prevalent attitudes and values among economists. Casual and among leading economists appears to have few or no repercussions. A 2019 of academic economists by the American Economic Association found that nearly half of Black economists reported being targets of discrimination in the profession. It also found that 鈥渙nly 45 percent of all . . . respondents (regardless of race) believed economists who are not White are respected in the field.鈥 When the work on the economics of racial stratification by scholars like and was finally included in the alphanumeric classification system for research topics in economics, it was placed in the last, residual category, 鈥淶 – Other Special Topics.鈥 Recent work by Alice Wu uncovered evidence that these attitudes are , while work by Valentina Paredes, Daniele Paserman, and Francisco Pino found evidence suggesting that economics programs both bigotry.
What has so far received comparatively less attention are the ways these attitudes are embodied in the basic concepts and analytical tools that most contemporary economists use to understand the world. Yet it is over this terrain that the discipline鈥檚 problems with issues of social identity prove most harmful to society at large.
The frameworks at the heart of contemporary economic thinking reflect analytical choices that ultimately betray the social position and outlook of those developing economic theory. In all of these choices, contemporary economic thinking has created a stilted conceptual terrain where it is easy to ignore or downplay the economic expressions of systemic inequities by social identity and class. This is evident in some of the discipline鈥檚 core analytical stances, like what is and what is not considered as economic activity, and in its rejection of social categories like gender, race, and class as useful in the analysis of markets and economies. It is also evident in the ways most economists think about the nature of discrimination, its relationship to market competition, and the statistical measurements of its effects on economic outcomes.
Given the outsized influence economics exerts across all fields of social inquiry and policy, these biases exert an insidious, conservative influence over public thinking and over the very framing of debates about those iniquities. Countering this influence requires understanding these biases, which in turn requires engagement with a few foundational methodological and technical issues in economic analysis. In what follows we draw on contributions by many critically minded economists and political economists, and on some of our own recent work, to contribute to a conversation among social scientists and political actors about these biases and about how they may be overcome.
51本色 