From REcovery to DIScovery-opening the debate on alternatives to financialisation

英国是否在复苏取决于你问的是谁。对一些人来说，复苏已经实现，因为经济恢复了增长，尽管仍依赖于个人债务、消费者支出和资产价格通胀。对其他人来说，继续依赖金融主导的增长不是复苏，因为英国没有实现再平衡，摆脱对金融和服务业的依赖，转向制造业、创意产业或重振中小企业。对另一些人来说，GDP增长、衰退和复苏的概念是旧范式的残余，无法解释家庭中的无偿劳动、增长的生态限制、全球经济的现实或技术从根本上改变日常经济生活体验的潜力。简而言之，复苏从根本上说是一个自由浮动的概念，对于它作为一项公共政策或政治目标需要做些什么，没有固有的先验理解。本系列研讨会通过引入另一种“发现”框架，推动了有关英国经济复苏的辩论。未来三年，一系列事件将开启一场急需的对话，设想英国经济增长的替代方案。它们将促进社会科学领域的跨学科对话，并为学术界与研究英国经济的第三部门团体之间的合作创造一个平台。这为知识交流提供了新的途径，可能带来令人兴奋的结果。通过与其他研究人员、从业人员和利益相关者群体的对话，新的概念、想法和进步语言得以揭示。这种多方面的对话将有助于促进新声音的可行性，这些声音为英国的问题提供了不同的解释，并为如何解决这些问题提供了新的思考方式。通过战略性地选择提高生产或增长的指标，复苏本身并不能说明问题；相反，它需要在人们对“经济”的生活体验中具体化。考虑到这一点，我们能够发现经济、政治和文化创新的新可能性。我们首先挑战将“复苏”等同于衰退结束的既定正统观念，或者说，英国经济在一个季度的经济产出高于前一个季度。我们从尚未找到答案的问题开始：如何复苏，如何增长，如何稳定经济？同时包括不平衡复苏的社会动态：谁的复苏，谁的增长，谁的经济？“如何”与传统的社会科学目标有关，即理解问题并提供潜在的解决方案；“谁的”为重新思考作为日常实践的恢复/发现提供了空间。全面揭露和质疑“复苏”辩论中隐含的政治优先事项——通常是以一种不言而喻的方式。这使得绘制关键概念在多大程度上促成、塑造或限制对英国经济如何向前发展的特定理解成为可能。例如，在英国，复苏、增长、生产、消费和投资等概念的传统单数用法并没有捕捉到不同性别、种族群体、世代或地区的经济生活差异。因此，考虑单一的复苏，而不是经常相互竞争的多重复苏轨迹，会让一些人对经济生活的体验变得沉默。我们已经可以看到，由于经济衰退带来的负担和经济复苏带来的收益分配不均，GDP增长可能与生活成本危机同时存在，女性承担了特别大的成本份额，而获得的收益份额却较小。重要的是，越来越明显的是，我们需要一个长期的解决方案来应对当前全球经济带来的环境挑战。要解决这些问题，需要的不仅仅是恢复增长，以及比新闻或选举周期通常允许的更广泛的辩论。

Whether the UK is in recovery or not depends on who you ask. For some, recovery has been achieved because economic growth is restored, albeit still relying on personal debt, consumer spending and asset-price inflation. For others, a continued dependence on finance-led growth is not recovery because there is no rebalancing away from the UK's dependence of finance and services toward manufacturing, creative industries or revitalizing the small and medium-sized enterprises. For still others, the very concepts of GDP growth, recession, and recovery are remnants of an old paradigm that cannot account for unpaid labour in the home, the ecological limits of growth, the realities of a global economy or the potential for technology to fundamentally change every day experiences of economic life. In short, recovery is a fundamentally free-floating concept with no inscribed a priori understanding of what it entails as a public policy or political objective. This seminars series moves the debate about the UK recovery forward by introducing an alternative 'discovery' framework. Over three years a mix of events will open-up a much needed dialogue that imagines alternatives to finance-led growth it Britain. They will promote interdisciplinary dialogue across the social sciences and create a platform for collaboration between academics and third-sector groups researching the UK economy. This offers new avenues for knowledge exchange with potentially exciting results. It is through dialogue with other researcher practitioners and stakeholder groups that new concepts, ideas and languages of progress are revealed. This multifaceted conversation will help to promote the viability of new voices offering alternative accounts of Britain's problems and new ways of thinking about how to solve them. Recovery does not speak for itself through strategically selected indicators of enhanced production or growth; rather it is something that needs to materialise in people's lived experience of 'the economy'. With this in mind we are able to discover new possibilities for economic, political and cultural innovation. We begin by challenging the established orthodoxy of equating 'recovery' with the end of recession-or, the UK economy producing more economic outputs in one quarter than in the previous quarter. We start with the questions have yet to find answers to: how to recover, how to grow, how to stabilise the economy? While including the social dynamics of uneven recovery: whose recovery, whose growth, whose economy? The 'how' speaks to traditional social science objectives of understanding problems and potentially offering solutions; the 'whose' makes space for rethinking of recovery/discovery as everyday practice. Overall exposing and questioning the political priorities embedded-often in an unspoken way-in 'the recovery' debates.This makes charting the degree to which key concepts enable, shape or limit particular understandings of how the UK economy can move forward possible. For example, the orthodox use in the singular of concepts like recovery, growth, production, consumption and investment do not capture the differentiated experiences of economic life across gender, racial groups, generations, or regions within the UK. To think about a single recovery rather than multiple trajectories of often competing recoveries is therefore to silence some people's experience of economic life. We can already see that GDP growth can exist at the same time as a cost-of-living crisis because of the uneven (re)distribution of the burden of recession and gains from recovery, with women taking a particular heavy share of the costs while getting a smaller share of the benefits. Importantly, it is increasingly clear that we need a long-term solution to the environmental challenges that our current global economy creates. Addressing these problems requires more than just a return to growth and more extensive debate than the news or election cycle generally permits.