The CSPS Cluster Critical Agrarian Studies invites you to their upcoming seminar on ‘Ethical Markets and Economic Development: How Fair Trade Produced A Neoliberal “Social.” with prof. Amy Cohen (Temple University).
About the seminar: This project traces how the modern fair trade movement helps to produce a neoliberalised version of social order. But our understanding of “neoliberal” governance differs from many others’. We do not describe the imposition of a single order of value, e.g, “market value” that cannibalizes all other values. Rather we describe it as an approach to governance that purposefully evades a shared consensus to address questions of value via the subjective evaluative techniques imaginatively associated with the sovereign consumer. As such, the social groups that coalesce around a fair-trade do not take the form of “publics” associated with a democratic polity. Nor do they take the form of unions among producers, laborers, and consumers that once served as the normative foundation of previous political imaginaries. Instead, they are contingent and thin social formations subject to ongoing competition and change that can forge loose and temporary alliances with other collectives—specifically corporations and their associated supply chains.
When: April 26, 12.30 – 13.30
Where: Leeuwenborch, B0076
You are very much welcome to join!
Centre for Space, Place and Society 