Join us for the book launch of Decolonising Economics, anticipate a fascinating discussion on Tuesday 7th October 2025 at 17:30-19:00 (BST) at University College London (UCL) and online on Zoom.
About this talk:
Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. In this new book on Decolonizing Economics, Devika Dutt, Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven seek to expose the Eurocentrism embedded in the economics discipline and show how Eurocentric foundations shape how economists study the world today. These foundations, they argue, have rendered the discipline ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes. The book argues that decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives. Through such scholarship, we can gain an enriched understanding of capitalism and its relationship to exploitation, colonialism, and racialization.
Meet the panel:
- Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap, Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
- Speaker: Carolina Alves, Associate Professor of Economics, UCL IIPP
- Speaker: Devika Dutt, Lecturer in Development Economics, King's College London
- Speaker: Surbhi Kesar, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, SOAS University of London
- Speaker: Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Senior Lecturer in International Development, King's College London
