Hannah McHugh Postdoctoral Fellow Aufenthalt am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Oktober 2023–Juli 2024Forschungsthema am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Markets, power and social practices«Projektbeschreibung: My postdoctoral research project is a critical republican investigation into the nature of social power, in particular focussing on how social power is manifested and held in market economies. Rainer Forst has argued that the critical theorist’s task is to identify »structures and relationships that are not reciprocally and generally justifiable, and those which render a practice of justification impossible as a political process«. This project intends to address a key feature of Forst’s account of power, which finds that power is reproduced even where no agent is reinforcing a particular social order. This project does so by placing emphasis on systems of coordination, structured by agents, relying on social practices. This project takes the coordination of market players as central for analysis.
It is often said that markets hold power. In 2022, the UK Prime Minister Liz Truss was forced to resign after markets coordinated in a way that condemned her. Similarly, excessive risk-shifting in the pre-2008 securitisation market led to a financial crisis in which many lost their homes and livelihoods. How, though, can we understand the nature of this power? Who, if anyone, is exercising power over whom in these cases? Coordination in markets may amount to an exercise of power, but no one agent alone could control or effect such an exercise. At the same time, as markets are made up by a collection of agential (in)actions, a metaphysically strained idea of structures holding power appears inadequate. This project proposes to address these questions by investigating the centrality of coordination in markets through social practices. Social practices are sustained by agents and can produce a form of structural domination. These practices, I will argue, arise not as moral, social or legal prescriptions but in the conceptual space left between their interaction. They are driven by incentives to coordinate. Once practices are centralised in analysing the market economy, I seek to argue that regulation aimed at changing individual incentive structures, rather than revolutionary structural change, may be a solution to redress normatively problematic markets. (Hannah McHugh) Zusammenarbeit: Hannah McHugh folgt einer Einladung von Rainer Forst, Professor für Politische Theorie an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, und dem an der Universität angesiedelten Justitia Centre for Advanced Studies, das von der Alfons und Gertrud Kassel Stiftung gefördert wird. Wissenschaftliches Profil von Hannah McHughHannah McHugh erhielt im Januar 2024 ihren Doktortitel in politischer Theorie vom University College London (UCL). Der Titel ihrer Doktorarbeit lautet Power to the People: Agent’s Role in and Responsibility for Domination. Hannah hat einen Master of Arts in Rechts- und Politiktheorie an der UCL (mit Auszeichnung für die am besten bewertete Dissertation eines Jahrgangs) und einen LLB (Hons) der University of London, International Programmes.Forschungsschwerpunkte: Neo-republikanische politische Theorie, Theorien politischer Veranstwortung, feministische politische Theorie
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