Up on arrival, you'll get a quick welcoming event to get familiar with the environment, socialize and exchange while eating your favorite type of sandwitche (we hope :p) and other snacks!

What exactly do we mean when speaking of crises? Are crises pathological states of emergency calling for immediate action (in order to be "fixed") or are they rather the turning points in processes of socio-economic change (for better or worse)? Are we currently really "surfing from crisis to crisis" or are we experiencing one major transformational crisis, a shift towards a new socio-economic paradigm? These are big questions, and I do not pretend to have answers to them. But asking them will hopefully be useful as a starting point of the conference.

The presentation is aimed at unpacking the Ukrainian crisis through the application of the theoretical framework known as critical geopolitics. The presentation will use geo-historical, geo-economic, geo-political as well as geo-strategic approaches to shed light on the narratives that have been used by all sides to construct their understanding of the crisis and spread it to the public. The lecture will focus on the positionality of the different actors involved in the crisis asking critical question on the relationship between interests and the unfolding of events. While awareness of the complexity of the crisis is necessary in order to find suitable entry points for negotiations and avoid falling into the trap of othering, polarization and the “us vs them” discourse, it is clear that awareness of complexity has been the first casualty of the crisis. As a simpler, very polarizing discourse was manufactured, hopes of successful negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict faded, which opened the door to intractability.

Time for Dinner, enjoy your meal :) 

It's time to talk and exchange as well as a ... QUIZ maybe :p

Start the day with some food to boost your energy and to be focused on something else than being hungry :p

We are living, we are told, at a time of multiple and overlapping crises. Issues such as climate change, the covid-19 pandemic, migration, populism and war are framed as crises that dominate media headlines, policy discussions as well as every-day conversation. But what actually constitutes a ‘crisis’ and how do we know when we are facing one? Are all ‘crises’ equally urgent and severe? What are the social and political impacts of discourses and imaginaries of crisis? For if crisis can draw and sharpen attention of an audience, this attention ultimately fades. And if crisis can open a moment for politization it can also be deeply depoliticizing. This lecture will attend to the meanings, implications and openings presented by crisis.

Full employment and price stability are economic goals of our societies in the 21st century. Until recently, we have asked central banks to deal exclusively with inflation. Low and stable rates of inflation were then thought to bring about full employment. However, central banks worldwide now see inflation moving towards ten percent. Some have increased interest rates in return, some did not - inflation is mostly still high and rising. It seems that we have to rethink our view of the economic system. Governments are ahead of theory by trying to alleviate price pressures with policies like cheap public transport or tax holidays on gasoline. The hypothesis of this keynote is that going forward we should recognize that central banks cannot and do not control inflation. We need a different institutional setup to be able to address the problems that monetary policy have created in the last decades, including a job guarantee and a better understanding of automatic stabilizers.

Don't forget to have lunch, we are only in the middle of the day,  much more is still on the plate! 

It is almost universally agreed that the persistence of extreme poverty in many parts of the world is a bad thing. It is less well-agreed, even among philosophers, what should be done about it and by whom. An influential movement founded by the philosopher Peter Singer argues that we should each try to do the best we can by donating our surplus income to charities that help those in greatest need. This “effective altruism” movement has two components: encouraging individuals in the rich world to donate more; and encouraging us to donate more rationally, to the organisations most efficient at translating those donations into gains in human well-being. Unfortunately, both components of effective altruism focus on what makes giving good rather than on achieving valuable goals. Effective altruism therefore does not actually aim at the elimination of global poverty, as is often supposed. Indeed, its distinctive commitment to the logic of individualist consumerism makes it constitutionally incapable of achieving such a large-scale project. Effective altruism is designed to fail.

During the paper sessions, participants will be able to hear presentations of the research submitted to the PPE Best Paper Award given by the authors. In these presentations, participants are invited to ask questions and discuss the implications and possible extensions of PPE research projects.

It's DINNER time, Guten Appetit! 

We'll try to keep this one a bit of a secret for a while, but we can guarantee it will be loads of fun!

Come and join us for a healthy and energizing breakfast... And be ready to tackle the last PROMISING day of the conference :)

The workshop will introduce research-based models on how trust matters in times of crisis and which practices, in general, may help to preserve trust. For the main part of the session, we will interactively address specific crises that are of particular interest to the participants. We will sketch concrete proposals for trust preservation measures. We will also consider the challenges of maintaining trustful relations in the face of uncertainty.

After the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09, there was an enormous growth in student activism seeking to challenge mainstream Economics and searching for new economic ideas and policies. We now live in an era of crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the cost of living crisis mount themselves on structural economic, ecological, and care crises. This workshop will introduce the participants to the recent history of the student movement in Pluralist Economics, paying particular attention to the Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik/Exploring Economics and the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). We will discuss what is the role of the student movement, what kind of activism(s) should emerge as a response to current crises, what sort of organizational form(s) the movement needs, what problems it should address, and what can it learn from existing organizations.

This workshop sets out from a starting point that the pandemic is not a natural disaster, but rather a politically-made disaster. Against this background, it outlines in what sense the spread of COVID-19 demonstrates that states have been neglecting global responsibilities which stem from human rights in the context of multiple crises. Considering that health narratives in the context of disease control always entail a risk of authoritarian abuse, this paper problematizes in a further step, with reference to the phenomenon of increasing nationalism and with the perspective of the ideology critique of the early Frankfurt School, in what sense the global health crisis has become instrumentalized by authoritarian populists. With this in mind, the workshop raises the question of whether national and global pandemic management increases authoritarian desires in society and leads to a new form of ideology in national and global politics, which when viewed through a postcolonial perspective could be qualified as necropolitical populism. Seen from a dialectical perspective, the global health crisis could nevertheless provide an opportunity for political and societal learning processes in a global context. The workshop thus aims in a third step to investigate theoretically under what conditions the COVID-19 pandemic could reopen spheres of utopian imagination based on societal critiques, that could serve to critically rethink global transformation in a post-pandemic world order. Against this background, it refers to contemporary utopian-theoretical debates in the (queer-)feminist context and questions whether ideological interpellations can be subverted by dystopian storytelling and performances.
 

With climate change, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, we are living in a state of multiple crises. In fact, however, crises that challenge our political and social systems are not new. This lecture will look at the legacy of crises and venture a first glimpse into the future of what the possible long-term effects of current crises might be. Particular attention will be paid to how social groups deal with the crises: How do the crises affect groups in the long term? What does this mean for social cohesion?

Ask not what's next on the program, ask what's for lunch. Bon Appétit ! 

How do societies change? While such a question might have been interesting only for historians in the past, the ecological crisis has made it one of the most urgent questions to answer. In fact, it might be that the survival of humankind as such depends on finding the right answers to this question. At the end of the covid pandemic, we see societies accelerating, not reducing consumption. We reinforce established patterns instead of changing them. Why is that? I will present a simple hypothesis: Societies follow narratives, not reason. If we want to transform society, we have to understand the current crisis as a narrative crisis.

Share some of your thoughts with us, and try to get further perspectives for higher enrichment and better knowledge :)

Time to end up the conference, hopefully on a POSITIVE note. Time to get some fun after thoughtful reflexions and heavy debates! :)