Mon | June 2nd, 2025 | 16:00 – 17:30 (CEST)
Property and Power
Prof. Dr. Franklin Obeng-Odoom (University of Helsinki)
The world is becoming less sustainable as it becomes more unequal. These trends need to be a focal point of political-economic research, teaching, and political action. In this context, what might a research agenda in property, institutions, and social stratification in Africa be? Addressing this question has been at the very core of my own interests, concerns, activities and purpose. While it is known that stratification economics has provided a pathway for me to develop this work, in this talk, I provide further clarification on why I have emphasised theorising around property and power in Africa, the Global South, and beyond. This elucidation is consequential because, as I argue, a property theory of power can helpfully serve as a research agenda in the study of Africa specifically but also stratification economics in general.
Franklin Obeng-Odoom is currently Professor of Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Obeng-Odoom’s research interests are centred on the political economy of development, urban and regional economics, stratification economics, natural resources and the environment, fields in which he has written six sole-authored books, including Global Migration Beyond Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), a winner of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy Joan Robinson Prize. Obeng-Odoom is the Global South Editor of Housing Studies, Associate Editor of the Forum for Social Economics, and Series Editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy. A Docent in Urban and Economic Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland, Dr Obeng-Odoom serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Economic Issuesand the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, published continuously since 1941.
Obeng-Odoom, doctor of political economy, Professor of Global Development Studies, teacher, and social critic is a winner of the Kurt Rothschild Award for Economic Research and Journalism, a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the oldest learned national society in postcolonial Africa, whose highest honour, the Gold Award, he holds. Professor Obeng-Odoom is also an elected Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, established in 1908 to be a society of distinguished scientists in Finland, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a supranational assembly of the world’s leading social scientists.
Venue:
Geozentrum, Ü8
University of Bonn,
Meckenheimer-Allee 176,
53115 Bonn
