Inequality in The 21st Century: A Day Long Engagement with Thomas Piketty - 14.00 Session 3 (Accumulation and Timespaces of Class)
Speaker(s) : David Soskice, Wendy Carlin, Bob Rowthorn, Diane Perrons, Stephanie Seguino, Lisa McKenzie, Naila Kabeer, Dr. Laura Bear, Gareth Jones, Mike Savage, Sir John Hills, Sir Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty
Recorded on 11 May 2015 at Old Theatre, Old Building
A day-long conference with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been of global significance in shaping debates about inequality across the globe. The workshop will be hosted by LSE's new International Inequalities Institute with the Department of Sociology at LSE and the British Journal of Sociology, which ran a special issue of reviews on Piketty’s book, several of the contributors to which will be involved in these discussions.
Thomas Piketty is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEIII
Session 3, 2pm to 3.15pm, Accumulation and Timespaces of Class
Piketty puts the issue of accumulation through time at the heart of his analysis of capital. But how might we extend his quantitative measurement of accumulation into an analysis of unequal relationships of class? Social science approaches since Bourdieu have argued that various capitals (economic, social and cultural) acquired over time and built into spatial infrastructures produce inequality and the relational experience of class. In this panel we will extend these theories in dialogue with Piketty’s recent findings to develop a critical approach to tracking various capitals and their timespace qualities. Speakers will focus in particular on the international timespaces of accumulation; the varying experiences of time produced by different forms of capital accumulation and the timespaces of the precariat and of the elite. Overall we aim to supplement Piketty’s focus on the distribution and accumulation of absolute amounts of capital through time. We will argue for quantitative and qualitative measures of: levels of security and insecurity and the temporal and spatial effects of various capitals. These measures we suggest should be applied across all scales of analysis to take in: transnational and national processes; the macro-level of institutions and the micro-level of human lives.
Speakers:
Dr. Laura Bear is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She has examined the effects of government policy on inequality and explored conflicts in time associated with globalisation in recent ESRC funded projects. She is the author of two books, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (2007) and Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt on a South Asian River (2015). Based on her twenty years of fieldwork in India she has also published numerous journal articles and special issues including the recent, Conflict, Doubt, Mediation: an Anthropology of Modern Time (JRAI 2014).
Gareth Jones, Professor of Urban Geography at the London School of Economics has applied political economic approaches to urban change, violence and insecurity, and youth identities in Latin America and to elite lifestyles in Southern Africa. He is currently working on an ESRC-NWO-DfG grant on urban poverty and violence in the Americas.
Mike Savage is Martin White Professor and Head of Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has long standing interests in class and stratification, especially its cultural dimensions and is the author or co-author of Class Analysis and Social Transformation (2000); Globalisation and Belonging (with Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005); Culture, Class, Distinction (with Bennett, Silva, Warde, Gayo-Cal and Wright, 2009) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method, (2010) and the forthcoming Social Class in the 21st century (with Cunningham, Devine, Friedman, Laurison, McKenzie, Miles, Snee and Wakeling).
