Political Economy International School - Immigration and Labour

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.

Immigration and Labour will be delivered by Hannah Cross, David Bacon and chaired by Surbhi Kesar.

Hannah is Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. She is a member (former chair) of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy. She is also a founding member of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy’s Africa working group. Her publications include Migration Beyond Capitalism (Polity 2021), and Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism: West African labour mobility and EU borders (Routledge 2013). She has also published articles and chapters on the global remittances agenda, migration and labour mobility in West and Southern Africa, and the CFA franc under neoliberal monetary policy. 

David is a former union organiser for thirty years and has photographed documentary projects about labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights in countries around the world including Iraq, the Philippines, Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. 

Surbhi is Lecturer at the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). Her research areas include informal economy, processes of structural transformation and capitalist transition in labour surplus less developed economies, issues of economic and social exclusion, identity, labour and work, and decolonised approaches to economics. She is a coordinator for the Economic Development Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a Steering Group member for the Diversifying and Decolonising Economics initiative. She is also an editorial board member of the Review of Political Economy journal.