Mecila
10 May

[2022] Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes

Robert Boyer (Institute of the Americas)

Online

About the event

Joint Lecture Series
Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes

26 April 2022 – 19 July 2022
Tuesdays 1:00 p.m. (Rio de Janeiro), 6:00 p.m. (Berlin and Hamburg)

The pandemic has produced ambivalent consequences for social life. Intersectional inequalities, combining, class, ethno-racial, citizenship, and gender inequalities, both between and within countries, grew during the pandemic and became even more difficult to be mitigated in the post-covid world. At the same time, the global virus has irrefutably revealed the high level of interdependency between different social groups, world regions, as well as between human and nonhuman living beings. However, this did not lead to more solidarity at the national and global level as individualistic and antagonistic responses to the pandemic have created and exacerbated divisions and divides. At the same time, these glaring problems came to the fore and demands to tackle them have grown.

This series of lectures seeks to discuss these ambivalent and long-lasting effects of the pandemic on societies: What has been the impact on social inequality and how does this affect the transformation prospects especially of poor countries? What is the impact of the global virus on world politics? How have the pandemic affected the sense of solidarity at the local, national, and global level? How does the global experience of living with and fighting the pandemic affect the treatment of issues concerning the planet’s common future, such as climate change?

To address these questions, the Institute for Social and Political Studies (IESP/Rio de Janeiro), the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS/ Hamburg) and the Institute of Latin American Studies (LAI /FU Berlin) have invited eight experts from different fields of social sciences to give digital lectures followed by debates with the audience. The lectures will take place between April and July 2022 and will be interposed by internal preparatory sessions at each of the organizing institutes. The series of events is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation within the framework of the Anneliese Meier Research Award conferred to Prof. Domingues, one of the convenors of this lecture series.

10 May 2022
Impacts on Global Development and Economy, Robert Boyer (Institute of the Americas)

Covid-19 first tested the adequacy of health systems to the probable repetition of pandemics. Most have shown the weakness of prevention measures and an underinvestment related to the cost control effort. Social inequalities, within and between countries, have increased. The State has reappeared as a central actor in the coordination and expression of national solidarity. An anthropo-genetic development model based on education, health and culture, implicit in long-term developments, takes on its full meaning for both rich and developing countries. Then and above all, the pandemic has marked the rise of transnational platform capitalism, which has prompted a return to the imperative of national sovereignty and the restructuring of global value chains. The polarization between the various zones of the world economy has worsened to the point of threatening an international regime in crisis. Critical moment that calls for an unprecedented effort from the social sciences, including imagination in terms of open scenarios on contrasting geopolitical strategies

Robert Boyer is a French economist trained at Ecole Polytechnique, Sciences-Po Paris and Paris 1 University. Previously senior researcher at CNRS and professor at EHESS, he is now Fellow at Institut des Amériques, Paris. Among his publications are Regulation Theory: the State of the Art (with Yves Saillard), Routledge, 2001, The Future of Growth, with Edward Elgar, 2004, Les financiers détruiront-ils le capitalisme? Economica, 2011, Economie politique des capitalismes, La Découverte, 2015. His most recent works deal with the consequences of Covid-19 on capitalism diversity (Les capitalismes à l’épreuve de la pandémie, La Découverte, 2020) and  economic theorizing (Une discipline sans réflexivité peut-elle être une science ? Epistémologie de l’économie, Editions de la Sorbonne, 2021). He is one of the editors of Revue de la Régulation.

Registrations via zoom.