Political Economy International School - Welfare Regime and Capitalism: Housing, Pensions, and Healthcare

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.

Welfare Regime and Capitalism: Housing, Pensions, and Healthcare will be delivered by Manuel Aalbers, Hwanhee Bae and chaired by Karthik Manickam.

Manuel is professor of Human Geography at KU Leuven, where he leads a research group on the intersection of real estate, finance and states. He takes a political economy approach to studying the effects of ‘big’ processes like financialization and neo liberalization on cities and housing markets across the globe and has published on redlining and exclusion, the privatization of social housing, neighborhood decline and gentrification. He is the author of Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets and The Financialization of Housing as well as the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies and editor-in-chief of geography journal TESG. 

Hwanhee is an Economics PhD candidate at SOAS University of London and Knowledge Transfer Partnership Associate for SOAS and GFTU, funded by Innovate UK. Her research interests are financialisation, housing, pensions, welfare, and political economy. 

Karthik is a PhD student in the Economics Department at the New School for Social Research. Karthik received his MA and MPhil in Economics from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has consulted for the World Bank, UNESCAP, and Club of Rome. His current research focuses on the political economy of social protection systems for vulnerable populations.