Economy & Society Winter School, 2025
Call for applications
The New Political Economy Initiative (NPEI) at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) is pleased to announce the 2nd edition of the Economy & Society Winter School (ESWS). This residential programme is a key initiative under NPEI’s Social Structures of the Economy Research Cluster and will be held from 8th to 20th December, 2025. This follows on from last year’s school which was held at IIM Kozhikode.
Indian sociology has traditionally worked in the cultural-symbolic register rather than a political-economic one. The discipline as a whole has shied away from “economic” matters. The New Political Economy Initiative at IIT Bombay aims to nudge sociology, political economy and social science scholarship, more generally, in India and the Global South to study how the material aspects and economic facets of life are produced and reproduced through social and political processes and be attentive to the mutual embeddedness and symbiotic relationships between markets, states, societies, and cultures. Research that explores how social networks contribute to shape, and are shaped by the accumulation of capital, in both formal and informal economic settings, is relatively scarce. Similarly, there is a lack of academic studies that examine how shifts in institutions shape and influence the context and results of economic actions. One of the reasons for this absence is the lack of courses/papers/modules in economic sociology in most undergraduate and master’s programmes in the country. We have found a similar trend in other countries in the Global South. The second edition of the Economy & Society Winter School aims to make up for this absence and in the process incubate a scholarly community in the Global South locales to take these new approaches to the study of economy and society more formally in their own research and work.
The student cohort will be chosen through an online call for applications followed by interviews of shortlisted candidates. The Winter School will cover both the foundations and the frontiers of economic sociology and different strands of political economy scholarship from South Asian, American, Latin American, and European traditions. Our learning from the first edition of the Winter School and feedback from the first cohort has really helped us shape the programme for interested applicants across the social sciences to converge on an interdisciplinary lens, which is key to answering the emergent phenomena of our times. The 2025 edition of the Winter School will have lectures, tutorials, discussion + readings groups, faculty salons for in-depth engagement with the text, field visits and city excursion. Like last year, this will be a full-time residential school, however, the second edition of ESWS will take place in Mumbai and surrounding locales. Resource persons will come from India and abroad.
Eligibility
We have changed the eligibility criteria for this edition. Applicants have to be late Master’s (entered 2nd year) and early PhD students (before the second year of their program) looking to gain exposure in allied fields between economy and society. Depending on the applicants, we will also be open to applications from independent researchers (including mid-career professionals) in the pre-doctoral phase and PhD aspirants who clearly demonstrate their fit for the programme. We are actively interested in building a pipeline for graduate studies. For the 2025 iteration, we only have 30 seats and we are looking for candidates from the Global South only. Please see this list for clarification on which countries are part of the Global South.
Cost
All students will receive basic travel, accommodation and meals support. Students who are not based in India or require a visa to travel to India will be provided reimbursement for their visa fee. The support is covered by the New Political Economy Initiative at IIT Bombay.
Application
Interested candidates are requested to make an application through this application form. Make sure to complete the form as incomplete applications will be automatically rejected.
Important dates
Application opens – 25th August, 2025
Application deadline – 14th September, 2025 at 10 pm IST
Application review – 15th to 30th September, 2025*#
Interviews – 2nd-3rd October, 2025*#
Communication of results to the applicants – 15th October, 2025*#
* These dates are subject to change upon review of applications.
#Note: During the application review process, we will not have the capacity to answer any queries from the applicants. We expect to receive a huge number of applications and we would like to appreciate everyone who is taking interest in this call and putting in the time to be considered for this programme. We are as excited about making this happen each year as several applicants who apply for the programme. Please be assured that if you are applying, you will hear from us in a timely manner.
Curriculum
This Winter School will feature a series of lectures and interactive tutorials that introduce students to both fundamental and frontiers themes within the field of economic sociology and political economy more broadly. Some of the topics that will be covered across the two weeks –
- Introduction to Economy and Society as a field
- Methods and debates that illuminate the understanding of economy and economic phenomena
- Embeddedness – Economic Exchange as Social Exchange, Cultural meaning and Market Transactions, The Institutional Foundations of Market Society, Performativity/Economic Expertise
- Varieties of Capitalism
- Caste and Capital
- New Monetary Circuits
- Development & Growth
- The Development of Labor under Contemporary Capitalism and Economic Sociology of Informal Work
- Organisation of work beyond the state regulation and Markets as social structures
- Economic Sociology of Migration
- Capitalism and nature: Political economy of natural resources
- Financialization
- Neoliberalism and Post-Neoliberalism
These themes are tentative as we further build the programme but are a fair indication of the range we will be covering through a combination of lectures, panels, focussed reading groups, faculty salons and field visit. We will also aim to have a more focussed project component both as a requirement for the completion of the programme but also to establish a community of interdisciplinary scholars to work together in the long-term. Towards this end, there will be ample time for informal collaboration with all the resource persons and in-depth collaboration with peers.
Organising Committee for 2025 edition
- André Vereta-Nahoum, University of Sao Paulo
- Anush Kapadia, New Political Economy Initiative, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
- Simone Polillo, University of Virginia
- Sonal Raghuvanshi, New Political Economy Initiative, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
- Tony Kurian, Azim Premji University
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