Austerity and After? Policies, Politics and Ideologies

As part of McMaster’s Socrates Project, and the Hooker Distinguished Lecturers series, Professor Emeritus John Clarke of the Open University, United Kingdom will be giving a series of five talks on a range of topics including austerity, new politics, policy in transition, contesting citizenship and remaking public service.

In this lecture, John Clarke will trace the rise of Austerity as the political common-sense of the global North during the last decade. He will consider the strange relationships between Austerity as an ideology, as a political project and as a set of (dysfunctional) policies. Borrowing from the example of the UK in particular to examine Austerity as an attempt to imagine a ‘moral economy’ based around ideas of sacrifice and fairness, in which profoundly conservative conceptions of family, work and nation are entangled. The talk will conclude by considering the fractures and fissures that have opened up in the apparently coherent and potent project of Austerity and ask what might succeed it.

Registration required through Eventbrite.