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Call For Papers: Ideas + Research

Ananya Chakravarti

November 27, 2018

RadicalxChange
11th floor of the College for Creative Studies – A. Alfred Taubman Center
460 W Baltimore St, Detroit, MI 48202, USA
March 22-24, 2019

We are soliciting applications to present in the Ideas + Research track at our first international RadicalxChange conference, to be held in Detroit, March 22-24, 2019.

About RadicalxChange

RadicalxChange convenes a community of activists, artists, entrepreneurs and scholars committed to using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality, build widely-shared prosperity, heal global political divides and build a richer and more cooperative social life. As advocates of radical social change, the RadicalxChange community challenges long-established social institutions such as private property, one-person-one-vote and the primacy of the individual on the one hand and the nation state on the other. To achieve this change the community seeks to harness the emancipatory potential of insights from the field of mechanism design in dialog with a range of other academic fields such as computer science, philosophy and history, the communicative imagination of artists, the pragmatic ingenuity of entrepreneurs and the idealism of activists for social justice.

RadicalxChange is an inclusive, open community that seeks to promote rich and meaningful connections across a wide range of people from all walks of life. We believe in diversity of opinion and representation across different ethnicities and races, genders and sexual orientations, religions, nationalities, abilities and socio-economic and professional backgrounds.

For more information, please visit our website.

Conference Themes: Ideas + Research

Researchers, academicians, social workers, policy makers and other stakeholders are welcome to submit a brief abstract of no more than 300 words, showcasing original research related to one or more of the following core ideas.

  1. Property is Monopoly: Markets and private property are often conflated in modern discourse. However, disaggregating the two concepts, as many nineteenth-century economists and thinkers did, reveals that private property in fact distorts free markets, while providing the basis for corporate monopolies, with pernicious effects for democracy. Furthermore, with modifications to corporate structure and better anti-trust regulation to disrupt corporate monopolies, we can promote wage growth, lower prices and create better standards of living for workers.
    Papers related to this core idea might explore novel solutions such as self-assessed property taxes; explore the historical development of private property and/or its relationship to corporate monopoly; demonstrate the effects of private property on particular markets and democracies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; explore anti-trust practices in various contexts and/or propose best practices in anti-trust regulation.
  2. Data as Labor: Imagine a world in which your personal data, currently hoovered up by tech companies and repurposed for their profit, were honored as your dignified work and compensated as such. Treating data as labor will not only build a fairer and more equal society but spur growth and innovation in technology and development.
    Papers related to this core idea might explore legal ramifications of treating data as labor, explore how forms of work in the past came to be recognized as labor by society and by law, propose novel technological or economic means by which data can be assessed as labor, explore budding social and artistic movements advocating for treating data as labor, and explore the socioeconomic and political consequences of treating data as labor.
  3. Uniting the World’s Workers: The current system of nation-states prevents the free movement of labor, creating distortions in the global market but worse, leading to inhumane treatment of immigrants. Given the increasingly fractious nature of political debates surrounding immigration, the need to find humane mechanisms for allowing worker mobility is urgent.
    Papers related to this core idea might compare different immigration regimes and their socio-economic effects; propose novel mechanisms for migrant sponsorship; explore the relationship between migration and development; trace the history of current immigration regimes and discourses surrounding immigration, and consider legal and democratic frameworks for immigration reform.
  4. Radical Democracy: As observers of political gerrymandering in the US know, the principle of one-person, one-vote does not necessarily lead to democratic outcomes. Imagine a world where political minorities could protect their most cherished interests at the ballot box without relying on the whims of judges, and compromises on sensitive issue could be hammered out transparently in the public square. If citizens were able to trade influence on issues they don’t care or know about for influence on the issues most important to them, the voting process itself could help create reasoned compromises among citizens.
    Papers related to this core idea may propose novel electoral designs, such as quadratic voting; assess the effects on societies and cities that have adopted such novel voting systems; explore the intellectual history of voting or forgotten thinkers and philosophical traditions that may help revitalize our intuitions about democratic institutions aand democracy in general today.

These ideas are inspired by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, Radical Markets (Princeton University Press, 2018). To learn more, please visit their website.

Abstract Template

  1. We encourage you to send an informative summary of a paper’s substance including its background, purpose, methodology, results, and conclusion.
  2. Please indicate which of the core ideas your paper relates to and include a maximum of five keywords.
  3. The maximum word limit for the abstract is 300 words.
  4. Your submission must be in English.
  5. Please include a brief biography, alongside your abstract, including your full name, your current professional affiliation and position (if any), your contact details, including mailing and email address.
  6. Please submit your abstract on our application form.

For further information, contact info@radicalxchange.org.