Grad Student CFP: “Before the City/Beyond the City: Capitalism in the Countryside”

The Harvard Graduate Conference on the History of Capitalism invites graduate students to submit proposals addressing this year’s theme: "Before the City / Beyond the City: Capitalism in the Countryside." The conference will be held on October 19-20, 2017, at Harvard University. The call for papers states:

In a world that continues to be mostly ocean, countryside, forest, and desert and with nearly half the world’s population still living and laboring in such locations, we seek to decenter the city and metropole and problematize progress narratives that render capitalist and urban formations inevitable. Proceeding outward from any world region, we hope to tackle a number of theoretical, historiographical, and methodological questions ranging from the origins of a capitalist world-system in the sixteenth century, to the relationship between slavery and capitalism, to the politics of development in the twenty-first century. These questions will touch on the changing ways in which people relate to land, water, and other materials and the claims they make on them; the power relationships that govern those claims; how life is imagined and sustained, how livelihoods are made and unmade, and how belonging is constructed and contested. 

Accepted papers will be grouped for presentation within three or four panels each composed of graduate students and faculty commentators from Harvard and elsewhere. The organizers invite graduate students to submit a 300-word proposal and one-page c.v. (in Word or PDF format) to capcon@fas.harvard.edu by March 1, 2017. It is anticipated that reasonable travel and lodging expenses can be reimbursed.
    Please check the Study of Capitalism website for the full call for papers and a more detailed discussion of conference goals. As the date approaches, additional information will be posted about the conference at studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu. The Twitter hashtag is #CapCon2017.