What’s Love Got To Do With It? – Emma Dowling on Feminist Political Economy & Crisis Capitalism – 15th of March

‘Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?’ The popular lamentation has it.

Capitalism, as economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter once avered, frequently engages in creative destruction for the purposes of renewal. In the wake of the turmoil caused by the 2008 global financial crisis, social innovation – cooperation, sharing and caring – have become central tropes of a new orientation for capitalism.

The promise is for a more ethical, more social, economy to arise from the debris of the crisis. Advocates claim to have unearthed the market’s ‘invisible heart’ as a remedy for putting finance in particular and the global economy in general back on track and en route to a more sustainable system.

In this lecture from Emma Dowling, we will investigate such claims through the lens of feminist political economy to understand what concepts like social reproduction and affective or emotional labour can do to help us make critical analytical sense of these developments and their significance for the contemporary political economy and our understandings of crisis, recovery and change.

You can now listen to a podcast of this event below: