International EMES Research Conference addresses social enterprises, cooperatives and more just economies and societies

Abstract submissions are now open for the 9th edition of the EMES International Research Conference on Social Enterprise which will take place 11 to 14 September 2023 at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Germany, with the conference theme “Act locally, change globally: Social enterprises and cooperatives for more resilient economies and societies.”

This is the first fully-fledged face-to-face EMES conference since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic and it aims to be a meeting place for scholars worldwide who are involved in social enterprise, cooperative, and social innovation research across the globe.

EMES was initiated in 1996 and has developed to become a research network of established university research centres and individual researchers who share the goal of building up an international corpus of theoretical and empirical knowledge, pluralistic in disciplines and methodologies, around “SE” concepts: social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social economy, solidarity economy and social innovation.

Currently there are 15 institutional members of the network and over 425 individual members.

The Community Economies Institute (CEI) and associated Community Economies Research Network (CERN) has had strong participation in EMES conferences. In the 6th edition of the conference (in 2017) CEI member Katherine Gibson presented a keynote lecture entitled “Decentering the enterprise, recentering the social” as part of the panel on “Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods” and this was complemented by a panel which featured CERN members addressing the topic of “Social enterprise and commoning: exploring community economies perspectives on sustainable transitions.”

In the 7th edition of the conference (in 2019) CEI Member Nadia Johanisova was a panellist on the opening plenary, addressing the topic of “Can social enterprise be a vehicle for sustainable development?”

For the 2023 conference there are fourteen thematic lines including “Social enterprises and cooperatives for democracy and peace,” “The role and potential of social enterprises in tackling the migration and refugee challenge,” “Social enterprise unleashing the transformative potential of culture and the arts” and “Commons and cooperativism in post-growth scenarios.”

Abstract submissions close 6th March 2023  (click here for an overview of the abstract submission process or click here to go directly to the abstract submission portal).

Jenny Cameron