Mini-conference: The socio-economics of asset stranding.
Montréal SASE 2025, 18-20 July 2025.
Colleagues are organizing a mini-conference on asset stranding in Montréal next year as part of SASE 2025.
Our mini-conference aims to develop the analysis of asset stranding by assembling presentations that investigate climate change as a problem of deep structural change. Faced with the threat of asset stranding, climate change mitigation and adaptation represent processes of resource reallocation with massive distributional consequences. Discussing climate change as a momentous restructuring problem is an opportunity to utilize socio-economics’ rich general theoretical repertoire analyzing processes of economic change. At the same time, the problem of asset stranding is sufficiently specific to stimulate an original conversation between different socio-economic perspectives. As such, the mini-conference is meant to foster a scholarly community around the problem of stranding by bringing together contributions from socio-economic subfields that are otherwise difficult to connect in practice without a concrete empirical focus.
The main agenda of the mini-conference is to push the socio-economic analysis of stranded assets in two directions. First, a subset of panels aims to understand the varieties of how actors deal with problems of economic devaluations. Processes of ‘asset stranding’ are shaped by a variety of forms of societal (in)action: political decisions to mitigate climate change, policies supporting economic growth and managing economic decline and reallocation, selective compensatory and acceleratory decisions, and anticipatory and future-oriented decision making under vulnerable climate conditions. Putting problems of stranding front and center relates climate change to broader theoretical problems regarding socio-economic change in capitalist societies. How do capitalist societies initiate, cope with, organize, and react to large-scale shifts in relative valuations? Second, we argue that these processual aspects of asset stranding are complemented by material effects of capital failure as a socio-economic problem. The gigantic proportions of the asset stranding problem open up the field to exchange between core subdisciplines within the wider SASE-community by inviting research into the fundamental processes through which societies respond to this problem.
The application deadline is 16 December 2024. The full call for papers is available here.