IGDC Research Seminar Series: Philanthrocapitalism, power and economic justice
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Event details
Guest Speaker:
- Linsey McGoey - Linsey is Reader in Sociology at the University of Essex, and the author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso, 2015) and The Unknowers (Zed, 2019).
This talk examines the roots and social implications of the “new” philanthrocapitalism, exploring how it diverges from earlier approaches to philanthropy during the late nineteenth century. I argue that while some claims to novelty are exaggerated, other distinctive aspects – such as the for-profit turn in philanthropic giving – have received surprisingly little media attention, compounding a lack of scholarly and public attention to the unprecedented and still unknown scale of personal and corporate profiteering from charitable giving. Is philanthropy helping to alleviate global and national levels of inequality, or simply making inequality worse? These questions have no precise answers. Even the questions have received surprisingly little attention among economic sociologists. The talk concludes with considerations of why sociologists have neglected the study of philanthropy in recent decades, how and why this neglect is changing today, and what this means for shifting notions of economic justice and injustice.
Contact
Maria-Eugenia Giraudo & Nicole Beardsworth