Dear Commoners:
Through the US Solidarity Economy Network (of which I am a member), I was alerted yesterday to a conference that is going to be held in November in Amherst, Massachusetts - the announcement for which is appended below. I plan to be involved in one panel that focuses on ideas of the solidarity economy, but in addition I want to explore whether there's interest in organizing a session which would focus on the commons (and where I would also be part of that). Please let me know if you are interested in taking part in this!

Regards,
Wolfgang



Greetings colleague,

We would be pleased if you would consider submitting a proposal for a paper, session of papers, or roundtable for ICAPE's 3rd international research conference, "Rethinking economics in a time of economic distress." Founded in 1993, the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE) is an association of associations committed to promoting healthy diversity in approaches to producing economic knowledge.

For the upcoming conference, to be held at U.Mass.-Amherst on Nov. 11-13, 2011, we invite proposals for papers or sessions from any strand of interested scholarship, examining topics of cross-cutting interest for creating a more robust, socially-valuable body of economic knowledge. Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):

* Re-thinking macro models via complex-systems: Path dependencies, endogenous cycles, emergent properties
* Minskian analyses of financial fragility & implications for financial policy
* Is fiscal policy different in the 21st century? Deficits & global bond markets
* Stresses and strains in the international financial system: Currencies, governance, emerging powers
* Enriching economics through perspectives of race, gender, ethnicity, and class
* Ecological sustainability as a central concern in economic analysis
* Measuring economic performance differently: Alternatives to GDP
* Human-capabilities and development practice
* Bringing the state back in to economic development
* Social and behavioral approaches to individual economic behavior: Is homo economicus dead?
* Grass-roots economic change: Community economies, local currencies, living wages, urban farming
* The economics of war and peace
* Heterodox economics and social provisioning
* Alternative theories of business cycles: Austrian, Post-Keynesian, Marxian, Schumpeterian
* Profits, factor shares, and financialized capitalism; varieties of capitalism(s)
* Ethics and the economics profession
* Economic education after the financial crisis: What needs to change?
* Practices of economic research: journals, research evaluation, interdisplinarity, underrepresented groups in the economics profession
* Changes in empirical methods: Has the ‘con’ gone out of econometrics? Are experiments the only right way to study individual economic behavior?
* Pluralism as a strategy for building a more robust economic knowledge
* Innovations in all strands of unconventional economic theory: Evolutionary, ecological, complexity, institutional, feminist, Austrian, Marxian, Post-Keynesian, behavioral/psychological, social, radical political economy, critical realism, general heterodox

The deadline for submitting proposals is April 30, 2011. We welcome proposals for individual papers, full sessions, and roundtables. To submit proposals, please go to: https://editorialexpress.com/conference/ICAPE2011, and follow the instructions given there. For individual papers, please include: Your name, your title and affiliation, an abstract of 300 words or less, 3 keywords, and contact information (address, phone, email). For full sessions of papers, panels, and other formats, please include the above for each contribution, as well as a title for the session, chair, discussants, and the name and contact information of the session organizer. Please alert promising graduate students to this opportunity to present their work, get new ideas, begin to make connections, etc. Information on plenary speakers, travel logistics, etc. will be posted soon on the ICAPE website: www.icape.org.

For further information or questions, please contact one of the co-chairs of the organizing committee: Martha Starr, mstarr@american.edu, or Erik Olsen, olsenek@umkc.edu.

Organizing committee: Martha Starr, Erik Olsen, Ioana Negru, Giuseppe Fontana, Mwangi wa Githinji,Andrew Mearman, Bruce Pietrykowski
Virgil Storr
    
Advisory committee: Gerald Epstein, David Colander, John Davis, Edward Fullbrooke, Rob Garnett, Stephanie Seguino