The Covid Pandemic: A Perfect Storm of Capitalist Irrationality

/ Nancy Fraser is Professor of Philosophy and Politics at The New School for Social Research in New York City. For more than 20 years, Nancy Fraser’s theses on social justice, democracy, and feminism have fueled public debates around the world. In her work, Nancy Fraser analyzes the relations of inequality specific to our world from a critical perspective in order to develop concepts to address them – for example, in relation to the welfare state, multiculturalism, gender relations, democracy, and economics. She is widely known for her critique of identity politics and her work on the philosophical conceptions of justice and injustice. Also, Fraser is a staunch critic of contemporary liberal feminism and its abandonment of social justice issues.

Fraser has received various Awards and Honors, including the American Philosophical Association’s Alfred Schutz Prize in 2010, the French Legion of Honor in 2018, the Nessim Habif World Prize (University of Geneva) in 2018 and the Havens Wright Center (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship in 2019. She holds honorary doctoral degrees from six universities in 5 countries. It’s the third time Nancy Fraser comes to Vienna after 1994 and 1999. Her Polanyi Visiting Professorship started in March 2021 and in the course of her (virtual) visit to Vienna, she will hold a PhD- seminar, an Internal Workshop at Central European University and two open lectures.

/ Armin Thurnher is an Austrian journalist and publicist. He is co-founder and publisher of the Viennese city newspaper Falter. He has been a fierce critic of neoliberalism and Friedrich Hayek’s Austrian School of Economics, as well as neoliberalism’s authoritarian turn from the early rise of Jörg Haider in the 1990s onwards. He has contributed popularizing Karl Polanyi, including co-editing Karl Polanyi. The Life and Work of an Epochal Thinker (in German and English, published by Falter-Verlag). He is author of several books, including Der Übergänger about the pianist Alfred Brendel and Fähre nach Manhattan. Mein Jahr in Amerika.

/ Carsten Q. Schneider is Professor in the Political Science Department at CEU. His research focuses on political regimes, their changes and persistence. He is also working in the field of comparative methodology, especially on set-theoretic methods, in particular Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). His co-authored book "Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences" appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2012. From 2009 - 2014, Schneider was an elected member of the German Young Academy of Science. In 2019, he was awarded APSA's David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award. Currently, Schneider is co-chairing the research division of CIVICA, The European University of Social Sciences.