Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures
A series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – have reinvigorated the debate about markets and social justice. Since then, counter-hegemonic movements all over the globe are attempting to redefine markets and the meaning of economic enterprise in people’s daily lives. Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalisation advocates and anti-globalisation movements, those on the political right and those on the left, all facing off to argue the benefits or harms brought about by markets. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analysing the conditions under which markets result in just outcomes. Professor Neiman will talk about how culture, politics, and ideology help shape market incentives in an attempt to reclaim the language of economic rationality and the policymaking legitimacy that accompanies it.
Through a variety of case studies – labor relations in the U.S. meatpacking industry, the globalisation process in Juárez, Mexico, financial reform in Cuba, and an interfaith Ugandan coffee cooperative – she will provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote just or unjust outcomes (e.g., discrimination, income inequality, environmental degradation, or racial justice, human rights, and equitable growth). Her talk will touch on subject matter as varied as food, religion, banking, and race and gender equality, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It will offer an analysis of markets based on community rather than pure individualism that has the potential to change the way we think about economic rationality.
Professor Neiman will be discussing her recently published book, Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures.
Nancy Neiman is a visiting Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow studying the challenges facing pastoralists and especially pastoralist women in Gujarat during migration. She earned an MA in Economics and a PhD in Political Science from Yale University. She has taught at Scripps College since 1993, where she has held positions in the Politics and Economics Departments and the Mary Wig Johnson Chair in Teaching. Professor Neiman’s previous work includes States, Banks, and Markets: Mexico’s Path to Financial Liberalization in Comparative Perspective (Westview, 2001). Her research covers a wide variety of topics, including neoliberalism, dollarisation, financial crises in Latin America, fair trade coffee in Africa, alternative education in the U.S., and politics of the global food movement. Her recently published book Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures, represents a culmination of years of diverse and interdisciplinary teaching, research, and community engagement.
Date: January 13, 2023
Time: 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Venue: 208, School of Arts and Sciences
