Monday, April 29, 2019, 6 p.m.

Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Room D4.0.022

Jamie Peck: Whatever happened to uneven development?

Comments by Jürgen Essletzbichler, WU Vienna, and Karin Fischer, JKU Linz (tbc)

Uneven development has long been part of the lexicon in political economy and heterodox economic studies, a signifier of a cluster of received (if often loosely specified) understandings relating to geographical inequality, core-periphery relations, unequal exchange, and global interdependency. The terminology of uneven development enjoyed its widest currency during the 1970s and 1980s, a time when the tectonic plates of globalizing capitalism seemed to be moving underfoot. In the decades since, the question of uneven development—as a locus for active theorization—has waned somewhat, even as geographical transformations in the world economy have, if anything, intensified. It has receded, one might say, into the background. The presentation will outline a conjunctural approach to the analysis of capitalist transformations and recombinant development models, drawing particularly on insights from the work of Karl Polanyi and Doreen Massey.

Jamie Peck is Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy, Distinguished University Scholar, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His recent publications include Doreen Massey: critical dialogues, edited with Marion Werner, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers (Agenda, 2018) and Offshore: exploring the worlds of global outsourcing (Oxford, 2017).