Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was held on Thursday, May 30th in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts. A special thanks to TMU Interim Dean of Arts Amy Peng for hosting this Broadbent Institute event.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left’s foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above. The Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Professor Wood’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology.
Each year’s recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture.
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was delivered by economist Professor Isabella Weber. She is awarded the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize in recognition of outstanding contributions to political economy research that helps to defend the working-class in a time of economic crisis.
Her lecture, entitled Profits, Inflation and Survival in an Age of Emergencies: Why We Need a New Paradigm, demonstrates how prices on essentials have risen, while corporate profits have grown, due to economic shocks induced by pandemics, climate change, and other global events. The lecture helps to equip progressive movements with the information and analysis needed to push back against austerity, and helps to demonstrate why public policies such as public investment, wage gains, and price controls complement a policy toolkit to help ordinary Canadians out of today’s affordability crisis.
