Dear colleagues,

 

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for a presentation at our session “Financialization, uneven regional development and labour” at the Global Conference on Economic Geography, Cologne (Germany), July 24-28, 2018.

Please submit your abstract before March 15, 2018 on the conference website: https://www.gceg2018.com/nc/call-for-sessions-and-papers/submit-an-abstract.html

 

In case of any inquiries, please feel free to contact Stefanie Hürtgen ([log in to unmask]), Michael Miessner ([log in to unmask])

 

Kind regards,

Stefanie Hürtgen (University of Salzburg), Michael Miessner (University of Goettingen)

 

Session:

Financialization, uneven regional development and labour

Chairs: Ass. Prof. Dr. Stefanie Hürtgen (University of Salzburg), Dr. Michael Miessner (University of Goettingen)

The financialization of the economy has been widely discussed in academic discourse since the economic crisis that erupted in 2007. Already 2008 Pike and Pollard (p. 30) emphasized ‘that financialization provides a strong impetus to embed finance in the heart of our understanding of economic geographies’. Nevertheless, the crisis also demonstrated important limits of recently very influential regional development approaches stressing endogenous resources (Hadjimichalis/Hudson 2014).In sum, it can be said that studies on regional uneven development and financialization remain limited, and in particular regional work and production – once at the forefront of regional development theory – still need more attention.

Ten years after Pike and Pollards analysis, we would like to investigate the implications of financialization for regional development, with a special focus on labour and production processes.

We invite papers focusing the following or related issues:

·        Is financialization a ‘profoundly spatial phenomenon’, as French et al (2011: 800) argue? Hence, how can we investigate the spatial implications of financialization?

·        How is financialization connected to the production and labour process? What does this mean for ‘labour geographies’ (Herod 1997)?

·        How are labourers included in the financial system? Does the growing ‘debtfarism’ (Hembruff/Soederberg 2015) of labourers implicate any spatial consequences?

·        What do the financialization of the production and labour process as well as the inclusion of labourers in the financial system entail for regional development? What kind of ‘spatial division of labour’ (Massey 1995) do we face?

 

References:

French, S. / Leyshon, A. / Wainwright, T. (2011): Financializing space, spacing financialization. In: Progress in Human Geography 35 (6): 798-819.

Hembruff, J. / Soederberg, S. (2015): Debtfarism and the Violence of Financial Inclusion: The Case of the Payday Lending Industry. In: Forum for Social Economics: 1-20.

Herod, A. (1997): From a geography of labor to a labor geography: labor´s spatial fix and the geography of capitalism. In: Antipode 29 (1): 1-31.

Hadjimichalis, C. / Hudson, R. (2014): Contemporary Crisis Across Europe and the Crisis of Regional Development Theories. In: Regional Studies 48 (1): 208-218.

Massey, D. (1995): Spatial Divisions of Labour. Social Structures and the Geography of Production. Macmillan, London.

Pike, A. / Pollard, J. (2009): Economic Geographies of Financialization. In: Economic Geography 86 (I): 29-51.