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Diversify and Decolonise your Holiday Reading List

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The D-Econ Winter 2019 Reading List

This article originally appeared on openDemocracy, as a part of their ‘Decolonising the Economy’ series.

Get a head start on your New Year’s Resolution to read more, by reading some or all of our recommended reads from our Winter 2019 Reading List! As the previous year drew to a close, we took stock of best books published last year. While mainstream economics publications (e.g. see the FT list or The Economist’s list) have been celebrating a very narrow range of authors and subjects (mostly white men based in the US and the UK, writing within mainstream economics), we have put together a more diverse list in terms of background, training, and perspective.   

This Alternative Economics list includes authors from across the world, with more varied backgrounds – and writing about more wide-ranging topics from a broader variety of perspectives. Our alternative list also reflects our belief that issues such as structural sexism, imperialism, and the politics of knowledge production are central to understanding economics. 

Due to institutional and language barriers we were unable to include as many scholars from the Global South as we would have liked. For example, we would love to read the new book L’Arme Invisible de la Françafrique by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla on the how the CFA Franc continues to constrain the social, political and economic prospects of its member states, but we are still waiting for the English translation. 

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D-Econ in Hanoi, 2019: Discussing Decolonising Economics with Young Scholars in Vietnam

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D-Econ will be present at the Asia Convening of the Young Scholar’s Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking from 12 to 15, August 2019 in Hanoi, Vietnam. The convening will be attended by a vibrant community of scholars from around 125 countries (full programme here). D-Econ will be at the convening to engage with the issues of Western-centrism and lack of diversity in Economics as a discipline and to discuss possible actions that we can collectively undertake to deal with these biases. We are organising a round-table on this theme at the convening on August 14, 2019 from 10:30 am to 12:15 pm. The panelists for the round-table are Devika Dutt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Surbhi Kesar (Azim Premji University and South Asian University), Seung Woo Kim (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies), and Jenny Tue Anh Nguyen (University of Oxford). 

Economics as a discipline, while claiming to be the objective social-science, has continued to remain dominated by issues and approaches that are mainly Western-centric and various scholars – and consequently their works – have remained heavily under-represented based on their social identities (gender, race, caste, location – to name a few). In this panel, we particularly engage with these two biases that have been historically produced – and are continuously reproduced – in the discipline. This bias is not limited to the discipline, but is also reflective of the broader society that we live in. In this context, we would specifically engage with four aspects of this issue:
(a) What do we mean by the Western-centrism and lack of diversity in the discipline?
(b) Why is there a need to engage with these and move beyond it?
(c) What does diversification entail?
(d) What can we do towards this end?

We invite everyone to join us at the session for an active engagement on these issues. We look forward to an enriching exchange that can collectively take this important initiative forward.

We are also conducting a survey to understand better what conference participants and economists in general think about the state of the profession. You can take the survey here!

Devika Dutt, Surbhi Kesar, Jenny Tue Anh Nguyen, and Richard Itaman from D-Econ will be present at the convening.