DAVID HARVEY is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics. Professor Harvey is a leading theorist in the field of urban studies whom Library Journal called "one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century." He was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place (and more recently "nature") have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include Social Justice and the City (1973); The Limits to Capital (1982); The Condition of Postmodernity (1989); Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996); Spaces of Hope (2000); and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (2001); The New Imperialism (2003); and Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006). His most recent book is The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2010).

READINGS

NANCY FOLBRE is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford, 2009), Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Harvard, 2009), Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint (Routledge, 1994) and co-editor, with Michael Bittman, of Family Time: The Social Organization of Care (Routledge, 2004). Books she has written for a wider audience include Saving State U (New Press, 2010); The Field Guide to the U.S. Economy (with James Heintz and Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, New Press, 2006 and earlier editions), The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New Press, 2001), and The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual (with Randy Albelda, New Press, 1996). She currently coordinates a working group on care work sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. You can read her regular contribution to the New York Times Economix Blog at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nancy-folbre/

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DUNCAN K. FOLEY graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Mathematics in 1964, and received the Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1966. He has taught at M.I.T., Stanford, Barnard College of Columbia University, and since 1999 has been Leo Model Professor at the Economics Department of the New School for Social Research. He is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has published in the fields of Public Finance, Macroeconomics, Money, Marxist Economic Theory, Economic Dynamics, Neo-Ricardian Economics, Growth Theory, and Complex Systems Theory and Economics. Foley's recent work includes studies of the relation of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to economics, global warming policy, complexity theory and Classical political economy ("Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital and Land in the New Economy", Routledge, 2003), work on the foundations of statistical method, and Marx's theory of money. He published a book on the history of political economy and economics, "Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology", in 2007.

READINGS

GÖRAN THERBORN is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK, and affiliated professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has been co-Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, professor of sociology at Gothenburg University, Sweden, and of political science at the Catholic University at Nijmegen, Netherlands. His books include, Science, Class and Society (l976), What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules (l978), The ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (l980), Why Some Peoples Are More Unemplkoyed Than Others (l985), European Modernity and Beyond. The Trajectory of European Societies, l945-2000 (l995), Between Sex and Power. Family in the World, l900-2000 (2004), Inequalities of the World /2006), From Marxism to Postmarxism? (2008), The World. A Beginner's Guide (2011). He is currently working on a global project on Cities of Power.

CHARLES POST is Professor Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College-City University of New York. His intellectual interests include the origins of capitalism, the determinants and dynamics of working class consciousness and organization, social conflict and capitalist state policy, and the restructuring of industrial capitalist production historically. He is the author of The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development, and Political Conflict, 1620-1877 (Brill Academic Publishers, 2011), which has been short-listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. According to Robert Brenner, "In The American Road to Capitalism, Charles Post offers a brilliant reinterpretation of the origins and diverging paths of economic evolution in the American north and south. The first systematic historical materialist account of US development from the colonial period through the civil war in a very long time, it is sure to be received as a landmark contribution." Post has also published in New Left Review, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Historical Materialism and Against the Current. He is also a long-time activist on the socialist left and in the American Federation of Teachers.

Gar Alperovitz, political economist, historian, and author of the new book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution will give two free public talks in Madison highlighting how, in an age of political deadlock and economic decay, hope can be found in the growing movement across the country to build a new and more egalitarian economy based in cooperation and community.  Dr. Alperovitz will suggest that a movement aiming at the “evolutionary reconstruction” of the American system—away from rampant inequality and corporate control, and towards a more just distribution of wealth and renewed democracy—is poised to take center stage in the national conversation. 

About Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, has been responsible for some of the most important and influential analyses of new forms of worker, community, and cooperative ownership. He is the cofounder of The Democracy Collaborative, a research institute developing strategies to build community wealth, including an innovative network of green worker cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to his work as a leader in the new economy movement, he is an acclaimed historian of US foreign policy.  He is a former fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard and of King’s College at Cambridge University, where he received his PhD in political economy. He has served as a legislative director in the  U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a special assistant in the Department of State. Earlier he was president of the Center for Community Economic Development, Codirector of The Cambridge Institute, and president of the Center for the Study of Public Policy. Dr. Alperovitz’s numerous articles have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The Journal of Economic Issues, Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History, and other academic and popular journals. His most recent books are America Beyond Capitalism (2011) and What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution. Dr. Alperovitz is also author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1995), Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (2002), and Unjust Deserts (2008).

About What Then Must We Do?

Never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with our economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new economy—and, if we act upon it, a new system—are forming.  In What Then Must We Do?,  forthcoming this April from Chelsea Green Publishing, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about why the time is right for a revolutionary new economy movement, what it means to democratize the ownership of wealth, and what it will take to build a new system to replace the decaying one, offering an evolutionary, common-sense solution for moving from despair and anger to strategy and action.