MPIfG Lectures in Winter Semester 2023/24

The MPIfG has four Public Lectures lined up for the 2023/24 winter semester. The series begins on October 23 with Oliver Nachtwey (University of Basel), who in “Perspektiven für eine erweiterte politische Ökonomie des digitalen Kapitalismus” will talk about an alternative approach to understanding value creation on digital platforms that is based on anthropological theories of gift exchange. In “The Politics of Climate Taxation,” Laura Seelkopf (LMU Munich) will speak on November 15 about climate taxation and the drivers of support for or opposition to it based on a series of survey experiments across the EU and in Germany. In the new year, Zsófia Barta (University at Albany) joins us on January 10 for “The Logic of Credit: How and Why Credit Rating Agencies Exercise Power within Global Governance.” She will show in her lecture how rating agencies award sovereign ratings, which political and policy objectives they are pursuing with their decisions, and why they are in a position to interfere in politics at all. Later in the same month, Anita Engels (University of Hamburg) will talk on January 31 in “Companies and Climate Activists in the Transformation toward Deep Decarbonization” about how the various actors in the climate movement position themselves vis-à-vis the transformation and how to assess their contributions to deep carbonization.