Working Group

All day

 

Our campus is closed to the public for this event.

“Every political-economic framework embeds values and encodes standards for behavior and choice” (Levi 2020)

We will misunderstand political economies when we do not study how and why they marginalize, disadvantage, or victimize (paraphrase of Michener, SoRelle, and Thurston 2022)

That political economies are systems of values worked out into behaviors and social distributions is not novel or controversial. In fact, the fiercest political debates of our time come from disagreements about values and about whether national political economies are organized in alignment with those values. While universalizing values overtook public debate in many Western societies, models of political economy likewise emphasized universals in the individuals moving within them. Dissatisfaction and disenchantment in the broader public has resurfaced questions of values, and especially systematic marginalization and disadvantage for minority groups, in political economy. Rather than universals, particulars are preserved and maintained through social institutions, encoding hierarchical social systems. Why are exclusionary, inequality-reinforcing values institutionalized in social systems, and when do those institutions change?

This working group will explore (a) what a political economy approach can contribute to understanding institutionalized discrimination, (b) the utility of conceptualizing social responsibilities as a credence good, or a promise of future cooperation, and (c) why/how categories of race, ethnicity, and religion persist.

Organizer

Kerice Doten-SnitkerKerice Doten-SnitkerComplexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

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