AFEE congratulates the winners for 2023 for Veblen-Commons Award, Clarence Ayres Scholar and James H. Street Scholar!

Veblen-Commons Award

The Veblen-Commons Award is the highest honor given annually by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), in recognition of significant contributions to evolutionary institutional economics.

Jon D. Wisman
American University

Jon D. Wisman is Professor of Economics at American University in Washington, D.C. He has twice been selected by American University as the Outstanding Teacher of the Year. He has published articles and chapters in a wide variety of journals and books, and edited Worker Empowerment: The Struggle for Workplace Democracy. Much recent published work addresses topics in the history of economic thought, guaranteed employment, and the role of inequality in generating economic crises and environmental devastation. During 2002, he served as President of the Association for Social Economics. His book, The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality: Sex, Politics, and Ideology, Oxford University Press, appeared June 2022. Interview by The Dissenter on book above appears at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wJURNprAx8 . CV available at http://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/jdwisma.cfm. Most blog posts available at: https://www.huffpost.com/author/jdwisma-648. Winner, with co-author Quentin Duroy, of the 2020 Journal of Economic Issues Editor’s Prize (Selected as the best article in the journal for 2020): “The Proletarianization of the Professoriate and the Threat to Free Expression, Creativity and Economic Dynamism,” 54(3), September 2020: 876-894.

Clarence Ayres Scholar

The Clarence E. Ayres Scholar is awarded to an international scholar for outstanding work in the area of institutional economics.

Kanchana Ruwanpura, Professor of Human Geography
University of Gothenburg

Kanchana N Ruwanpura is Professor at the Department of Economy and Society, School of Economics, Business and Law at Gothenburg University, Sweden.  She also holds an Honorary Fellow position at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she was a Reader until 2020.  She has held full-time positions in academia at the University of Edinburgh and University of Southampton in the U.K. and prior to that Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA. At different stages of her academic career, she held fellowship positions at the National University of Singapore, Singapore, Humboldt Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian’s University-Munich, Germany, Göttingen University, Germany, France-ILO Chair Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies-Nantes, France.  Her PhD is from Newnham College, University of Cambridge, England.  The research she has done has focused on issues around gender, conflict, post-disaster and post-war infrastructural politics and labour governance, which has been funded by the ESRC, ERC, British Academy, BA-GCRF, GCRF-NERC-AHRC, Adlerbertska Foundation, Jubileumsfonden.  She has written for popular science and open-editorials outlets, journal articles, edited volumes & books, and research monographs. Garments without Guilt? Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels with Cambridge University Press (2021) is her most recent book.  Political economy of development conceptualisations shapes her research, where she has engaged with institutional economics, human geography, social anthropology, and feminist scholarship, from feminist economics to feminist geography.  This work has been recognised with the Rhonda Williams Prize (2005) from IAFFE (International Association for Feminist Economics) and more recently a best paper prize (2018) from Progress in Development Studies.  The Clarence Ayres Prize for institutional thought in 2022 is a welcome recognition of her initial disciplinary training in heterodox economics.

James H. Street Scholar

The James H. Street Scholar is awarded annually for outstanding scholarship in Latin America in the area of economic development, from an Institutionalist perspective.

Huáscar Pessali, Professor
Federal University of Parana, Brazil

Huáscar Pessali is full professor at the Economics Department and at the Public Policy Postgraduate Programme at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil. He was introduced to institutional economics by his MPhil Supervisor, Ramón Fernández – the James H. Street Scholar of 2021. In 2003 he finished his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire under the supervision of Geoffrey Hodgson – the Veblen-Commons Award recipient of 2012. Pessali was a Research Fellow at the Brazilian Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA) from 2008 to 2011, served at the UFPR Research Consulting Committee from 2010 to 2014, and was a co-founder of the Public Policy Postgraduate Program at his home university. He was the Director of the Program from 2017 to 2019, where he teaches a variety of courses with institutional content and supervises Mphil and PhD students from Economics and many other backgrounds, e.g. social work, law studies, odontology, psychology and law studies. He has been a consultant to the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq) since 2013. He has occasionally served as consultant to local and regional public offices regarding participatory institutions such as public policy councils and conferences. These institutions have come under the scope of his research interest over time, as part of a broader interest in economic development and other topics approached from an institutional standpoint. In addition to making extensive use of institutionalism in his work, Pessali is co-editor of a book with translations into Portuguese of classic articles by Veblen and Commons. He is currently working on the first translation of James H. Street’s celebrated 1987 JEI article on “The Institutionalist Theory of Economic Growth” for Brazilian academic audiences.