Re-conceptualising VET: responses to covid-19

The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liberalism. The paper analyses discourses that have developed around VET across the world during the pandemic, illustrating both possible continuities and ruptures that may emerge in this field, as the health crisis becomes overshadowed in public policy by the prioritisation of economic recovery and social restoration. The paper concludes that, alongside the possibility of a narrowing of VET to its most prosaic aims and practices, the health crisis could also lead to a re-conceptualisation that develops its radical and emancipatory possibilities in both the global south and north.N/

Revisiting connections between capital and nature II: The case of climate change

Following on from an earlier paper that emphasized the importance of the concept of labour for understanding the relationship between capital and nature, in this paper I attempt to apply this understanding to the issue of climate change. I criticize approaches that regard climate change as a purely technical issue or economic issue or ecological issue, and distinguish four more broadly political positions, namely: green-growth capitalism, steady-state capitalism, eco-socialism, and open steady-statism. I evaluate each of these positions and show how the labour theory set out in the first paper can be used to arrive at a clearer position