15th Conference on Social Studies on the Economy

The conference on social studies on the economy constitute an interdisciplinary space that renews the tradition of the Social Sciences, questioning the established disciplinary jurisdiction that separates those objects and processes that would be strictly “economic” from “social,” “political,” “cultural,” or “moral” ones. Since their first meeting in 2006, the conference has consolidated as an interdisciplinary space through the progressive inclusion of students, teachers, fellows, and researchers from different backgrounds and latitudes. Establishing a permanent controversy with economics from its neoclassical-orthodox perspective, the space achieves the convergence of sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and economists from different places such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, France, and the United States, among others. The Social Studies of Economics Conferences are the expression of the formation process of an intellectual field that, while promoting and stimulating the production of knowledge, allows a true circulation of social, political, and cultural ideas about economic processes and objects.
In 2024, the XV edition of the Social Studies of Economics Conference, “State and Market? Tensions between antagonism and complementarity in a world in crisis,” aims to recover, discuss, and problematize the complex and relevant relationship between State and Market, a topic of growing global and regional relevance.
In the international context, developed countries reclaim economic protectionism in the framework of geopolitical disputes with Asia, and especially with China, for leading the “green and digital” economy. In Latin America, on the other hand, expressions emerge that seek to reduce the State’s participation in the economy and society, proposing the market as the exclusive and most beneficial allocator of natural, material, and symbolic resources.
In the interconnections between State and Market, as well as between the global, regional, and local levels, discussions persist around an agenda of research problems, which have been addressed from different theoretical-methodological perspectives, both micro and macro-social. In these conferences, we seek to work on development models; the configuration of social inequalities and their recent transformations; the dynamics of indebtedness in States, households, and companies; the monetary and financial repertoires of individuals; the complex relationships between States and markets; the economic and political action of companies and entrepreneurs; popular economics and informal and illegal markets, among others.
Taking up the open dialogues among researchers in the region, the conferences seek to establish themselves as a space to rethink the multiple ways in which we do economic sociology in Latin America and the dialogues we establish with academies from other regions of the world. The conferences invite, then, to think of economic sociologies in the plural, allowing for the diversity and heterogeneity of theoretical and methodological perspectives with which the social sciences approach economic life.