16 Mar 2011 5:00pm - 6:30pm Room 3, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge

Description

Humanitas Visiting Professor in Women's Rights 2011

The Humanitas Chair in Women's Rights has been made possible by the generous support of Mrs Carol Saper

 

Professor Nancy Fraser (Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, The New School for Social Research, New York)

 

Lecture 3: Between Marketization and Social Protection: Ambivalences of Feminism in the Context of Capitalist Crisis

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In her lecture series, Professor Nancy Fraser will create a Polanyian-feminist framework for theorising capitalist crisis in the 21st century. Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book 'The Great Transformation’ rejected economism and instead analysed the previous crisis of capitalism as a crisis of social reproduction. In his view, 19th-century efforts to create such a society proved so destructive of livelihoods, communities, and habitats as to trigger a century-long struggle between free-marketeers and those who sought to protect society from the ravages of the market. The end result of this “double movement” (marketisation versus social protection) was economic depression, political stalemate, and world war.

Professor Nancy Fraser will argue that Polanyi’s concept of this “double movement”, although relevant to today’s crisis, is gender blind as it fails to account for political projects, such as struggles for women’s emancipation, which cut across conflicts between marketisation and social protection. She will reconstruct this “double movement” for present-day theorising of a feminist theory of capitalist crisis in a form that can be used to analyse three-sided struggles among marketisers, social protectionists, and proponents of emancipation.

 

Further lectures in the series are:

A symposium will take place on Thursday 17 March.

The lectures are free and open to all. Registration is required for the symposium.

 

About Professor Nancy Fraser

Professor Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, The New School for Social Research, New York. Her research interests lie in social and political theory, feminist theory, 19th and 20th century European thought and philosophy of social science. From 2008-2010 she was Blaise Pascal International Research Chair, École des hautes études en science sociales, Paris. 

 

About the Professorships

 

Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge intended to bring leading practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the Programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue with the support of a series of generous benefactors, and administered in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Humanitas Visiting Professors are held by distinguished academics and leading practitioners who have contributed to interdisciplinary research and innovation in a broad range of contemporary disciplines in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Covering areas of urgent or enduring interest in today's society as well as the performing arts, Humanitas Visiting Professors will present their pioneering work through a series of lectures or performances open to University audiences and the wider public.

 

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

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