• Date: September 11th, Friday, 2020 10:00-12:00
• Online seminar via Zoom

SNUAC’s Center for Asian Urban Societies has programmed a seminar on the basics of <Cultural Political Economy of Variegated Capitalism> on every other Friday starting from August 14th.

In this seminar, we plan to overview the components of cultural political economy:  (1) critical realism, (2) the strategic-relational approach, (3) critique of political economy, (4) the régulation approach and governance theory, (5) state theory, (6) critical discourse analysis and critical semiotic analysis, (7) conjunctural analysis, (8) the variegation approach.

The seminar will proceed with the lectures (mostly explanations of the background) by the host and presentations and discussion by participants. While this will start out in the form of a reading club, we are hoping that it will grow into a research network in the future. We ask all graduate students and researchers who are interested in the critique of political economy, critical cultural political economy and critical cultural studies to join us.

※ Inquiries : Kihoon Choi (geozealot@gmail.com)

Jihoon Park

Researcher at Sogang University Institute of Social Sciences. Visiting researcher at SNUAC. Earned a Ph.D. with “A Cultural Political Economy of South Korea’s Development Model in Variegated Capitalism” under the guidance of Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum at Lancaster University.

※ Please sign up through this Google Form if you wish to participate.
https://forms.gle/t25SP74xDGSnn6J19

This seminar held on September 11th was the third meeting of the eight programmed to be held, aiming for a basic understanding of the strategic-relational approach.

The host of the seminar, Jihoon Park (SNUAC visiting researcher) introduced the strategic-relational approach and explained the background of Bob Jessop establishing this theory, as well as his academic trajectory.  Also, he dealt with critical realism and social-relational approach as critical realist social theories, explained how critical realism as a meta-theory can describe social structure, and how Bob Jessop’s approach is special in that theory.

Jaesol Shin (M.A. graduate, Dept. of Sociology, ChungAng Univ.) compared Jessop’s view with those of others who attempted the critical realist approach and introduced Jessop’s discussion through his 2005 paper. In terms of explaining critical realism as a theory of social structure, as there can be various opinions from different scholars limitations of each approach were analyzed. Jessop’s strategic-relational approach is characteristic of explicitly revealing the spatiotemporal property of the social structure as an ensemble.