About
York University represents one of the largest global concentrations of academics—faculty, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates—who use Marxism to study the world and to make practical interventions. Marxist Studies in Global and Asian Perspectives (MSGAP) is a research program that brings together, within a common framework, Marxists at York University and at other institutions who work on Asia or on other parts of the world. It is also open to other frameworks on the Left which can be, or are, in conversation with the Marxist tradition
MSGAP endeavours to foster and disseminate research through a variety of activities including research talks, workshops, seminars, conferences, reading group meetings, and publication of working papers series. MSGAP is also launching a blog.
The program is motivated by the conviction that a Marxist approach, that takes dialectical relations, material conditions and class relations in the world seriously, can uniquely allow us to examine the fundamental concerns of humankind such as: capitalist economic development and economic inequality; geopolitics, imperialism and international institutions; economic crisis; neoliberalism and global economy; the urban condition; labor issues; intra- and international migration; science and technology; national and regional approaches to economic and foreign policy; right-wing politics; culture, gender, ethnic and race relations; religions; economic, political and ecological struggles; and environmental changes, and biological threats to life. MSGAP wishes to contribute towards the concrete analysis and towards the theorization of fundamental transformations in economic, political, and social relations as they unfold within Asia and across the world.
MSGAP’s founding document can be found here.
The MSGAP blog—York Left Consortium: Reflections on Capitalism’s Half-Life— serve as an accessible location for written interventions of various sorts relating to COVID-19 virus and its aftermath (from short blog posts to longer thought pieces and speculations) on the part of leftist faculty and grad students at York (with opportunity for a supplement of non-York experts to also post as invited by York faculty and students). Ultimately, the blog will become a platform beyond the current moment associated with COVID-19.
MSGAP is a research initiative within the York Centre for Asian Research.
