11th November (Wednesday)
2 hours
New York 17:00 (Wednesday 11th)
Buenos Aires 19:00 (Wednesday 11th)
Amsterdam 23:00 (Wednesday 11th)
Nairobi 01:00 (Thursday 12th)
Bangkok 05:00 (Thursday 12th)
Warrane-Sydney 09:00 (Thursday 12th)
Aotearoa-NZ 11:00 (Thursday 12th)
Organiser: Nikolai Siimes and Peter Howland
This session convenes a conversation between the contributors to an edited volume of constructive alcohol and communities economies and post-capitalist scholarship. Our book project responds to Mary Douglas’s volume Constructive Drinking, which 40 years on continues to be a touchstone for research that foundationally acknowledges that ‘drinking’ is always socio-culturally constructed, historically contingent, and morally relativistic. Our guiding brief is to respond to Douglas’s volume by championing present-day research that focuses on constructive aspects of alcohol that can conceivably be framed as ‘beyond capitalism’, and we want to use this LIVIANA session to develop these ideas in conversation with DE and CE scholarship. In the first instance it simply means ‘beyond’ the sort of economic, financial, corporate, employment, national industry, etc considerations that characterise much research and media reporting on alcohol. More fittingly it means a focus on constructive aspects that presently contest, resist, or in some way provide alternatives (radical or plain-sight) to capitalist economics and society; that could plausibly continue to exist—or indeed have existed—in thoroughly post-capitalist or egalitarian social settings; or which are in some way universal to human existence (e.g. biological, chemical, evolutionary). Our goal is to foreground examples of constructive alcohol and, in doing so, hopefully also highlight some constructive ways of living. In this session, we invite authors to workshop one case, concept, or argument from their individual chapters through 5 minute presentations and a response from a CERN discussant (TBA) in the first hour, followed by an open discussion on these themes in the second.