Rethinking Economics for Africa Festival 2023
The annual Rethinking Economics for Africa (REFA) Festival is a public platform for exploring new forms of thinking, practice and policy proposals, to ensure that economics serves the needs of the African continent. The REFA Festival has brought together between 200 and 400 students, academics, civil society, workers in the labour movement and activists annually for the past five years. Participants explore the economic and social issues of our time through conference-style lectures, panel discussions and workshops as well as interactive stalls, artwork displays, film screenings and live performances.
SCIS is proud to host our first international symposium which brings together researchers from across the global South to discuss methodological and substantive issues relating to the study of inequality, and in particularly to develop a Southern approach to inequality studies.
The creation of new knowledge relating to inequality is in itself determined by patterns of inequality in research and knowledge creation – following a core-periphery pattern. Northern institutions set the agenda and epistemological framework for knowledge creation, and use the south as the site of research and observation. This approach is problematic for various reasons.
The first is that it removes the agency from the South to set the intellectual and policy agenda for the study of inequality. It is a form of epistemological imperialism. For the content of research and knowledge production, too, there are important concerns. The first is that this approach assumes, to a certain extent, a universalism in the causes of inequality, and the origins of that universalism are located squarely in the global North. While this may be true to a certain extent, it is a very strong assumption when it underpins the research agenda.
It is particularly dangerous because while inequality may look similar in the North and the South, it is our hypothesis that the reproduction of inequality in the South may be determined by factors that are quite different, and possibly which are particular to the South, and of course is shaped by the way the South articulates with the North. To take one example, the reproduction of inequality in the South is certainly determined by the historic process of colonialism, which has left a very different legacy in the global South compared to the North.
The global south is emerging at the forefront in the use of socio-economic rights and the law to achieve social change.
The changing geography of economic and political power in the world system is in fact closely related to the emergence of a new geography of global inequality in which more than 70 percent of the world's poor now live in middle-income countries. And crucially, widening inequalities between and within countries is coupled with the persistence of poverty. The objective of this conference is a comprehensive and broadly shared understanding of how inequality is produced and reproduced in South Africa and in comparable countries in the global south, and the identification of the sources of power that can address and overcome this inequality.
Download the programme Inequality symposium.
Much of the research on inequality has focussed on inequality of income and of opportunities. There is a large gap in understanding wealth inequality, and its impact on other spheres of society. In economics and quantitative-based sociological studies, much of the research has focussed on measuring wealth distribution, how wealth is held, and the mechanism through which wealth distribution is produced and reproduced. In sociology and anthropology, insightful research on elites show why and how wealth privileges reproduced, and reveal the non-money metric factors that are crucial to understanding the top shares in the distribution in the form of power, culture, and other social structures. Crucially, these studies also help us understand the political economy in which policy efforts to redress inequality is done.
Much of the theorising on wealth inequality has been done in the ‘Global North’, where the Northern experience has been universalised and applied to the South. However, the roots of inequality in the South are different, and the manifestation of inequality are different both in and within the South. We propose that using ‘wealth inequality’ as a conceptual tool can bring together different disciplinary approaches to studying this phenomenon, and research originating in the South provide an alternative base from which to theorise about wealth inequality. In better understanding wealth inequality in the South, we hope to provide a basis in which to redress inequality.
Aim:
The event is bringing together a new group of researchers from different disciplines across the world. The goal is to share ideas and experiences to workshop a common approach to understanding wealth inequality in the Global South. Further, many researchers work on this area in isolated spaces, and we hope that this network will motivate and build momentum in this area of research. Specifically, we aim to discuss:
- What are the key questions that need to be researched?
- What would a multi/trans-disciplinary approach look like?
- What are the challenges facing research?
- How can this network support and grow this research agenda?