Political Economy International School - Climate and Ecological Crisis and the Role of Trade Unions

About The Course

This online international seminar series is built upon the joint Lecture Series in Advanced Political Economy (SAPE) by SOAS University of London and The New School for Social Research in New York in 2021-23. With an additional partner The Center for Heterodox Economics (CHE) at the University of Tulsa, this seminar series will connect the academic discussions to the real-world power struggle and workers’ everyday lives.

We will talk about current affairs, trends in production and work, and their implications on trade unions and the working-class movement. Each week, we will invite leading experts on the subject and analyse what’s been going on by identifying key challenges.

Together with the audience, we want to think about how we can fight against the challenges and build a movement toward a more systematic change.

Climate and Ecological Crisis and the Role of Trade Unions will be delivered by Max Ajl, John Bellamy Foster and chaired by Ying Chen.

Max Ajl is a Senior Fellow at University of Ghent and an associated researcher at the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is an associate editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society and has written for The Journal of Peasant Studies and the Review of African Political Economy. His book, A People’s Green New Deal, was published in 2021 with Pluto Press. 

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. He is the author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014), among many others. 

Ying Chen is Associate Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on. She was also consulted for the working of the UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2021.