ISRF Newsletter – August 2025
This month: a Director's Note reflecting on the ideas of Kohei Saito and Aaron Benanav. Also included: upcoming ISRF events, latest blog posts, and Fellows news.
Contents
Director’s Note
Why Democratic Communism Could Be the Answer to the Climate Emergency
Christopher Newfield
In this monthly Director’s Note, Christopher Newfield considers how democratic communism, grounded in ecological Marxism and democratic planning, could offer a compelling alternative to capitalist growth.
We can’t simply add more diverse voices to deliberation, but must plan a system that allows for deliberation about incommensurable goals that leads to a stable, mutually agreeable accommodation.
This is currently beyond the capabilities of humanity, as our 19th century stall-out suggests. We still aren’t ready to implement the ideas Neurath and Keynes came up with so many decades ago.
And yet a just economy and survivable world depends on developing these capabilities. The best way to get them is to build the processes in which these capabilities will be used.
Book Launch: Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows, by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson
Thursday 25 September 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (BST). In person & online.
Barnard’s Inn Hall, London
Bordering Social Reproduction explores what happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives. Developing innovative theorisations of welfare bordering, the volume provides rich ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of destitute mothers and children who are denied mainstream welfare support in the United Kingdom due to their immigration status.
Book Launch: Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, by Lisa Taylor
Thursday 20th November 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.
Venue TBC.
Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.
Book Launch: Neoliberalism and Race, by Lars Cornelissen
Tuesday 9th December 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.
Venue TBC.
Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present.
Awards Announcement: Eleventh Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition
Stuart Wilson
In October 2024, the ISRF launched its eleventh Flexible Grants for Small Groups competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, a selection panel nominated the following 17 projects for award.
Why Neoliberals Destroy Universities
Lars Cornelissen
In both the UK and the US, neoliberals have systematically targeted higher education for destructive reform. Lars Cornelissen argues that this is a function of neoliberalism's enduring hostility to the university sector.
New publication: ‘Muslim-Mancunian Women: Racial-Colonial Literacy, Counter-Knowledge and Epistemological Justice’, by Fatima Khan and Sadiya Akram
Epistemological justice, which exposes the role of colonialism in conceptualising contemporary society, particularly racial inequalities, has gained prominence within sociology. Yet, sociologists often ignore that the material conditions of professional sociology inhibit racial justice-oriented knowledge making.
11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)
Launching late summer 2025
Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.
12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)
Launching winter 2025
Funding support for small groups (2-10 scholars) to complete a piece of research or undertake face-to-face joint group work.
11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)
Application window closed on 10th January 2025
Funding support for small groups (2-10 scholars) to complete a piece of research or undertake face-to-face joint group work.
8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)
Application window closed on 14th February 2025
Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.