Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Henry Wai-chung Yeung, National University of Singapore

; Jim Murphy, Clark University

Description:

The unprecedented worldwide disruptions unleased by the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with the variegated challenges to “business-as-usual” globalization since the late 2010s, have challenged economic geographers’ research programs and raised questions regarding what post-pandemic institutional life will be like, particularly for aspiring geographers. In one sense, these disruptions have been brewing for some time with Covid-19 potentially serving as a critical juncture in, and a trigger for, the transformation of the global economy. The dominant doctrine of Globalization – one based on the unfettered expansion of neoliberal capitalism through financialization, transnational (private) corporations, space-time compressing technologies (e.g., ICTs), and geopolitical/geoeconomic settlements aimed at consolidating the West’s control of the real economy – underplayed challenges that were fermenting at the international and local scales: from the impact of human-environment interactions (Covid-19) to economic dislocation, rising inequality, and new forms of nationalism that have destabilized and threatened established notions of democracy and the role of markets and trade in driving development (e.g., the rise of far-right movements, the US-China trade war, etc.). This contemporary phase of globalization is marked by the rise of new forms of state capitalism, threats to regional pacts/arrangements (e.g., NAFTA, the EU), subnational fragmentations (e.g., geographies of discontent), and, perhaps most strikingly, an emerging, global-scale economic system associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

At the same time, and closer-to-home, new and pressing real-world issues are confronting economic geographers as the post-pandemic era begins, raising questions regarding our research programs and the contributions we might make to understandings of the workings of everyday economies, regional evolutionary trajectories, and the drivers and impacts of uneven development at multiple scales (among others). Such research topics include home-based work, economic decoupling, digital disruptions/divides, racial capitalisms, and environmental adaptation in an age of Covid-19 and rapidly intensifying climate change. Economic geography can play a key role in advancing new and critical knowledge related to such issues but only through critical reconsiderations of, and necessary transformations to, our key theories, concepts, frameworks, and methods.

In this new and challenging contexts of changing world and changing research priorities, we invite paper presentations that incorporate new thinking and research agendas at the beginning of this uncertain decade of the 2020s. Your paper can be primarily theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical in orientation; it can also be a little speculative in light of all the uncertainties around us! But we ask you to take this opportunity to examine the key processes and forces reshaping the post-pandemic global economy and to reflect on the practices and geographical problematics in sustaining the contemporary progress of the field. We anticipate multiple paper sessions (some virtual and others in-person) and an invited panel discussion. We very much welcome your presentations related, but not limited, to some of the following topics:

• New economies: digital and platform economies; restructuring of industries; gig/sharing economies; contentious economies (racialized, financialized, conjunctural, and so on); resilient economies;
• New regional trajectories: recovery and resilient growth; strategic coupling with global production networks; diversification through innovation and technology; beyond pandemic-related “lock-ins”;
• New economic processes: dispossession, inequality, and poverty; environmental change and adaptation; home/care work; financial marketization and value capture;
• New globalizations: decoupling/deglobalization; supply chain disruptions; (dis)articulations; GPN integration; uncertainty and risk mitigation
• New actors and institutions: global governance; philanthropy and private organizations; extra-territorial institutions; digital entrepreneurship; state capitalism; changing logics of competition and asset classes
• New economic geographies: empirical foci; methods; epistemic trading zones; diversification of the field

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda