The plenary speakers of the 2020 CPA Conference included Susanne Soederber, Prem Sikka and Jamie Peck. Recorded videos of these presentations can be found below.

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Susanne Soederber is a Professor of Political Studies and Global Development Studies at Queens University. Her work addresses pressing social topics, including development finance, poverty, neoliberalism, debt (both consumer and sovereign), corporate governance, and global governance. Geographically, her research spans North America, Western Europe, Latin America and South East Asia. She received the Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professorship in Studies of Contemporary Society in 2015. A profoundly interdisciplinary scholar, Susanne draws on geography (urban studies), politics (comparative and international relations), sociology (global inequality), gender studies, and history to make sense of contemporary issues. Her most recent book, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (2014), examines the social power of money and new forms of neoliberal practice that deliberately use debt as a tool for social and economic governance. Her current research examines the impact of climate change on the poor, at the intersection of climate disasters, shelter, and debt.

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Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at the University of Sheffield and Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, is a fierce critic of the accounting profession and it’s role in enabling corporate fraud and tax avoidance. He has written about auditing failures, corporate governance failures, money laundering, insolvency scandals, and tax avoidance for The Guardian, The Independent, and HuffPost. Prem is a pioneer in the use of the media by academics. Besides his new media articles, he regularly draws attention to spurious accounting practices on Twitter and various blogging platforms. His academic journal articles have examined the role of accounting firms in financial crises, money laundering, tax avoidance, and unscrupulous wealth retention.

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Jamie Peck, Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, is an institutional political economist. His research addresses a range of issues relating to economic geography, urban restructuring, labor regulation, and statecraft. He examines the ways in which ostensibly global processes—for example, forms of market-oriented governance – are (re)made through local sites, distanciated networks, and grounded practices. He is now working on the restructuring of contingent employment regimes, the dynamics of “fast policy,” and the fiscal transformation of the local state.

Born in the UK, Jamie holds a Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy. He is the managing editor of Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and the recipient of both the Guggenheim and the Harkness fellowships. He is the author of numerous publications, most recently Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (2015, with Nik Theodore).