About this Event
We invite you to join us on Thursday, May 30, 2024 for the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, at the Sears Atrium (3rd Floor, George Vari Engineering an Computing Centre).
In January 2016, the Broadbent Institute lost our dear friend and inspiration Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood.
The Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Ellen’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians. At this troubling political moment, Ellen's belief that democracy means “nothing more nor less than people’s power, or even the power of the common people or the poor” is more relevant than ever.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left's foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above. Challenging the prevailing logic and assumptions in her field, Ellen’s scholarship emphasized the importance of political processes and class conflict in shaping historical change. Meiksins Wood authored nine influential books throughout her career, served on the editorial committee of the British journal The New Left Review and was a much-respected member of Britain's radical left. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 1996.
In recognition of Ellen’s distinguished legacy of historical scholarship on political thought, the Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology.
Each year’s recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture.
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture will be delivered by economist Dr. Isabella Weber—for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with policy alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy decisions, and help to empower workers.
About Isabella Weber
Isabella Weber has become a leading voice on policy responses to inflation and has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization. For her public policy work she has been profiled in , recognized as one of Bloomberg's 50 Ones to Watch, Germany's 100 women of 2022 and Capital 40 under 40 and has been awarded the Kurt Rothschild Prize and the Hans-Matthöfer Prize. For her work on China’s market reforms she has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade and the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology.
Isabella’s first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize, the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award and the Keynes Price and has been recommended on best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, ProMarket and Folha de S.Paulo among others. The book has been translated into German, Portuguese and Persian.
Her writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Project Syndicate and Süddeutsche Zeitung. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Keynesian Economics, the Review of Political Economy and on the advisory board of Environment and Planning A and a member of the Program Committee of the International Economics Association World Congress. Previously she was a tenured Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, Toronto, Canada
CAD 15.00 to CAD 20.00