Nick Bernards

ABSTRACT The Recovery and Resilience Facility of the European Union (EU) provided member states with funds to counteract the economic consequences of the pandemic and required the submission of national action plans. The EU developed guidance on how member states should apply for and use these funds, directing applicants to include a gendered analysis. While there is significant variation in the levels of gender awareness within the national plans, the Irish plan is notable in that it lacks any substantial engagement with gender considerations. Using document analysis and policy maker interviews, this article examines the causes and outcomes of this disengagement, exploring this puzzle of a lack of gender sensitive economic policy-making in Ireland. We examine why, despite direction from the EU, those charged with Ireland’s economic policy framework omitted any significant consideration of gender. Drilling down into a specific example of how gender considerations were marginalised in economic governance, we argue for understanding more about how the interpretive or cognitive lens that policy makers apply reinforces long-standing norms about what matters. We contribute to feminist political economic analysis of the EU and national policy-making, highlighting where the blockages to gender equality lie.

Why is it so hard to translate high-level committements into actual policy changes when it comes to gender equality?

Check out our newly published article - ‘It would have slowed down the work’ – the challenges of gender sensitive economic policy

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

THE HIDDEN ABODES OF CAPITALIST SPACE: Rethinking Crisis and the Built Environment This article develops a new theory of the relationship between the built environment and the reproduction of capitalism. To do so, it pursues a critical engagement with David Harvey's landmark texts ...

I have a new article out in
@ijurresearch.bsky.social!

"The Hidden Abodes of Capitalist Space: Rethinking Crisis and the Built Environment."

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Should be of interest to those writing/thinking about Hegel, Harvey, capitalism's "hidden abodes," and much more

New piece for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social, written with @jacktaggart.bsky.social and @tomchodor.bsky.social! It's an attempt at grasping the dismantling of multilateral global governance, in light of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, resurgent state capitalism, and hegemonic crisis. Link below:

For those interested in value theory and the critique of political ecology:

This new article by André Novas Otero shows how rent can only be understood in terms of its double basis (natural difference and class power), and how this double basis helps explain the persistence of uneven development.

I have a new one on cloud infrastructure and capitalist instability out!

doi.org/10.1080/0197...

African Decolonial Theory: A Conversation Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous studies, Latin American feminism, and wo...

African Decolonial Theory: A Conversation (with an incredible lineup). A longread of 68 pages @antipodeonline.bsky.social
#geosky @demonicgrounds.bsky.social @udadisi.bsky.social @roapejournal.bsky.social @africamultiple.bsky.social @pollenetwork.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Now that I think about it, the only things I've written that are somewhat hard to access are the ones that aren't readily available in PDF format...

Unironically people asking me questions about things I've written is an extraordinary occasional privilege and genuinely one of the most enjoyable parts of the job. I do not wish to automate it away.

'Imagine if every stupid thing you've ever written took on a life of its own and people could ask it questions on your behalf, saving them the trouble of reading it, or actually asking you, and consuming a small swimming pool's worth of water in the process.'

My afterword "The Material Politics of Labour in Africa" to the SI "Under construction – towards critical perspectives on infrastructuring and infrastructured labour in Africa" edited is now freely available. @rsa-tpg.bsky.social @rsablog.bsky.social #geosky

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DFDSB...

Understanding the roles of decommodification in socioecological transformations: a new theoretical approach Decommodification is widely considered a central pillar of progressive socioecological transformations, like the green new deal, degrowth and ecosocialism. Yet it is inadequately problematised and ...

Very interesting new article by Geoff Goodwin www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

On the 22nd of January (incidentally, the date of Gramsci's birthday) my article came out in @gpejournal.bsky.social

bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...

(This is mostly a stupid joke but also we need to reckon with the role that the University in its current form has played in enabling fascism and managerialization and ‘impact’ is not not relevant)

Someone, somewhere in the University of Kent’s research office, is trying to work out whether they can put together a REF impact case study out of Matt Godwin.

EU green rules fail to boost funds’ ESG credentials, research finds SFDR also did not boost flows to more sustainable funds, say academics

Feels almost quaint, at this point, to be reporting things like disclosure requirements and stricter labelling rules ‘did not materially alter the sustainability of [mutual fund] portfolios’.

www.ft.com/content/7535...

My co-edited book with Kayhan Valadbaygi, Mode of Production and the Historiography of Capitalism, is now out with Bristol University Press.

The book reopens the mode of production debate and its historiographical stakes.

50% off in the January sale.

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/mode-of-prod...

while the richest person on the planet cannot shut up about satellites, we mere mortals (w. @joschabels.bsky.social) are left to study the pesky cables here down on earth in the mud (or rather on the seabed).

Check what we found out in our new open access paper in Globalizations: lnkd.in/ep4q94XK

Iran in Revolt | Kayhan Valadbaygi Deep political-economic transformations are causing recurrent waves of unrest, with no long-term solution in sight.

📣 My new article on Iran’s latest unrest for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ira...

Iran has witnessed another wave of unrest beginning on 28 December—the fourth major uprising since 2017. (1/5)

Now available for pre-order and we're open for book talks to students, workshops and conferences, organisations etc.
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Gramsci talks about many things! Usually not in pithy aphorisms!

There was a stretch from like the 1970s until ten years ago where most interpretations of Gramsci were super-narrowly focused on a bastardized idea of 'hegemony' as something like 'coercion + consent'. And that was dumb but I'm starting to miss it.

Or really any other Gramsci. Even just the rest of the ‘time of monsters’ paragraph at this point.

Enough ‘now is the time of monsters’, in with ‘widespread participation in financial markets compels contradictory state action to backstop financial markets’ Gramsci.

Thanks, I hope so!

Thanks Ian!

And finally, I write about how the specific modes of exploitation prevalent in the production of colonial export crops have shaped the uneven distribution and form of exposure to climate hazards, using examples from Senegal and Ghana. 12/

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is the only article in the collection which isn't available Open Access. If you want a copy (you should!) and don't have access, just let me know. 11/

Shae Frydenlund writes about the 'dialectical disposability' of Rohingya refugees in Kuala Lampur. Exploring the uneven temporalities through which refugees' labour is exploited helps grasp the complex 'modes of existence' of relative surplus populations. 10/

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Ben Selwyn with a really useful conceptual provocation about capital's 'conjoined appropriation' of labour and nature, in and through the operation of capitalist value chains. 9/

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Bridget Kenny has contributed an awesome piece on logistics in Gauteng, South Africa. She shows how the remaking of labour processes to capture value in the process of circulation has re-articulated old racial hierarchies and transformed urban space. 8/

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....