Student Lecture Halls
(Piazza Paleocapa 2 -- 2nd floor - Torino, ITALY)
The PEL Seminars at the IUC of Turin On May 28th 2011
"Contested spaces, identity, religion, resistance" PEL Seminar Series
Andre Pusey, University of Leeds
Dr Bhabani Nayak, Glasgow Caledonian University
Luigi Russi, International University College of Turin
Abstract: The workings of the market economy affect – for better or ill - an ever increasing portion of the world’s population. Scholars from disparate backgrounds have drawn attention to those spaces which are being lost in the narrative of ever increasing, market-led material well-being. This workshop attempts to reflect on some of these spaces through the prism of identity, religion and resistance. In the first presentation, Luigi Russi investigates how the need for constant economic growth in the Western world is increasingly fed through the manufacture of needs, and interference with individual identity-building processes. Dr Nayak turns then to explain how outside the Western world, the roots of capitalist expansion creep through the most diverse social structures, including religion. Finally, Andre Pusey demonstrates how the ever-increasing sophistication of enclosures in the modern world urges a re-thinking of the act of resistance, and the opening of new commons.
The Workshop aspires to contribute to the understanding of the boundary between the market and countervailing non-market structures, and the shape that resistance may take in the face of the crises confronting global governance.