Call for Papers and Panels for the 28th Annual Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE)

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Call for Papers and Panels for the 28th Annual Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE)

1-3 July 2026 at the University of Coimbra, Portugal

Deadline for paper and panel submissions: 20 February 2026

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We invite submissions of papers and panels for the 28th Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, taking place on 1-3 July 2026 at the University of Coimbra in Coimbra, Portugal. This is an event organised in collaboration with the Faculty of Economics at the University of Coimbra (FEUC), the Centre for Business and Economics Research (CeBER), the Centre for Social Studies (CES), and the Portuguese Association of Political Economy (EcPol).

AHE seeks to support scholarship, reflection, and debate on innovative and diverse heterodox and radical understandings of the global political economy. We welcome submissions that challenge conventional economic paradigms, offer alternative frameworks for understanding and navigating these complex crises, and actively work towards radical social change. Our plenary sessions this year will cover inequality, financialisation, housing and long-run transformations. Confirmed speakers include Arjun Jayadev, Ozlem Onaran, Ana Santos and Francisco Louçã. 

We have a series of streams running this year that you can submit your papers and/or panels to. You can see a full overview of the streams below. Please read the stream descriptions carefully before submitting.

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Paper submission

Submit abstracts for individual papers (max 300 words) by 20 February 2026 by filling in this form. We particularly encourage applications from underrepresented groups in the economics discipline including, but not limited to women, people of colour, scholars from the Global South. Limited travel support is available for selected early career scholars from the Global North and South. Early career scholars include PhD students as well as those who received their PhD no more than 2 years prior to the date of the conference and are not currently in a full-time, tenured position. When submitting your abstract, please indicate if you would like to be considered for the bursaries. Submit your paper here. Please note that we can only consider one submission per presenter, i.e. only your first submission will be considered. 

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Panel submission 

To make a submission for a panel please fill in this form. Please note that a panel typically consists of 3-4 presentations on a similar theme, but we are also open to panel submissions in non-standard formats (e.g. roundtable or workshop). Submit your panel here.

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Fred Lee Prize

If you are an early career researcher and interested in having your paper considered for the Fred Lee Early Career Prize, please indicate this on the paper submission form. You will be asked to send your full paper by 13 May 2026 with the subject line “Early career prize submission” at heteconevents@gmail.com. Eligible scholars for the prize include PhD students as well as those who received their PhD no more than 2 years prior to the date of the conference and are not currently in a full-time, tenured position.

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Overview of Streams

Borders, Labour, and the State

Coordinators: Pedro Antunes, Miguel Duarte; Marina Barbosa; Ana C. Haddad; Bianca Barp

This stream examines the rise of anti-immigration rhetoric in contemporary mainstream political discourse, and its effects on political agendas, public policies, and labour. In a decade marked by debates over multiculturalism and national identity—often propelled by the far right—against a backdrop of rising inequality and an affordability crisis, understanding the connections between borders, labour, and the state is fundamental. The migrant is a historically contingent category, shaped and imposed in part by the state: a category that mobilises difference, often ethnicity, to determine who has the right to have rights. This contributes to labour-market segmentation and helps ensure a supply of vulnerable workers for the most precarious sectors. The category of “migrant” also enables the state to remove, through deportation, non-conforming members of the working class. It has been central to the construction of the nation-state, national identity, and borders. As Robin D. G. Kelley notes, migrants are “the very heart of a global labor force whose movements are linked to war, capital flows, policies imposed by states and international financial/economic bodies, racist and patriarchal security regimes, and the struggles of working people on every side of every border”. In Harsha Walia’s words, “exclusionary projections of who belongs and who has the right to life upholds ruling-class and right-wing nationalism, thus breaking internationalist solidarity and entrenching global apartheid”.

With this in mind, the stream recognises that the rise of anti-immigration rhetoric carries wide-ranging political, social, and economic consequences, and welcomes heterodox perspectives on these issues. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Political economy of borders, migration politics, and state violence
• Nationalism, national identity, and the rise of the far right
• Labour-market segmentation and globalisation
• Neo-colonialism and development theories
• Social reproduction and migration
• Resistance, solidarity, and alternative frameworks

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Concretely Utopian Public Services: Practice to theory, theory to practice

Coordinators: Emanuele Lobina, Nuno Martins, Julia Bacchieri Indiani and Conor Gray

This stream explores the emancipatory potential of concretely utopian public services (CUPS) across sectors. Margaret Archer’s concrete utopias are ideas of universal emancipatory development that guide actual practice in quest for the good life, including ideas of socio-ecological and economic justice and deep sustainable development. The pursuit of CUPS is particularly urgent in the era of zombie neoliberalism, where policies like privatisation and financialisation are being reproduced in the Global North and South despite their repeated failure to prioritise community needs.

We invite papers that engage with the challenges and opportunities of building alternatives to the neoliberal governance of public services (or otherwise contribute to understanding the developmental potential of such alternatives). These alternatives may include but are not limited to the following:

• Institutional preservation of Tony Lawson’s “eudaimonic bubbles”;
• Mobilising for Quality Public Services;
• Democratising governance;
• In-house restructuring of public enterprises;
• Public-public partnerships and labour-management partnerships for capacity development;
• Reverse privatisation/de-privatisation and remunicipalisation;
• Public ownership for decarbonisation;
• Pragmatic cost recovery; and,
• De-financialisation.

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Core–Periphery Revisited: Long Cycles and the Political Economy of Global Transformation

Coordinators: Ernesto Nieto-Carrillo, María Gabriela Palacio, and Natália Bracarense

This stream examines the interaction between long cycles of accumulation, discontinuous technical change, and global value extraction within core–periphery hierarchies. It brings together three major intellectual traditions: (1) long-wave (Marxist and evolutionary) perspectives; (2) Latin American structuralist and decolonial contributions (Furtado, Lewis, Prebisch, Dussel, Dos Santos, Shiva, Valencia, Quijano); and (3) the systemic and hegemonic approaches of Polanyi, Arrighi, Amin, Fraser, Wallerstein and Gunder Frank. It reconnects analyses of technological paradigms, structural change and unequal exchange with reflections on long-wave transitions, rentier and logistics regimes, and the emerging geopolitics of energy, data, identity, and debt that redefine centres and peripheries of accumulation.

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions—quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic or historical—that examine long-term transformations of capitalism from an evolutionary and global perspective. Particular attention is given to peripheral and semi-peripheral dynamics, including informal labour, hidden markets, debt, (trans)national mobility and displacement, emancipation struggles, and the political–ideological waves and crises of hegemony accompanying each cycle. By bridging Northern and Southern traditions of heterodox thought, the stream encourages theoretical innovation and empirical inquiry into the long cycles of global capitalism, viewing the South(s)—in their plurality—not only as an object of study but also as a vantage point for rethinking accumulation and transformation. Indicative topics:

• Long cycles, technological paradigms and global value extraction
• Political–ideological waves, institutional transformations and crises of hegemony
• Core–periphery dynamics and asymmetric development in long-run capitalist transformations
• Financialisation and rentier dynamics in capital–labour relations throughout the long wave
• Informal labour, hidden markets and migratory adjustment in systemic cycles of accumulation
• Long-run dynamics of social reproduction and gendered stratification
• Emancipatory struggles to redefine labour, culture and value across historical phases of capitalism
• Semi-peripheral industrialisation and deindustrialisation across long-cycle transitions
• Plural Souths and internal peripheries
• Energy transitions and socioecological constraints in structural restructurings of global production
• Expulsion, debt and moral economies of survival in global systemic crises
• South-centred and decolonial epistemologies of structural transformation

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Dimensions of Sustainability

Coordinators: Andrew Mearman, Briti Kar and Sarika Chaudhary

The ways in which the current economic system is designed – and discussed – feeds into the process of capitalist accumulation, deepening already existing inequalities rather than challenging the status quo. There remains an urgent need to change radically both the power dynamics of that system and how it is treated. Thus, the stream wishes to explore heterodox treatments of climate change and sustainability, be they theoretical, empirical, policy- or other stakeholder-oriented, or educational. One particular concern for heterodox economists is that climate change, though recognised as a problem, is analysed within existing power dynamics. Instead, there is a need for decolonising both the study and the practice of climate change and sustainability. The stream therefore welcomes contributions on any aspect of the above, using a diversity of methods of enquiry, data, schools of thought or perspectives, and a diverse variety of session styles. In particular we welcome submissions on the following sub-themes: 

• Theoretical and conceptual discussions of sustainability, or aspects of it, including critiques of current models of sustainability and evaluations of policy and other relevant frameworks
• Theoretical and empirical studies of sustainability topics, particularly those aimed at
• analysing the class dimensions to climate change across the globe.
• Theoretical and empirical studies focusing on the global north – south divide in
• contributing to and bearing the effects of climate crisis.
• Socio-economic analyses of climate change, within Global North and South. This
• would explore the class angle within the countries, their consumption, and the existing
• restrictions.
• Discussion of teaching sustainability either in economics or related disciplines
• Consideration of links between sustainability and pluralism, however defined

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Feminist Economics 

Coordinators: Ines Heck and Lina Coelho

We invite submissions to the Feminist Economics Stream at the 27th Annual Conference of the Association of Heterodox Economics. This stream explores feminist economic perspectives on the multiple and intensifying global crises reshaping economies and societies, including climate breakdown, genocidal violence, surging economic inequality, the erosion of democratic institutions and rise of authoritarian populism. These crises demand urgent rethinking of traditional economic frameworks, and feminist economics provides critical tools for imagining and creating more equitable and sustainable futures. We welcome contributions on topics including but not limited to the following:

• Feminist analyses of global crises and the gendered dimensions of climate breakdown, conflict, and genocide
• Care work and social reproduction
• Political ecology and environmental justice from a feminist standpoint
• Intersectional analyses of the labour market and rising informality and precarity
• Gender dimensions of trade, finance and global production networks
• Gender and macroeconomics
• Gender analyses of tax and fiscal policy
• Feminist activism and policy pathways for transformative change

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Financialisation, Growth Models and Labour Regimes

Coordinators: Ana Costa, José Reis, Alexandre Abreu, Pedro Lima, Maria Cristina Barbieri Góes, and Marcelo Santos

This stream examines the interplay between financialisation, growth models and labour regimes in contemporary capitalism. Drawing on Minskian and post-Keynesian macroeconomics, the regulation school and growth-models literature, critical analyses of financialisation and structural accounts of inequality, it brings together analyses of accumulation regimes, labour relations and changing financial structures, emphasising their co-evolution in structuring demand, wealth creation (or destruction) and the organisation of work. We invite theoretical, empirical and mixed-methods contributions that link macro growth models (wage-led, profit-led, export-led, finance-led, innovation-led) to concrete institutional configurations of industrial relations, welfare states, corporate governance and state–finance relations. A central concern is the co-evolution between finance-centred accumulation, labour regimes and inequality, and its implications for alternative policy and development paths. Indicative topics:

• Wage-led, profit-led, finance-led, export-led and innovation-led growth models, and their implications for employment, wages, and productivity.
• Financialisation of non-financial corporations: shareholder value, payouts, leverage, intangibles and corporate governance.
• Household indebtedness, housing and consumption: debt-led growth, asset-based welfare, stratification in access to credit, and financial vulnerability.
• Sovereign debt, fiscal rules, austerity, central banking and the politics of macroeconomic “credibility”.
• Precarious and platform work, informalisation, wage restraint and changing bargaining institutions.
• Comparative analyses of growth models and labour regimes in different institutional settings.
• Distributional consequences of financialisation and rentierisation: top incomes, wealth, capital gains, rentier incomes, and shifting wage–profit–rent relations.
• Rent-seeking, technological change and digital business models: platforms, data, intellectual property, knowledge and intellectual monopoly capitalism.
• Financial crises, instability and stagnation: competing heterodox explanations and their implications for labour markets and policy.
• Entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented finance: development banks, green and just transitions and industrial policy in growth models.
• Methodological and modelling innovations in studying growth models, finance, and labour regimes (e.g., stock–flow consistent models, input–output, microdata-based analyses, case studies).
• Human capital and education under financialisation: the political economy of skills, vocational systems, and financing of education/training.
• Digitalisation, artificial intelligence and task recomposition: the implications for job quality, wage inequality, productivity and inequality across growth models.

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Heterodox Health Economics

Coordinator: Imko Meyenburg

There is also growing interest in person-centred care (PCC) across healthcare systems across the world, which emphasises patient needs, preferences, and lived experiences. Despite its increasing adoption, guidance on implementing PCC within workforce and service delivery planning is limited, specifically examining PCC’s impact on patient safety. This is due to multiple barriers, including slow cultural change, rigid funding structures, high staff turnover, organisational constraints, heavy workloads, resistance to change, insufficient training, and inadequate supervision. This stream welcomes heterodox economists with an interest in contributing to person-centred care (PCC) healthcare policies. It encourages a plurality of theoretical perspectives, such as feminist theories or the capability approaches, to move beyond traditional and orthodox health economics methods. The aim is to explore how PCC can be delivered at various levels, from policy development to service provision.

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Histories in Heterodox Economics

Coordinators: Cecilia Lanata-Briones, Danielle Guizzo; João Pedro Amaral Cabouco Rodrigues

This stream warmly welcomes submissions on any aspect of the history of heterodox economics and its intersections with economic history and historical inquiry more broadly, notably (but not limited to):

• The history of heterodox ideas, debates, concepts and wider economic thought;
• The history of the marginalisation, dissemination, or institutional positioning of heterodox economics;
• Intellectual histories of individual heterodox economists, traditions, or communities;
• The history of the professionalisation and organisational development of heterodox economists;
• The relationship between heterodox economics and policy, viewed through historical, archival, or genealogical approaches;
• Heterodox economics or economists in public discourse and the media from a historical perspective;
• The history of heterodox economics education, curricula, and teaching practices;
• Historical analyses of the scientific production, circulation, and contestation of heterodox knowledge;
• Economic history research that draws on heterodox/non-traditional approaches, concepts, or questions;
• Work that uses historical methods, including archival work, longue durée analysis, oral history, genealogy, or mixed historical methodologies to investigate topics relevant to heterodox economics or economic life more broadly;
• Studies that connect the evolution of economic institutions, practices, and cultures with heterodox perspectives.

We welcome a diversity of methods of inquiry, data sources, and schools of thought, including work engaging with interdisciplinary historical methods.

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Philosophy and Methods in Economics

Coordinators: Renato Rosa, Felipe Rodrigues, and Nuno Ornelas Martins

This stream welcomes submissions that explore any dimension of the intersection between economics and philosophy. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

• Philosophical aspects or interpretations of economics;
• Ethical issues in economics
• Social ontology
• The fragmentation of the economics discipline;
• Criticisms to the mainstream and/or neoclassical economics, from the grounds of both theoretical works and policymaking practice;
• Economic methodology, including decolonising methodologies in economics;
• Bibliometric or network analysis studies in economics and related fields;

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Quantitative Political Economy

Co-ordinators: Tomás Rotta, José Coronado, Patrick Mokre, Josephine Baker, Cem Oyvat

This stream brings together papers that apply quantitative and computational methods within the field of Political Economy. It welcomes a broad range of theoretical traditions, including (but not limited to) Marxian, Keynesian, Kaleckian, Sraffian, feminist, critical race, and ecological approaches. We encourage submissions on topics such as development, ecology, inequality, exploitation, unequal exchange, colonialism, decolonisation, imperialism, socialism, economic planning, innovation, and technical change. Submissions should feature a substantive quantitative or computational component such as mathematical modelling, simulations, econometrics, Bayesian statistics, entropy and information metrics, input-output analysis, machine learning, or network analysis, and be theoretically grounded in Political Economy. We anticipate hosting four panels (four papers each) but warmly welcome additional submissions.

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Regional Development and Economic Geography

Coordinators: José Miguel Rebolho, Simone Tulumello, Helen Belisário, and João Pedro Ferreira

This stream focuses on the critical and heterodox political economy of regional development, regional applications, and economic geography. In an era defined by overlapping crises – from ecological breakdown and financial instability to rising inequality – the spatial dimensions of economic processes are more crucial than ever. Global dynamics do not unfold uniformly; they manifest in specific places, creating and reinforcing regional disparities, core-periphery dependencies, and uneven development both within and between nations. This stream moves beyond mainstream equilibrium approaches to critically examine the processes, policies, and power relations that shape regional trajectories, local labor markets, and the possibilities for alternative development strategies. We seek to bring together theoretical, applied, and policy-oriented research that explores the spatial dimensions in economic analysis.

We warmly welcome submissions from heterodox perspectives. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Regional inequality, spatial justice, and core-periphery dependencies.
• Regional industrial strategies, clusters and diversification.
• Governance of regional and global value chains.
• Alternative regional development strategies and challenges (e.g., community wealth building, foundational economy).
• The financialization of space, housing, and regional infrastructure.
• Regional labor markets, spatial divisions of labor, and migration.
• Sustainability and the uneven regional impacts of climate change and green policies.
• Methodological innovations in heterodox regional analysis and economic geography.

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Social Studies in Economics

Coordinators: Danielle Guizzo, Renato Rosa and Felipe Rodrigues

This stream warmly welcomes submissions that examine economics through a sociological lens, broadly understood. We seek work that explores the social organisation, cultures, practices, and knowledge-making processes of economics, particularly within heterodox and critical traditions. While policy can be a site of inquiry, we encourage approaches that treat policy as a social and political construction rather than solely as an applied domain. The stream aims to create a space for scholars who analyse economics as a social, cultural, and political practice, and who contribute to expanding the methodological and conceptual repertoire of heterodox economics. We welcome papers on (but not limited to) the following themes:

• Sociology of the economics profession: analyses of academic communities, disciplinary boundaries, intellectual networks, institutional structures, and the social organisation of heterodox economics.
• Theoretical perspectives: engagements with political philosophy, critical social theory, science and technology studies, economic sociology, or anthropology of expertise as they illuminate economic reasoning and practice.
• Policy as a sociological object: studies of how economic ideas shape, circulate within, or are contested in policymaking arenas; comparative analyses of how heterodox and mainstream frameworks construct policy problems and solutions.
• Policy experimentation and the politics of methods: critical examinations of policy pilots, behavioural interventions, evaluation practices, and experiments as sociotechnical devices, focusing on their epistemic, organisational, or political dimensions rather than their instrumental outcomes.

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Heterodox Perspectives on Economic Development

Coordinators: Olivia Bullio Mattos, Simone Silva de Deos, Ana Rosa Ribeiro Mendonça, Fernanda Ultremare

The multiple crises we currently face – climate change, rising inequalities, pandemic impacts, and geopolitical conflicts – have exposed the limitations of orthodox, market-based development strategies that heterodox economists have long criticized. With the need for deep, structural changes in 21^st-century economies to deliver the key transitions societies need, political economy approaches, including but not limited to Post-Keynesian, Institutionalist, Marxist, Feminist, and Ecological, offer a valuable framework for an alternative. This stream invites papers that critically explore theoretical contributions and concrete policy choices for economic development. We encourage submissions in the following topics:

• Financing strategies for the climate crisis and just transition.
• Money, finance, and development.
• Development and industrial policy.
• Development, globalization, and trade.
• Development and the labor market.
• Comparative development and historical perspectives.

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