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Tessa Barnow

Research Assistant

Subjects
Management Investment EU law Politics Companies Sustainability

Primary research areas

Political theories of the corporation

Historical and contemporary conceptions of the corporation and its political consequences, uses and government

Sustainable investing

The politics of rectifying and perpetuating financialisation and rentierism for and through the purpose of sustainability and distinguishing between real and meta investment value

European industrial policy

Reconfigurations of state-market relations in a (post)neoliberal interregnum

Organising for degrowth

Qualifying growth, democratic organising, needs theory and the corporate diagnosis

The politics of sustainable corporations and finance

My PhD project concerns the EU’s government of the sustainable transition and industrial policy. I examine in particular how the EU Taxonomy and the sustainable finance framework subject corporations and investors to the political objective of sustainability and how Important projects of common European interests (IPCEIs) present governmental reconceptualisations of the state/market, public/private, economic/political divides otherwise founding the European economic project.  

My research is ultimately motivated by the interest to rethink corporations and finance for the purpose of the public good. My approach employs the Foucauldian premise that all government comes at a cost and with reference to particular forms of knowledge and truths, including what corporations, finance and the public good might mean. As such my research ambition is to offer a critique of the particularities of contemporary European government of corporations and finance and ideally provide alternative solutions.  

Recent research projects

Corporate subjects: An intellectual history of the corporation

A central part of existence and power of corporations is both their status as legal persons and ascribed existence and legitimacy through notions of individuality, property, rights, responsibility.
https://corporatesubjects.com/