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Capability Association

Agency, Well-Being and Justice

Category Archives: External / non-HDCA event/news

Conference: The Sociology and Economics of Public Goods, Commodification and Rising Inequality: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Stanford University, November 2‐3, 2017

Organized by David Grusky, Stanford University, and Ravi Kanbur, Cornell University

Two striking stylized facts mark the last twenty five years: (i) rising inequality of income and wealth, and (ii) rising commodification of goods which were previously supplied through group membership. Goods supplied through group membership, with elements of non‐rivalry and non‐ excludability, are labeled as “public goods” by economists. Such goods can be provided by the public sector (when the group is the nation as a whole) but they can also be provided by smaller groups such as associations, communities or families. The retreat from such modes of provision, and their replacement by privatized, individualized, modes is labeled as “commodification” by sociologists.

Rising inequality and increased commodification of public goods have happened at the same time. But are they connected? Does one trend feed on and intensify the other? If this is the case, what are the options for breaking the downward spiral? Sociologists and Economists have of course been aware of these trends and spirals, and have been engaged in research on these topics. However, these are quite separate literatures and engagements, with little interaction between them.

Economists have developed the theory of “voluntary provision of public goods”, which explores outcomes when individuals contribute to a good which is non‐rival and non‐excludable in consumption. The theory is seen as having wide application, in settings ranging from families, through communities, to sub‐national or national polities, and collective action more generally. Empirical analysis considers the relationship between group characteristics and the level and nature of public goods provision. There is also a strong strand of experimental work which explores, through “public good games” in laboratory settings, how different contribution, monitoring and sanction rules affect provision. Throughout, the interaction between inequality and public goods is a question of interest, but typically the causality of focus is from inequality to public goods, not from commodification to inequality.

Sociologists have focused on documenting long‐run trends in the provision of public goods and the institutional forces that affect whether goods are commodified or decommodified.  There is also a vibrant debate on the costs and benefits of delivering anti‐poverty interventions in ways that either (a) acquiesce to the commodification of opportunity (e.g., providing “basic income” that then allows for opportunity to be purchased by low‐income families), or (b) endeavor to decommodify opportunity via   universal or means‐tested delivery of services (e.g., childcare, college).

These two literatures have many insights to share, and have much to learn from each other. Yet they have developed quite separately. As a first step in bringing them together, Cornell University and Stanford University propose to hold a conversation between sociologists and economists on Public 2 Goods, Commodification and Rising Inequality, at Stanford University on 2‐3 November, 2017.

The conference organizers are David Grusky of Stanford University and Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University. The organizers invite submissions of completed papers, or substantive paper proposals (around 3‐5 single space pages), on any aspect of the conference theme. The papers can be conceptual, empirical, or policy oriented.  Submissions should be sent to Ravi Kanbur at sk145@cornell.edu, by May 15, 2017.  Decisions on acceptance will be communicated by July 15, 2017. The conference will cover the travel and accommodation costs of one author per accepted paper.

Call for Papers: The Sociology and Economics of Public Goods, Commodification and Rising Inequality: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Stanford University, November 2‐3, 2017

Submission Deadline: May 15

Organized by David Grusky, Stanford University, and Ravi Kanbur, Cornell University

Two striking stylized facts mark the last twenty five years: (i) rising inequality of income and wealth, and (ii) rising commodification of goods which were previously supplied through group membership. Goods supplied through group membership, with elements of non‐rivalry and non‐ excludability, are labeled as “public goods” by economists. Such goods can be provided by the public sector (when the group is the nation as a whole) but they can also be provided by smaller groups such as associations, communities or families. The retreat from such modes of provision, and their replacement by privatized, individualized, modes is labeled as “commodification” by sociologists.

Rising inequality and increased commodification of public goods have happened at the same time. But are they connected? Does one trend feed on and intensify the other? If this is the case, what are the options for breaking the downward spiral? Sociologists and Economists have of course been aware of these trends and spirals, and have been engaged in research on these topics. However, these are quite separate literatures and engagements, with little interaction between them.

Economists have developed the theory of “voluntary provision of public goods”, which explores outcomes when individuals contribute to a good which is non‐rival and non‐excludable in consumption. The theory is seen as having wide application, in settings ranging from families, through communities, to sub‐national or national polities, and collective action more generally. Empirical analysis considers the relationship between group characteristics and the level and nature of public goods provision. There is also a strong strand of experimental work which explores, through “public good games” in laboratory settings, how different contribution, monitoring and sanction rules affect provision. Throughout, the interaction between inequality and public goods is a question of interest, but typically the causality of focus is from inequality to public goods, not from commodification to inequality.

Sociologists have focused on documenting long‐run trends in the provision of public goods and the institutional forces that affect whether goods are commodified or decommodified.  There is also a vibrant debate on the costs and benefits of delivering anti‐poverty interventions in ways that either (a) acquiesce to the commodification of opportunity (e.g., providing “basic income” that then allows for opportunity to be purchased by low‐income families), or (b) endeavor to decommodify opportunity via   universal or means‐tested delivery of services (e.g., childcare, college).

These two literatures have many insights to share, and have much to learn from each other. Yet they have developed quite separately. As a first step in bringing them together, Cornell University and Stanford University propose to hold a conversation between sociologists and economists on Public 2 Goods, Commodification and Rising Inequality, at Stanford University on 2‐3 November, 2017.

The conference organizers are David Grusky of Stanford University and Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University. The organizers invite submissions of completed papers, or substantive paper proposals (around 3‐5 single space pages), on any aspect of the conference theme. The papers can be conceptual, empirical, or policy oriented.  Submissions should be sent to Ravi Kanbur at sk145@cornell.edu, by May 15, 2017.  Decisions on acceptance will be communicated by July 15, 2017. The conference will cover the travel and accommodation costs of one author per accepted paper.

Call for Papers: 2017 International Health Conference, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Submission of Abstracts - Final Call Deadline 23.59pm GMT, 25th April 2017
http://www.globalhealthcongress.org/submissions

This Oxford-based conference series seeks to bring together researchers who aim to promote health and wellbeing throughimproved health services in Europe and around the world. 

The aim of the event, building on the 2016 congress, is to highlight the link between research and practice by gathering together a wide range of papers on health and health services research close to practice and/or policy. These will come from the full range of allied disciplines including primary care, acute medicine, public health, psychiatry, paediatrics, and ageing as well as economics, psychology, statistics, social science and ethics, clinical trial design, health informatics and implementation research.

The Conference series has been established by academics in Oxford and elsewhere and is open to researchers in health, particularly those related to health services in the UK, Europe and beyond. We hope that you will contribute to what promises to be an exciting new opportunity to develop research networks and encourage the uptake of research and evidence based innovations in all areas of science that contribute to health and wellbeing through better health services.

Invited Speakers Confirmed:

  • Professor Ralf Schwarzer, Freie Universität Berlin
  • Professor Theresa Marteau, University of Cambridge
  • Professor Susan Brundage, Queen Mary University of London
  • Professor David Hunter, Durham University 
  • Professor Jonathan Emberson, University of Oxford
  • Professor Rajesh Chopra, The Institute of Cancer Research
  • Professor Winette Van der Graaf, The Institute of Cancer Research
  • Professor Peter Scarborough, Nuffield Department of Population Health

Submitted papers are welcomed on:

General Practice, Cancer and Health Services, Public Health, Community Care, Acute Health, Hospitals, Mental Health, Paediatrics, Older Age, Dentistry, Health Economics, Health Psychology, Medical Statistics, Social Science and Medicine, Health Policy and Systems, Health Management, e-Health, Big Data, Health Informatics, Human Resources, Nursing, Leadership, Medical Decision Making, Research Utilization, Inequalities, Social Determinants and Patient Reported Outcome Measures

May 12 CfP Deadline: “Environmental Citizenship and Individual Responsibility for Global Environmental Problems (EC.IRGEP)”

At Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT)

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 12 MAY 2017

Convenors:

Laura García-Portela (University of Valencia) laura.garcia-portela@uv.es
Dr. Lieske Voget-Kleschin (University of Kiel) voget-kleschin@philsem.uni-kiel.de
Christian Baatz (University of Kiel) baatz@philsem.uni-kiel.de

In the wake of the international negotiations for a global climate treaty in the 1990’s, approaches to address climate change on the national and international level have been the focus of attention. Only recently did questions of individual responsibility for climate change become a major topic among philosophers. At the same time, environmental citizenship proposals have been brought up by political theorists as a new way of interpreting cosmopolitan citizenship (Harris, 2010; Dobson, 2006). Additionally, sustainable consumption is broadly regarded as an approach to address different global environmental problems with a focus on individual behaviour. Recently, an important role is played by social practice theory accounts of sustainable consumption. This panel aims to bring together these approaches to give a holistic account of individual responsibilities to tackle global environmental problems.

The responsibilities of individuals are mostly discussed in the case of climate change (for an overview of this debate see Fragnière, 2016). That individuals have some responsibility is hardly disputed and the debate quickly turned to what individuals are responsible for: are there duties to work towards just institutions that address the problem at the collective level or are individuals (also) obligated to reduce emissions themselves? A central dispute is whether or not individual reductions of emissions result in morally relevant positive consequences. While this is disputed by some (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006; Cripps, 2013; Maltais, 2013), others answer the question in the affirmative (Kagan, 2011; Hiller, 2011; Lawford-Smith, 2016) and conclude that individuals ought to reduce their GHG emissions. Yet others defend duties to reduce emissions with reference to so called non-causation arguments, such as the duty to maintain our integrity as moral agents (Glover, 1975; Hordequin, 2011) or to display virtuous character traits (Jamieson, 2010). Finally, another group of authors bases such duties on the wrongness of contributing to, rather than causing, harmful outcomes (Raterman, 2012; Baatz, 2014).

This debate reached a considerable level of sophistication but its preliminary results have hardly been transferred to other environmental problems. Moreover, it is by no means clear how the debate relates to accounts of cosmopolitan, environmental and ecological citizenship on the one hand and proposals regarding sustainable consumption on the other. Regarding the former, it could for example be asked what the debate about morally relevant positive consequences implies in regard to “a community of citizenship […] created by material relations of cause and effect” (Dobson, 2006) or how ecological citizenship as “shared personal commitment” of “ethically motivated citizens” (Seyfang, 2006) relates to non-causation arguments. The latter are important as sustainable consumption is broadly regarded as an approach to address different global environmental problems with a focus on individual behaviour. In this regard, social practice theory accounts of sustainable consumption highlight the social and material embeddedness of (consumption) behaviour (Shove et al., 2012; Welch & Warde, 2015), and the fact that such behaviour mostly occurs in a habitual manner (Shove, 2012; Warde, 2014). It thus challenges one of the main premises behind individual responsibility for climate change, namely that individuals GHG-related behaviour is based on conscious choice.

The panel seeks to further explore these different approaches regarding individuals’ relations towards global environmental problems (e.g. climate justice, citizenship accounts, social practice accounts) and especially their interrelations. It is part of the MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory, an annual conference in political theory, organised under the auspices of the Manchester Centre for Political Theory.

We strongly encourage scholars working on these topics to submit an extended abstract of 700 - 1000 words by 12 May to ec.irgep.mancept2017@gmail.com. Successful applicants will be notified no later than 9 June. Full working papers (about 6000 words) are due to a week before the workshop (4 September) to be circulated among participants in order to benefit the discussion and to allow for the preparation of a response.

 Proposals should be prepared for blind review, so please enclose two documents. The first one should include the title and the text of the proposal with the literature used referenced. The second one should additionally include your complete name, current position, affiliation and e-mail address.

Registration for the conference will open in May. Fees are £230 for academics and £135.00 for graduate students and retirees.  Please notice that he organization offers a bursary for graduate and retirees applicants, whose deadline will be the 16th June.

References

Aufrecht, M. (2011). Climate Change and Structural Emissions: Moral Obligations at the Individual Level. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 25(2), 201–213.

Baatz, C. (2014). Climate change and individual duties to reduce GHG emissions. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 17(1), 1–19. 6

Cripps, E. (2013). Climate change and the moral agent: individual duties in an independent world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dobson, Andrew (2006): Ecological citizenship. A Defence. In: Environmental Politics 15 (3), S. 447–451.

Fragnière, A. (2016). Climate change and individual duties. WIREs Clim Change, 7(6), 798–814.

Glover, J. (1975). It Makes no Difference Whether or Not I Do It. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49(1975), 171–190.

Harris, P. (2010). World Ethics and Climate Change: From International to Global Justice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Studies in World Ethics.

Hiller, A. (2011). Climate change and individual responsibility. The Monist, 94(3), 349–368.

Hourdequin, M. (2010). Climate, Collective Action and Individual Ethical Obligations. Environmental Values, 19(4), 443–464.

Jamieson, D. (2010). When utilitarians should be virtue theorists. In Climate Ethics. Essential readings.

Kagan, S. (2011). Do I Make a Difference? Philosophy & Public Affairs, 39(2), 105–141.

Lawford-Smith, H. (2016). Difference-Making and Individuals’ Climate-Related Obligations. In C. Heyward & D. Roser (Eds.), Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World. Oxford University Press.

Maltais, A. (2013). Radically non-ideal climate politics and the obligation to at least vote green. Environmental Values, 22(5), 589–608.

Raterman, T. (2012). Bearing the Weight of the World: On the Extent of an Individual's Environmental Responsibility, Environmental Values, 21(4), 417–436.

Schinkel, A. (2011). Causal and Moral Responsibility of Individuals for (the Harmful Consequences of) Climate Change. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 14(1), 35–37.

Seyfang, Gill (2006): Ecological citizenship and sustainable consumption: examining local organic food networks. In: Journal of rural studies (22), S. 383–395.

Shove, Elizabeth (2012). Habits and Their Creatures. In Alan Warde, Dale Southerton (Eds.): The habits of consumption. Helsinki (Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 12), pp. 100–112.

Shove, Elizabeth; Pantzar, Mika; Watson, Matt (2012). The dynamics of social practice. Everyday life and how it changes. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2006). It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations. Advances in the Economics of Environmental Resources, 5, 285–307.

Warde, Alan (2014). Sociology, Consumption and Habit. In Dale Southerton, Alsitair Ulph (Eds.): Sustainable consumption. Multi-disciplinary perspectives in honour of Professor Sir Parthe Dasgupta. Oxfort Univ. Press, pp. 277-298.

Welch, Daniel; Warde, Alan (2015). Theories of practice and sustainable consumption. In Lucia Reisch, John Thøgersen (Eds.): Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 84–100

Seminar at Centre for Public Policy Research, King’s College London

"Education, Capabilities and Sustainable Development– How do Aspirations Matter?"
Paper presented by Dr. Caroline Sarojini Hart
 
The seminar will run from 1-2pm and will be held in room G/8, Waterloo Bridge Wing, Franklin Wilkins Building (SE1 9NH). Please see the abstract below. Refreshments will be served, please feel free to forward this invitation to any interested parties. 

Abstract
Drawing on the capability approach, this presentation aims, first of all, to situate education in relation to the global post-2015 agenda for sustainable development. It argues that educational processes potentially have important roles in contributing to many of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and not only those specifically related to education.  The discussion goes on to conceptualise the way in which personal aspirations and wider social and development goals are juxtaposed and the tensions this brings in thinking about personal and social ‘trade-offs’ in developing and pursuing goals for human development. The paper argues that educational processes may contribute significantly towards the development of individual capabilities and sustainable development more broadly, but this cannot be taken for granted due to negative as well as positive outcomes from educational processes, trade-offs and sacrifices along the way.  The role of aspirations as multi-faceted, significant and yet vulnerable, emerges.

ZIF Summer School 2017 – Universität Bielefeld

A Fuzzy Set Approach to Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

1-8 August 2017

http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/erziehungswissenschaft/zif/

We would like to cordially invite PhD and Post-Doc scholars to a Summer School at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld exploring the Fuzzy Set Approach as an alternative to Multidimensional Poverty Measurement. Experts in the field are recruited in order to provide the best knowledge and skills to the participants.

This summer school introduces to a multi-disciplinary audience of early stage researchers (PhD students & postdocs) the Fuzzy Set Approach, a cutting-edge alternative to traditional means of poverty measurement which goes beyond binary and monetarist models of poverty and offers new perspectives and methods of analysing the relative levels of welfare within and between societies. This summer school will broaden the access to this innovative method of poverty measurement and it will enable early stage social scientists to deepen their understanding of the concept and function of the Fuzzy Set Approach to multidimensional poverty measurement. Theoretical lectures and applied workshops with demonstrations of the theory and a number of hands-on exercises to test and refine the participants? understanding of the Fuzzy Set Theory will be combined. By the end of the summer school, young researchers are expected to have developed an in-depth understanding of how Fuzzy Set Approach measurement works, to be capable of using the Fuzzy Set Approach for their own purposes and to obtain a supportive interdisciplinary and international network for future collaborations.

This comprehends knowledge and skills on:

  • The state of the art of poverty measurement
  • The advantages of multidimensional poverty measurement with the Fuzzy Set Approach
  • The basics, the logic and structure behind the concept of multidimensional poverty measurement and Fuzzy Set Approach
  • Introduction to SAS
  • Introduction to the use of EU SILC Data including missing values
  • Fuzzy Set Approach for multidimensional poverty measurement using SAS and EUSILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) data
  • Short presentations on the participants research projects and supervision on statistical methods and research designs by experts

Participants have to cover their travel cost. Accommodation, breakfast and lunch is included.

Book Launch, London: Universities and Global Human Development: Theoretical and Empirical Insights for Social Change

Thursday 2nd February 2017, 5:30 PM
Development Planning Unit
Room 101
34 Tavistock Square
WC1H9EZ London

This book makes the case for a critical turn in development thinking around universities and their contributions in making a more equal post-2015 world. It puts forward a normative approach based on human development and the capability approach, one which can gain a hearing from policy, scholarship, and practitioners dealing with practical issues of understanding policy, democratising research and knowledge, and fostering student learning - all key university functions.

Book presentation: Alejandra Boni (Ingenio, CSIC-Universidad Politécnica Valencia)
Comments: Elaine Unterhalter (Institute of Education, UCL) and
Click here for more details

Seminar at UCL, London: Thinking of University and Civil Society Engagement: Benefits, Challenges and Key Enablers of a Valued Relationship

Tuesday, January 31st at University College London
4:00 - 7:00 PM
Chadwick Building, Main Quad, UCL
Gower Street
WC1E 6BT LONDON
Presenters: Alexandre Apsan Frediani (DPU), Stephanie Leonard (Citizens UK), Students from MSc SDP, Alejandra Boni (Ingenio)
Commentators: Elaine Unterhalter (IOE), Tristan McCowan (IOE), Jude Fransman (Open University)

CFP: Conference and Workshop on “Ethics for a Broken World”

November 25th – 27th 2016

Keynote: Timothy Mulgan (Auckland, Nz)

Location: University of Munich, Faculty of Philosophy at the Munich Center for Ethics supported and sponsored by the Research Consortium ForChange in the project Capabilities: Opportunities for Change in collaboration with the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy

Submission deadline: April 30, 2016

Download the call as pdf

We invite submissions for a joint conference and interdisciplinary workshop on Timothy Mulgan’s book Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (McGill 2012).

Tim Mulgan’s book is a highly innovative exploration of our modern concepts in political philosophy. It achieves this aim by looking at our current theories from the viewpoint of a fictional “broken” future, i.e. one in which a climate catastrophe has made life much more difficult for all humankind.

Mulgan’s book applies a method that is quite unique in philosophy. He develops a detailed scenario of the future and scrutinizes political philosophy in this fictional world. Thus, Mulgan builds on a tradition in political philosophy to use scenarios and thought experiments in their arguments, such as Rawls “original position” or the “state of nature” in classic contractualism. Also, Mulgan’s work criticizes the “affluent” philosophy of our time because it does not fit the conditions of a broken world. Even worse, affluent philosophy may be partly to blame for not preventing climate change and disregarding the needs of future people. We take Mulgan’s criticism as a starting point to look for alternatives to traditional Western theories in political philosophy. The capability approach, as it was developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen seems a plausible candidate, which I why we focus on it in the conference. Also we aim to expand Mulgan’s methodology and scenario building to further topics not covered in Mulgan’s book so far, most notably gender issues. We are especially interested in submissions about the following topics:

Capabilities for a broken world

The capability approach claims to evaluate the actual well-being of people and their circumstances of living. How does this thought transfer to the intergenerational context? How useful is the idea of capabilities in world, which is threatened by crisis or where crisis has already happened?

Gender and the broken world                         

Gender justice is often thought to be an important topic in works on sustainability. How relevant are just gender relations in scenarios about the future? What role does gender equality play in a broken world or in other scenarios? Can we achieve (more) sustainability by promoting gender justice?

For this segment we have invited Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey (both to be confirmed) for a round-table discussion on the Futures of Women This book was written 20 years ago in order to envision the different routes that the movement for gender justice could take. McCorduk and Ramsey lay out four detailed scenarios. Both are experts in scenario building. In this workshop we will discuss the role of scenarios in decision-making for the future and in philosophical ethics.

Workshop on world-building and the broken world

The conference is accompanied by an interdisciplinary workshop in which the participants will meet professionals from media and other creative industries. The aim will be to join forces to flesh out the broken world as it is presented in Mulgan’s book to the point where the world would be suitably concretely defined to serve as the story world of a movie or a novel. We will then turn around to discuss some philosophical questions with respect to this more fully specified world. The question we aim to answer is whether or not the added fictional detail will help us to develop clearer moral intuitions.

Given the experimental character of this event, we will ask of all prospective speakers to bring an open mind, as well as the willingness to do some light creative “homework” as preparation for the event.

The workshop will be facilitated by nifu.tv.

Please send an abstract of about 500 words for the conference until April 30th 2016 to

Dr. Rebecca Gutwald: r.gutwald@lmu.de and Dr. Andreas Kapsner: Andreas.Kapsner@lrz.uni-muenchen.de  

The conference and workshop is free of charge. We will not be able to provide funding for travel and accommodation. Contact us for tips where to stay in Munich, or if you have any other questions.

 

 

Call for Papers – Factors in Studying Employment for Persons with Disability

Call For Papers: Research in Social Science and Disability, Volume 10. Factors in Studying Employment for Persons with Disability: How the Picture can Change.

Submissions are due May 1, 2016. Please send to Barbara Altman (b.altman@verizon.net) and Sharon Barnartt  (sharon.barnartt@gallaudet.edu).

More information: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=5348

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