For more information on each special session, click on the title to expand its description. You can submit papers to the special session using the standard submission tool. Just choose the name of the special session for the primary or secondary research topic. You can, of course, also submit to the general conference theme, as described in the general call, or to one of the regular sessions organised by the research areas.
This track continues the successful panel on postcolonial perspectives initiated in Leeds, Bilbao and continued in Athens. The aim is to discuss the affinities and potential frictions between the programs of pluralism and decoloniality. Special attention will be given to the discussion of papers that are to be prepared for a special issue of REPE, for which the CfP will be distributed soon and which has already been accepted by the editorial board. The main issues to be addressed in the special sessions are the following:
These and related questions are relevant not only from a philosophy of science and sociology of science perspective, but also underlie many practical and applied debates in the context of pluralizing and decolonizing economics. In these tracks we will also discuss manuscripts that will be published in an associated special issue of REPE.
The special session aims to bring together various strands of economic analysis, schools of economic thought, and different methodologies to expand our knowledge of the gender dimensions of labor markets and technological change. It foregrounds feminist economics, feminist macroeconomics, and heterodox political economy perspectives to challenge gender-blind analyses of labour market outcomes, institutions, and policies.
Gender-blind assessments of labor market outcomes, policies, and institutions often fail to provide models that account for real-world economic phenomena. Feminist economics scholarship, and particularly, feminist macroeconomics, have demonstrated that gender-neutral policies and analysis are flawed and limited over the last 3 decades of the evolution of this subfield. Gender is not only a matter of social justice but also a macroeconomic one.
This special session is interested in gender-aware approaches to labor market phenomena, as well as structural and technological changes, including the gender-biased effects of labor market regulation, job-displacing technologies, technological augmentation, and productivity gains. The session is also conceptually linked to an edited volume planned for publication with Routledge, Women’s Activation at the Margins of Europe: Labour, Culture, Care and Digital Opportunities in Peripheral EU Regions.
This special session might have well-known feminist economists as guest speakers, such as Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, Ozlem Onaran and Giulia Zacchia.
Agriculture is reshaping at an international scale, reducing the number of farmers and family workers, and increasing the use of salaried workforces. The profile of these workers and their working conditions are also changing, as policy and institutional tools enable farmers to access new migrant workers, more flexible and inexpensive contracts, original ways of outsourcing labor inputs, and advanced technologies. This international pattern manifests in various configurations between countries, as agricultural labor markets are embedded in different sectoral institutions and national wage-labor nexuses. This array of labor transformations needs to be analyzed thoroughly.
Agriculture is indeed a sector characterized by the specifics of its labor institutional configuration: historical reliance on family workforce; biological constraints implying seasonality and periods of peak workloads; substantial all-encompassing sectoral policies; and international competition putting pressure on prices and incomes. As such, dedicated policies have been developed in many countries for agricultural workers, such as seasonal migration programs, social security contributions’ reductions, or special work contracts or subcontracting modalities. In several cases, these institutional innovations have then been extended outside agriculture, a widespread case being the temporary work migration programs present in most European and North American countries. This nature of being at the forefront regarding labor-related institutional innovation remains to be more deeply discussed, as are its consequences on agricultural and non-agricultural workers.
Meanwhile, the concentration of capital on fewer, larger, more automated farms and the growth of wage labor are reducing the specificity of the agricultural work. It interrogates why still considering agriculture detached from the rest of the labor market and from the policy and institutional questions surrounding it when the sector is becoming closer to traditional wage-labor nexus configurations. It also questions whether biological constraints and inheritance from farming systems reliant on family workers allow the sector to retain specificities or to evolve in unique ways regarding labor.
By interrogating simultaneously its specific and innovative character and its ongoing normalization, this session aims at a better understanding of the transformations in agricultural labor. This includes comparing agriculture between different countries or regions, or to other sectors, to help understand how mechanisms that regulate labor can converge or diverge at sectoral or territorial scale. To add a union’s perspective on the challenges agricultural workers are facing, this session will host a presentation from Fabrizio De Pascale, Chair for agricultural sector at the EFFAT, the European Federation of Food, Agriculture, and Tourism Trade Unions.
Heteredox economics is commonly defined by its commitment to theoretical and methodological pluralism, with the aim to position itself as a critical alternative to mainstream economic thought. In principle, this pluralism provides fertile ground for analyszing multiple and intersecting axes of power, including gender, race, class, and colonial legacies. In practice, however, heterodox economics has often struggled to adequately pay attention to these dimensions. Perspectives grounded in feminist, racialized, and de-/post-colonial analyses continue to be under-theorized, reduced to single dimensions (e.g. only gender or only class), or relegated to the margins of heterodox discourse.
This neglect is not incidental. Feminist scholars have long highlighted this phenomenon, emphasizing the systemic erasure of marginalized voices, particularly those of marginalized women. That knowledge production is shaped by power relations, institutional hierarchies, and the social positioning of scholars themselves, is well argued. While such patterns of exclusion are widely recognized as constitutive features of mainstream economics, heterodox economics has not been immune to reproducing similar epistemological blind spots. These dynamics manifest, for example, in the continued privileging of particular methodologies, limited engagement with intersectional frameworks, and insufficient incorporation of non-Western epistemologies in research and pedagogy.
At a time when economic crises are so deeply and increasingly intertwined with social inequalities structured along gendered, racialized, and colonial lines, these blind spots pose a serious challenge to the academic rigour and political viability of heterodox economics. Addressing these gaps is not a matter of providing “representation” or “diversity” as ink-on-paper, but becomes a prerequisite to develop more robust, and reflexive economic analyses that are rooted in social ground reality.
This Special Session therefore seeks to foster critical reflection on the epistemological, institutional, and political boundaries of (heterodox) economics. Its aim is to examine how structures of exclusion operate within the field, to identify points of convergence and divergence with mainstream economics, and to explore pathways toward a more inclusive and reflexive pluralism within EAEPE and beyond. The Special Session will also feature a panel discussion with distinguished scholars in the field, designed to facilitate broader discourse within EAEPE.
We welcome submissions from economics broadly construed – not limiting ourselves to heterodox economics alone, given its status as a specialized subfield – while encouraging contributors to reflect on the significance of their work for heterodox approaches.We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to the following topics:
gender, race, and postcolonial blind spots in (heterodox) economic theory and methodology
intersections of feminist, racial, and de-/post-colonial economics with heterodox traditions
epistemic injustice, power, politics of knowledge production in economics
pedagogy, curricula, and the reproduction of exclusion within (heterodox) economics
methodological pluralism, intersectionality, and the limits of existing heterodox frameworks
institutional practices and reforms for fostering inclusive pluralism
This Special Session offers an overarching theme under which an array of research topics could be accommodated, considered and advanced; including topics that explore transformations taking place and posing challenges for labour.
Integral to this special session is a commitment to strengthen connections between the members of EAEPE with the American Association for Institutional Thought (AFIT) and the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). Relatedly, one of our aims is to bring into EAEPE some of the promising younger scholars from South America, especially Brazil and Argentina, as well as from México, the USA, and Canada in North America; younger scholars who could join this session as a way of coming into conference participation and establishing their integration as the new generation of EAEPE members.
This special session examines structural inequality as a dynamic process of circular cumulative causation unfolding across three co-evolving dimensions: economic dynamics, institutional structures, and social–political perceptions. Inequality is understood not as a static distributional outcome or temporary disequilibrium, but as an emergent property of mutually reinforcing processes that evolve over time and stabilize unequal trajectories. The session brings together evolutionary, institutional, and political economy perspectives to analyze how inequality is produced, entrenched, and contested in contemporary capitalist economies—particularly under conditions of accelerating ecological crisis.
A first focus concerns self-reinforcing economic dynamics generating structural inequality among people, firms, and regions. Building on classical and contemporary theories of cumulative causation, contributions may examine how initial advantages reproduce themselves through multiplicative growth, increasing returns, network effects, and path dependence. In modern economic contexts, these mechanisms appear as scale dependence, type dependence, and non-linear returns, shaping persistent inequalities in income and wealth, firm growth and market power, regional divergence, and global production networks. Importantly, such inequalities can arise even in the absence of explicit exclusion, as small initial differences compound and become increasingly difficult to reverse.
A second dimension addresses the co-evolution of these economic dynamics with institutional structures. Institutions—such as tax systems, welfare states, labor-market regimes, financial regulation, housing markets, education systems, and industrial policies—do not merely correct inequality ex post. Rather, they adapt to, legitimize, and often stabilize cumulative growth processes. Once inequality reaches certain thresholds, institutional change itself may become constrained, generating lock-in effects that entrench unequal growth regimes across social groups, firms, and regions. Within this framework, the session places particular emphasis on climate collapse and environmental policies as drivers of structural transformation. Decarbonization, mitigation, and adaptation policies reconfigure production systems, labor markets, and regional development paths in uneven ways, interacting with existing inequalities and shaping differential capacities to adapt.
A third focus lies on perceptions, expectations, and political beliefs surrounding inequality and climate transformation. Building on work on inequality misperceptions and Albert Hirschman’s tunnel effect, the session highlights that tolerance for inequality depends on beliefs about future mobility and collective progress. These beliefs are socially embedded and shaped through vernacular inequality understandings—localized interpretations formed through lived experience, social networks, and reference groups. Such perceptions influence voting behavior, redistributive preferences, support for environmental policy, protest participation, and political stability.
The central argument of the session is that economic dynamics, institutional evolution, and perception formation constitute interacting components of a single co-evolving system. Methodologically, the session is explicitly pluralist, welcoming qualitative and quantitative work, historical and contemporary analyses, and a wide range of modeling approaches. The unifying concern is how co-evolving economic, institutional, ecological, and perceptual dynamics generate persistent inequality—and how these dynamics might be transformed.
AI is considered one of the major technological breakthroughs of our century with considerable economic, social and institutional repercussions in labour markets, research, policy-making, global relations and our daily lives. One may argue that the automation and mechanization of human life are not a recent phenomenon; it may be considered an advanced stage of a process that had already been taking place many decades ago. In his 2002 book “Machine Dreams”, Philip Mirowski documents how economics has become a cyborg science, one that focuses on cyborgs as a hybrid of machine and organism, which is not born, but originates from a matrix, and reflects the domination of abstract individuation, as the ultimate self finally liberates itself from all kinds of dependencies. Mainstream approaches to economic behavior related to rational choice, optimization processes, and game theoretic strategies not only reduce human action to automated, mechanistic reactions to external shocks, but have also lent themselves to computer programming, algorithmic analysis, logistic simulations, and artificial intelligence, thus excluding human intervention altogether, along with all the abilities to reflect, discuss and decide based on social, political, and ethical considerations. Hence, it becomes clear that AI is more than just a new engineering technology. It can be considered a social technology, and even more so, a new social phenomenon.
Questions that arise include, among others:
We intend to discuss these and many other questions based on Heterodox Economics approaches, by drawing from the complexity paradigm, institutional and evolutionary economics, Marxist, (Post-)Keynesian, and other approaches.
The aim of the special session is to analyse the effects of labour market institutions, and their reforms implemented in these institutions, in developing economies on labour market outcomes in general and on the quality of employment and wage developments in developing countries. In the case of developing economies, a growing number of studies have highlighted the negative effects of reforms implemented to make the labour market more flexible. In many cases, driven by various international organisations, developing economies have implemented reforms in labour market institutions similar to those implemented in developed countries. However, studies on the effects of these reforms in developing economies are very scarce.
Key points to be developed and discussed in this session include analysis of the effects of labour reforms implemented in developing countries that have made the labour markets in those countries more flexible on aspects such as job quality, the effects on informal employment, labour segmentation, income distribution, poverty, the impact on wage growth and labour productivity growth, among others.
Green transitions increasingly face “green discontent”: opposition to specific measures expressed through protest or non-compliance, distrust in public institutions, electoral support for climate-sceptic and populist platforms, or frustration that climate policy is insufficient. Green discontent varies across sectors, social groups, and places. It is also marked by inherent contradictions and a dual nature: it may express the belief that policy does too much and is excessive or disruptive, or that policy does too little and is weak or slow. This special session starts from the premise that green discontent is not an inevitable reaction to decarbonisation, but that it is socially produced.
The ways in which green transitions are designed, governed, implemented, and narrated help explain the emergence – or avoidance – of green discontent. Three channels in particular emerge from the recent literature:
We welcome contributions across sectors and places, including – but not limited to – housing, mobility, renewable infrastructure siting, industrial decarbonisation, and other domains of climate mitigation and adaptation. We are particularly interested in contributions which explore the following, non-exhaustive topics:
EAEPE-2026 JAES special session
In 2026, we will continue to discuss the challenges associated with the polycrisis in societies entering the era of the mass proliferation of AI technologies.
As AI is not only a technological but also a social phenomenon, will it help overcome the polycrisis or, conversely, contribute to its deepening? Our special session will be dedicated to answering these questions:
