Programa del congreso

There is a gap in the current digital landscape of blockchain governance, crypto governance, refugee studies, and feminist studies, that requires a fundamental rethinking of the way data and technology are researched, developed, and used, in the historical backdrop of megacorporations and cyberpunk movement. My research delves into the intricate workings of blockchain financialization in the context of global humanitarian supply chain management. Specifically, I am concerned with the intersection of gender and surveillance capitalism within the emerging field of data feminism. I am interested in examining the ways in which racialized gendering components of crypto financialization affect the allocation of resources and the valuation of human life in the neoliberal market economy. This study explores the relationship between gender, race, and digital financial infrastructures in refugee camps worldwide, focusing on the blockchain based crypto currency and how it is on the advent of producing [and reproducing] a racialized notion of humanity, identity, and universality of knowledge. The project uses interdisciplinary methods including archival research, and discourse analysis to examine specific financial infrastructural networks, tracing how they all reflect and produce racialized circulations of power and property.

My goal is to uncover which aspects of human life are considered valuable and which are disregarded in the pursuit of an 'autonomous' economy by crypto proponents based on empirical research. Therefore, I aim to shed light on the ways in which feminist economics scholars and feminist commodity chain analysis frameworks have argued that neoliberalism is characterized by a 'disinvestment' in human lives. Through my research, I hope to explore how the global humanitarian supply chain projects rely on crypto currency and fundamentally perpetuate this neoliberal trend by profiting over gendered and racialized refugee lives without any accountability. Ultimately, my research seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on surveillance capitalism and its impact on gender, race, and socioeconomic status in the context of blockchain financialization.

This paper presents the results of an intervention designed and tested to adapt a public works programme to better works with and for young women and girls. The intervention provided paid classroom teaching assistantships in public schools in Maputo, Mozambique. The program moves beyond generic theories of change adopted by usual public works programs such as increased income or decreased poverty through labour force participation of women, towards building skills, improving employability of women in the labour market, and building their soft assets. The programme offers clear lessons to public works programs globally for ensuring empowerment of women through sustainably building not only resources, but also their agency and achievements. Globally, social protection programs are starting to have a specific focus on women and girls’ empowerment. While this is encouraging, most of these programs are primarily aimed to increasing the disposable income of program beneficiaries and do not address the issues of skills development and employability. It is in the background of such a context, the MUVA Assistentes program holds significance and has achieved positive results both in terms of soft asset creation (for the education sector, the teachers and the pupils) and for the young women who were enrolled in the programme in terms of graduation out of poverty and agency. The paper looks at those results and also offers a challenge in terms of the choice between approaches of liberating empowerment and liberal empowerment and the choices between focusing on individual agency and collective feminist movements.

This paper asks how the massification of feminism in Latin America has impacted the daily work of economists in public office and the way in which the State deals with economic problems. Based on in-depth interviews with women economists in decision-making positions in the governments of Argentina, Chile and Colombia, we seek to construct a mosaic of narratives/experiences that allow us to trace how feminist economics concepts appear in public discourse and, at the same time, how the discipline is being transformed by these conceptualizations.

Argentina has for the first time a Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversities and has just won the law on voluntary interruption of pregnancy (Dec-20). The massive protests in Colombia that shaped the national strike in 2019 and against the tax reform of President Ivan Duque in 2021, had as protagonists the feminist movement, LGBTIQ+, students and peasants. In August 2022 the first leftist government in Colombia took office with the promise of achieving gender parity and with the first black vice-president and environmental and feminist activist. The feminist mobilizations in Chile in March 2020 were the most massive in recent history. Part of the demands voiced there were part of the struggle for a new Constitution, the first in the world to be drafted with gender parity. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic left in the region an economic and social crisis with a strong impact on inequality and poverty, and women are especially affected. What contributions of feminist economics appear in the discourses to understand the particularities of the current crisis? How do women economists in public office approach it?

Developmental states have historically played an important role in achieving industrialization that brings about better economic conditions. On the other hand, the labour and production process rely on unequal power relations between firms along the value chain, within the workplace, as well as between workers and the state. Focusing on the textile and garment industry in Mauritius, this paper examines how state policies have played out and what the local implications have been for workers at the lower end of the chain. The overarching research question asks whether, and in what ways, the state’s interactions with firms and labour organizations and workers have created opportunities or constrained the development of an industry that is driven by social upgrading in Mauritius.

The paper first examines how and in what ways social upgrading has been considered in Mauritius’ state policy in the post-independence period. Moreover, how have policies and firms responded to workers’ concerns and actions? The paper explores capital-labour relations via interviews with senior policy makers, industrialists, labour union representatives and workers in and around the garment industry.

Findings suggest that despite development of vertical integration and majority locally owned factories together with the implementation of a minimum wage and a discourse of inclusion and fairness, the Mauritian garment industry is still based on actor relationships that fosters marginalization and exploitation of labour with major implications for the reproduction of colonial and patriarchal relations. Labour is highly segmented in the industry along lines of gender, nationality, and migration status. Those firms that have survived the competitive landscape and expanded, have shifted toward more capital-intensive production where women are at high risk of losing their jobs. Above all industrialists have in close collaboration with the state found new ways of accessing cheap labour. This takes the form of disposable, migrant male workers, mainly coming from Bangladesh, who at present make up over half of the labour force on Mauritian factory floors. In parallel, industrialists say they cannot find Mauritian workers when in fact the working conditions, including mandatory overtime in combination with lived experiences of sudden factory closures and relocation of the most labour-production to Madagascar, make up some of the overlooked reasons related to social reproduction needs.

On the other hand, and despite the challenges to achieving real developmentalist outcomes for labour, there is evidence of worker power that has shaped the ways in which the Mauritian garment industry operates.