Service provision in social sectors such as healthcare, social care and education is most often considered within a national boundary, reflecting the origins of these sectors in an era in which the nation-state was the pre-eminent form. However, the interplay of commercialisation and globalisation is producing significant changes in the political economy of these sectors, including the expansion of global markets for services, cross-border provision by public and private institutions, and new state-market engagements to promote exporting and importing. This one-day research symposium seeks to bring together researchers who are studying this area to unpack and critique these developments in different social sectors. It will invite multi-disciplinary perspectives, aiming to generate discussion and stimulate learning across boundaries. See the Call for Abstracts for further information. A set of blogposts produced by the symposium participants to set out some initial thoughts for discussion are linked below.

Symposium blogposts

Benjamin Hunter – Beyond borders

Ana Carolina Cordilha – Beyond austerity and privatisation: bringing financialisation into the analysis of neoliberal reforms

Jian Wu – International student mobility in an era of globalising and neoliberlised higher education: contested landscapes of global flows

Ramila Bisht – Transnational markets in medical education and training

Elaine Unterhalter and Jasmine Gideon – Comparing health and education: some possibilities of conceptual and methodological approaches to comparison in the study of transnational processes

María Fernanda Rodríguez – The market and the state: revealing arguments for, and orders of worth of the struggle over the regulation of private education in Peru

Sibille Merz – Studying transnational markets in health education through a moral economy lens

Margaret Walton-Roberts – Globalisation and commercialisation in social sectors: connecting global care chains and global value chains

Julia Ngozi Chukwuma, Maria Jose Romero and Elisa Van Waeyenberge – The financialisation of healthcare: the World Bank’s role in promoting public-private partnerships in health

Hannah Moscowitz – The nation state in the global higher education market

Yiming Dong – Market-makers in China’s healthcare sector

Mariano Rosenzvaig – Unravelling the complexity of making and unmaking education markets

The symposium is being organised by Susan Fairley Murray, Susan Robertson and Benjamin Hunter.