The main topic of the 28th European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) Conference in Torino, Italy, 22-24 May 2025, Campus Luigi Einaudi, is the changing face of economics, or the “end” of a traditional view of the discipline.

While economics is now threatened by the risk of losing identity, with the fading out of (theoretical) foundations, it can explore an opportunity of pluralism, directing attention toward frontier issues, like innovation, sustainability, and gender, that most profit from the discipline’s applied turn and its new openness to neighboring social sciences. For more, see the conference website, 28th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET).

For this reason, the ESHET and the HDCA are launching this call for a joint session entitled “How do human development and the capability approach reshape economics? A multidisciplinary perspective.”

To trigger the discussion between the two communities, we invite you to submit abstracts based on the capability/capabilities approach that will be discussed by the ESHET members. Possible topics for this joint session include mainly, but not exclusively: the transformative impact of human development and the CA on the evolution of economic discipline and/or policies; the analysis of foundational conceptual issues about capability theory and related literature; applied works based on the CA which contributed to the mentioned above empirical turn in economics; multidisciplinary research (adopting perspectives that also include philosophy, health, education, law, government, sociology, and more) on human development and the CA; historical and methodological works on human development and/or the CA.

We invite interested scholars to submit an abstract (400 words max., keywords) by February 2, 2025 to valentina.erasmo@unito.it.

Please find the Call for Papers here.