Key Issues and Texts: Capitalism and Society

Key Issues and Texts: Capitalism and Society

Seminar 1: Latin America and the world market (PML)

This session examines key attempts to theorise Latin America’s insertion into the world market and global capitalism during the 20th and 21st century. It covers the broad arguments laid down by a series of schools originating from, or reflecting upon Latin America, focussing on dependency theory, global capitalism and critical globalisation studies, and global value chains. The focus throughout is on identifying how these different schools have theorised i) the specificity of Latin American economies, ii) the causes that explain Latin America’s position in the world market, iii) the processes and policies that could potentially transform the continent’s economic relations. In other words, this session explores how different schools of thought have attempted to understand how Latin America is inserted into the world market, why it is in such a position, and what could be done to change this.

Key issues

  • Dependency theory
  • Global capitalism and critical globalisation studies 
  • Global value chains 
  • Extractivism

Required readings

  • Bárcena, A and Herreros, S, 2023. The Insertion of Latin America in The World Economy. In: Fortin, C, et al. eds. Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order: The Active Non-Alignment Option. Anthem Press, 143-156.
  • Robinson, WI, 2020. Globalization and the Transformation of Latin America’s Political Economy. In: Rossi, I ed. Challenges of Globalization and Prospects for an Inter-civilizational World Order. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 793-808.
  • Rugitsky, F, 2024. The World’s Stockyard. Phenomenal World [online]. Available from: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-worlds-stockyard/.
  • Stallings, B 2024. Changing international hegemony and dependency in peripheral countries: A case study of Latin America. Competition & Change, [online preprint], https://doi.org/10.1177/10245294241235686. 

Bibliography

Seminar 2: Latin America, global value chains, and the zero-carbon agenda (DSL) 

The session discusses how the region is inserted into the global value chain of lithium and its relevance for the low-carbon energy transition agenda. Lithium-ion batteries play an essential role in this global agenda by expanding and massifying the use of electric vehicles, currently the dominant approach to reducing CO2 emissions from the transport sector; and by increasing the efficiency and capacity of renewable energies through large energy storage systems to be connected to the grid and off-grid. 

The so-called ‘lithium triangle’ (Bolivia, Chile and Argentina) accounts for 59% of the world reserves and a third of the world production in 2024. This makes the region an important scenario  with different actors seeking to extract and industrialize lithium. 

In the session, we will explore the different governance frameworks in place and will focus the debate on the potentialities and challenges emerging from lithium mining. 

Key issues 

  • Value chain of lithium  
  • Governance 
  • Industrialization  
  • Low-carbon energy transition 

Required readings

  • Barandiarán, J. (2019). Lithium and development imaginaries in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. World Development, 113, 381-391.
  • Jetin, Bruno (2023). Electric batteries and critical materials dependency: a geopolitical analysis of the USA and the European Union. International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 23(4), 383-407.
  • Jovine, R. F., & Paz, M. J. (2025). Models of lithium exploitation in Latin America: Is history repeating itself?. The Extractive Industries and Society, 22, 101581. 
  • Sanchez‐Lopez, M. D. (2023). Geopolitics of the Li‐ion battery value chain and the Lithium Triangle in South America. Latin American Policy, 14(1), 22-45. 

Bibliography

Seminar 3: The state and violence in Latin America (GDW)

What is the state, how does it work, and who does it serve in Latin America? In this session we’ll examine contested questions about the place of the state in the everyday lives of citizens. Examining the state from and through the specificity of Latin America is vital, and it reveals important foundations for reckoning with persistent problems, lingering inequality, and the constant insufficient of democracy as a project of change.

Required readings

  • Auyero, J., Burbano de Lara, A., & Berti, M. F. (2014). Violence and the State at the Urban Margins. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(1), 94-116.
  • Alves, J. A., & Costa Vargas, J. (2017). On deaf ears: anti-black police terror, multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state. Identities, 24(3), 254-274.
  • Denyer Willis, G. (2022). Eating pizza in prison: Failing family men, civil punishment, and the policing of whiteness in São Paulo. American Ethnologist, 49(2), 221-233.
  • Jusionyte, I. (2015). States of camouflage. Cultural Anthropology, 30(1), 113-138.
  • Viveros-Vigoya, M. (2016). Masculinities in the continuum of violence in Latin America. Feminist Theory, 17(2), 229-237.

Bibliography

Seminar 4: Social reproduction and capitalism in Latin America (PML)

This session discusses how capitalism in Latin America is reproduced through a range of inequalities across scales and social categories. Focussing on the notions of intersectional inequalities, social reproduction, and care work, it has three objectives. First, it highlights the specificities of how social hierarchies are constructed and mapped onto groups of people in Latin America. Second, it highlights the labour that is necessary to reproduce these social categories and who performs and benefits from it. Third, it discusses how this also forms the basis for struggles against the same inequalities and the challenges involved in doing so.

Key issues 

  • Social reproduction 
  • Intersectionality 
  • Care and care work 

Required readings 

  • Acciari, L 2021. Practicing Intersectionality: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies of Building Alliances and Mobilizing Identity. Latin American Research Review, 56(1), 67-81. 
  • Gago, V 2021. Neoliberalismo y después: empresarialidad, autogestión y luchas por la reproducción social. Contemporânea – Revista de Sociologia da UFSCar, 11(3), 957-970. 
  • Guimarães, NA and Hirata, H, 2021. Care work: a Latin American perspective. In: Guimarães, NA and Hirata, H eds. Care and Care Workers: A Latin American Perspective. Cham: Springer, 1-24. 
  • Rezende, CB and Lima, M 2004. Linking gender, class and race in Brazil. Social Identities, 10(6), 757-773.

Bibliography

Seminar 5: Urbanisation in Latin America (GDW) 

Why is Latin America characterised by ’slums’, favelas, villas, and so forth? In this session we’ll examine the history, patterns and politics of urbanisation. This is to say, of how cities came to be the material creatures that are today. Cities are tactile, brick and mortar, and static, but they are also always social, perceptible and dynamic. As spatial units cities are always under processes of formation, doing and undoing, and thinking deliberately about how Latin American cities, grow, shift and are differentiated is a political, economic and social question of the highest order.

Required readings

  • Arboleda, M. (2016). Spaces of extraction, metropolitan explosions: planetary urbanization and the commodity boom in Latin America. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), 96-112. 
  • Britt, A. G. (2022). Spatial Projects of Forgetting: Razing the Remedies Church and Museum to the Enslaved in São Paulo's ‘Black Zone’, 1930s–1940s. Journal of Latin American Studies, 54(4), 561-592. 
  • Davies, A. (2021). The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(4), 740-757. 
  • Davis, D. (2016). The production of space and violence in cities of the global south: Evidence from Latin America. Nóesis: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 25(49), 1-15.  
  • Varley, A. (2013). Postcolonialising informality?. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(1), 4-22. 

Bibliography

Seminar 6: Which development? For whom? Challenges from Latin America (PML)

This session discusses how Latin American authors have challenged ‘standard’ views of development and proposed alternatives during the past decades. It first examines how a series of concepts, theories and political platforms emerged in the struggle against neoliberalism, during the 1990s. This session then investigates the novel theoretical approaches and visions of development that have been proposed, during the 2000s and 2010s, in relation to the left-of-centre governments and the processes of commodities-based capital accumulation of the period. In examining these visions, the focus of the session is to identify what are their novelties, how they defy prevailing visions of development, and how they are related to the social, economic and political landscape of Latin America since the 1990s.

Key issues

  • Neo-extractivism 
  • Commodities consensus 
  • Post-neoliberalism 
  • Post-development 
  • Buen vivir, sumak kawsay, suma qamaña 

Required readings

Bibliography

  • Note: Consult the complete bibliography in the University's Online Reading Lists here.