Registration: https://eveeno.com/ownership-26
Dear Colleagues,
You are warmly invited to the workshop “New Forms of Ownership” at ZEPP on Thursday, 2 July, and Friday, 3 July 2026. The workshop brings together scholars to discuss new forms of ownership in business corporations, land, natural resources, and social infrastructure, with particular attention to employee, cooperative, steward, public, and commons-based ownership.
The question of ownership must stand at the centre of political and social philosophy, even though its prominence has varied over time. After several decades in which it receded from view, the issue of ownership has now forcefully returned to philosophical debate. For good reasons: property and ownership shape how power, resources, and decision-making are distributed within a society, and they affect our understanding and practice of freedom, justice, and collective self-government. The workshop will address several layers and dimensions in which structures of ownership intersect with central issues in ethics as well as social and political philosophy: freedom and dependence, democratic sovereignty, workplace hierarchies, distributive justice, systemic domination, ecological concerns, and digitalization and AI.
The workshop will also concentrate on questions of transformation and transition: how to develop practical pathways for introducing and establishing new models of ownership, and how to assess such pathways in terms of democratic legitimacy, practical feasibility, and strategic effectiveness.
Speakers include Niklas Angebauer (University of Oldenburg), Sophie Bloemen (Commons Network), Rutger Claassen (Utrecht University), Jessica Edioke (Purpose Economy), Mike McCarthy (UC Santa Cruz), Caroline Obolensky (Hochschule St. Gallen), Elisabeth Pichler (Stiftung Verantwortungseigentum), Tanja Schomann (LMU), Jenny Stupka (FU Berlin), Jerome Warren (IfU Frankfurt), and Eva Weiler (University of Duisburg-Essen).
