The Political Economy of the European Peripheries Summer School 2024 is the second summer school launched by the Portuguese Association for Political Economy (EcPol).

 

The Political Economy of the European Peripheries Summer School 2024 - The Socio-Economic (Re)Production of Peripheries: Challenges and Possibilities aims to explore and frame the multiple connections between the economy and society’s productive base, places and territories, and communities. The historical configuration of these relations may vary across national and sub-national peripheries, concentrating on differentiated problems and trajectories of vulnerability. In line with a critical geopolitical approach to development, we strive for the possibility of questioning the homogeneous account of peripheralization by adopting an inquiring view of the relationship between peripheries and centralities. The Summer School will indeed embrace the objective of locating and analysing centralities inside peripheries and vice-versa.

 

Theoretically, it will combine a dual and comprehensive approach. First, it seeks to widen the perspective on addressing issues such as uneven development processes, persistent geographical inequalities, and peripheralization. Additionally, it endorses the possibility of re-evaluating the peripheries as places entailing several potentialities by rejecting the central-homogeneous view of global peripheries as backward places.

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Indeed, we hypothesize that those potentialities may be the key to questioning some core notions of the ongoing stage of capitalism, namely i) its accelerated temporal dimension, or even a perception of suppression of temporality, ii) its exploitative character and iii) individualization and alienation. The objective is, after all, to endorse a critical debate about the conditions and possibilities for promoting the existing resources of those peripheral territories by recognising their mobilising and relational capacity with other areas.

 

Furthermore, thinking critically about peripheries also invites one to adopt a questioning attitude towards centralities and their role in widening current inequalities. In an age of acute climate crisis, of depletion of natural resources, of new forms of labour exploitation — such as migrant labour—, of authoritarianism, we must bring to the fore not only the questions of repartition of the economic surplus and redistribution, but also of imagining and creating the conditions for a good life.

 

Such an approach requires an ontology based on a relational perspective defined in terms of i) reconnecting personal and social lives, ii) recognizing volition and creativity in action by giving voice to communities, and iii) taking seriously alternatives already present in the terrain.

 

Therefore, we aim to question the relationship between peripheries and centralities while re-appreciating what may be enhance in peripherical places – a more humane connection between place, time and work – as a way to question and answer global/local social problems.

 

The Summer School is aimed at Master’s and PhD students and Early Researchers (maximum of 5 years after obtaining their PhD). Participants will be able to engage with leading scholars and peers through group work and discussion and present and discuss their research and papers. Informal moments of conversation will be promoted. Theoretical lectures will be followed by labs and methodological workshops. The working language of the Summer School is English.

A cultural and artistic programme is also part of the Summer School.

 

Master’s and PhD students must submit an abstract of their project (maximum 800 words). Early Researchers must submit an extended abstract of their paper (maximum 1000 words). 

The Political Economy of the European Peripheries Summer School 2024 – The Socio-Economic (Re)Production of Peripheries: Challenges and Possibilities will take place in Évora, Alentejo, at the south of Portugal, from July 7th to 11th. Évora and the Alentejo will be European Capital of Culture in 2027.