Alternative Futures and Regional Prospects Symposium
Working across Differences, beyond Carbon, Capital and Commodity
Date: Thursday 22nd & Friday 23rd of November 2018
Venue: UTS City Campus, Building 8 , Level 5 – Room 2 (CB08.05.002): 14-28 Ultimo Rd, Ultimo NSW 2007
Organisers: The University of Newcastle Alternative Futures Network, University of Technology Sydney, Common Alternatives Network
No Registration Fee but due to limited space please RSVP indicating day/s attending to Michael.McDonagh@uon.edu.au by 15 November 2018
A two-day symposium including roundtable discussions, to cross-fertilize between several game-changing communal responses, pioneering workable policy platforms and ‘real/concrete utopian’ visions in the current era of economic uncertainties.
The post-mining boom era has already started, and it has posed serious challenges to the Australian economy in general and to the Hunter region communities in particular. Among the most important challenges commonly acknowledged by the entrepreneurs, small business owners and workers in the region are: prospects of rising under/un- employment especially among the youth, environmental degradations, unconstructive competitions, wage stagnation, decline in property investment and water management issues. New insights and leadership are needed for a future after coal. Prospective trajectories of change in future should be predicted. Alternatives and solutions to such challenges, instead of short-term remedies, need to be envisioned by drawing on careful analysis of the roots of today’s challenges and changes. Many lessens can be learnt from projects and experiences that have already gained momentum in other places across the world.
This symposium brings together a number of leading inter/national activists, scholars, policy advocates, and research institutes from a broad range of disciplines and ideological backgrounds into a close conversation around multiple alternative modes of livelihood, governance, and sociability that function beyond the mainstream free market structure. We hope this will promote cross-fertilization and thereby collaboration among these agents of progressive change.
The event is part of a broader project that attempts to lay the comparative foundations for assessing alternatives to capitalism, and for analyzing ‘post-neoliberal futures’. The project will offer integrative analyses of post-neoliberal, post-capital, and post-carbon modes of livelihood, focusing on new variants of pluralist Commonwealth, Community Economy, Post-Keynesian reforms, Circular Economy, Post-Patriarchal Southern Experiences, Eco-feminism, Economic Democracy, Eco-Commonism etc. Moreover, we intend to examine the capacities of the existing initiatives (both academic and communal) to ‘traverse’ their differences and engage collaboratively to produce meaningful and comprehensive answers to the current ‘global challenges’ experienced in our regions. We ultimately aim to produce publicly-engaged and timely policy insights into the effectiveness of these initiatives and their capacity to address global crises and to rival right wing populism.
View the program, speakers and abstracts here.
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