Grace Blakeley to Deliver Lecture on Digital Oligarchy at the 2025 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize Event
TORONTO – As economic injustice fuels discontent and corporate consolidation drives up the cost of living, the Broadbent Institute is proud to present the 2025 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture featuring British economist and author Grace Blakeley.
Blakeley, the recipient of the 2025 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize, will deliver the lecture on Tuesday, May 20 at 6:00 PM EDT (7:00 PM ADT) at Toronto Metropolitan University. Limited tickets are available, and the event will also be livestreamed on the Broadbent Institute’s YouTube channel.
WATCH: GRACE BLAKELEY’S 2025 ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD PRIZE ACCEPTANCE VIDEO
In her video statement receiving the Prize, Blakeley underscored the broader political stakes:
“We’re engaged in a global struggle against a corrupt and unaccountable oligarchy that treats our hard-won democratic rights with disdain, while subjecting ordinary people to misery, oppression and exploitation to line their own pockets.”
Following the lecture, Luke Savage—author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History and co-author of Ed Broadbent’s Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality—will moderate a live audience Q&A. The fellow Jacobin and Tribune writers will discuss the future of economic democracy and working-class power.
For media attendance at the lecture, please contact communications@
About Grace Blakeley
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine, a columnist for Zeteo News, and the author of several books, including ‘Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom‘.
She is the former economics commentator for the New Statesman, and her work has been featured in publications including The Guardian, The Independent, MSNBC News, Jacobin, and Current Affairs. Grace appears frequently in UK and international media, including BBC Question Time, Talk TV‘s Piers Morgan Uncensored, and MTV News.
About the Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize and Lecture
In January 2016, the Broadbent Institute lost our dear friend and inspiration Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood.
The Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Ellen’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians. At this troubling political moment, Ellen’s belief that democracy means “nothing more nor less than people’s power, or even the power of the common people or the poor” is more relevant than ever.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left’s foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above. Challenging the prevailing logic and assumptions in her field, Ellen’s scholarship emphasized the importance of political processes and class conflict in shaping historical change. Meiksins Wood authored nine influential books throughout her career, served on the editorial committee of the British journal The New Left Review and was a much-respected member of Britain’s radical left. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 1996.
In recognition of Ellen’s distinguished legacy of historical scholarship on political thought, the Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology.
Watch, listen and read the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture delivered by German economist Isabella Weber.
