SPERI Presents...

How is value constructed and contested in the wine industry? What is the significance of place and nature? What does the win industry tell us about capitalist production in general? Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School. He joins Josh White to discuss his book Value Struggles: Looking at Capitalism through the Wine Glass (Bloomsbury Academic, 2...

How should we understand the ruptural shift of the second China shock? How does it effect what we thought we knew about China and global production? How can we study this transformation? What comes next? Professor Yvette To is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr Frank Maracchione is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Depar...

How are Chinese firms' activities in Africa shaped by local social, cultural and political processes? In what sense is this embeddedness flexible and how does this affect firms' internationalisation? What is specific and generalisable about Chinese firms? How are geographies of trade and production shifting towards South-South engagement? Dr Elisa Gambino is Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political...

How do neoliberal think tanks work? When do they disagree with each other? What do they do to influence government policy and public debate? How did they respond to the crisis of COVID-19 and state intervention that came with it? Nina Lotze is a Associate Lecturer in the UCL Department of Political Science. She joins Josh White to talk about her article ' Strategies of neoliberal knowledge product...

Is a climate transition really happening? What do political economists mean when they talk about climate 'transformation'? Does it require overcoming capitalism? Should we be honest that we're actually talking about revolution? If so, what political agent could possibly bring it about? Chris Saltmarsh is a postgraduate researcher studying the climate movement at University of Sheffield. Stan Wilsh...

Scholars argue that streaming platforms have turned music into a technology of surveillance. Thanks to music streaming, now more than ever before, music accompanies us as we move across the physical, social and geographical spaces that define our everyday lives.  Music has been traditionally imagined as a means of self-expression. More often than not, it is used to channel our emotions and de...

Every day, millions of people travel to and from their main occupation. Commuting is a central part of daily life, but it is also political. Managing the public transport network is an important part of the job of local officials, for example the mayor of London. Public transport policies are likewise a key element of any progressive strategy for sustainable development, including in the UK, where...

Drugs, alcohol, and other recreational substances are central to everyday social life and form a significant, contested and repressed sector of the global economy. Importantly, it is a market that states seek to disband or regulate through domestic and international political institutions.  Through their encounter with state institutions, substances become a central political issue at all lev...

Shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race have brought queer TV into the mainstream of global media. Scholars of everyday political economy highlight how both producing and watching television shape global queer identities. Dominant media channels promote specific, standardised ways of being queer, often celebrated as victories of LGBTQAI+ visibility, yet at the cost of erasing alternative expressions. ...

Everyday life is often described as common, usual, uneventful, slow, and mundane, yet it can easily become unpredictable, anxious, and traumatic. This episode explores contexts in which war and political violence closely interact with everyday life.  To discuss the everyday political economy of state-mandated violence, we focus on survival. Where critical political economy frames survival as...

Supporting the most vulnerable, including children and the elderly, is one of the main forms of caring labour for social reproduction. The moral and economic choices individuals and families make every day when dealing with children, as well as old age, have broad implications for the global political economy of care.  These decisions unfold within a context where populations in wealthy econo...

Across factory floors, family kitchens, neighbourhoods, and informal markets, the international economy is lived and negotiated in ordinary places. This episode introduces the theoretical concepts behind Ground Level, SPERI’s podcast series on Everyday Political Economy. Ground Level’s host, Dr Frank Maracchione , speaks with Professor Juanita Elias about why everyday life matters for studying and...

How important is winter tourism to certain regions in Austria? How skiing resorts are being affected by climate change? Can regions survive without it? What comes next if it melts away? Valentina Ausserladscheider is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economic Sociology at University of Vienna. She joins Josh White to talk about her article ' Decoupling climate change: winter tourism and...

Is the climate transition really happening? If so, what does it look like in reality? Has its promises been broken? Who profits and who loses? Should the environmental movement actually resist climate transition, and how? Dr Nicholas Beuret is Lecturer at Essex Business School, University of Essex. He joins Josh White to talk about his book Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Tr...

Who makes money out of football: broadcasters, clubs, players, or investment banks? Why are clubs selling their own assets to themselves? How do fans and players take collective action to resist the further financialisation of the sport? How important are local and foreign fans to the Premier League's boom? Is it inevitable that the Premier League will go bust? Dr James Jackson is a Hallsworth Res...

How important is exploitation in the organisation of global supply chains? How do they drive geopolitical conflict and ecological destruction while depressing wages? How does the capitalist state drive and uphold capitalist accumulation? What does US-China rivalry mean for value chains? Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Relations and International Development at University of Sussex. H...

Does China’s unique party-state capitalist political economy model hold the key for global climate transition? Can the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) translate its success in expanding green energy technology to the destruction of the fossil fuel industry? What does China’s idea of ecological civilisation offer that Western notions of green capitalism do not? How should activists in the West respon...

What is labour governance and why is it failing? How effective is civil society activism at improving labour conditions in global value chains? What does the Indian tea industry tell us about the consequences of colonialism and globalisation for racialised workers? What role did the collapse of the USSR play in creating our contemporary situation? Dr Natalie Langford is Lecturer in Sustainability...

How are technologies used by militaries to enact organised violence produced? How are post-industrial regions of the UK becoming dependent on the supply chains of the global war industry? What narratives enable organised violence perpetrated by elites, and how are they resisted? What is the role of everyday tedium and mundanity in producing such violence? Dr Joanna Tidy is a Senior Lecturer in Pol...

The crisis of India's agrarian sector has been widely reported amid spates of farmer suicides and mass protest as incomes decline and indebtedness rises in response to falling productivity. What are the underlying causes of this persist crisis in India's agriculture? Is it right that we understand these phenomenon as 'crisis'? Who are the winners and losers? In particular, how are women workers di...

How have states evolved in tandem with the spread of techno-monopoly? Why do states and cities increasingly behave like startups? Is social polarisation a product of the startup economy or is it a necessary precondition? Sami Moisio is Professor of Spatial Planning and Policy in the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki. Ugo Rossi is Professor of Economic and Politi...

A tiny number of huge companies dominate the pharmaceutical industry, making extraordinary profits in the process. All the while, the poorest people around the world struggle to access medicines they need to survive. What does the COVID-19 pandemic tell us about Big Pharma? What's the problem with a cartelized global market? What role does Bill Gates play in solving (or reproducing) the big challe...

How do we make sense of the multitude of so-called crises that dominate our current conjuncture? Is polycrisis a useful concept for getting to grips with the present condition of political economy? Are its proponents right to embrace uncertainty at the expense of theoretical explanation? Or can we hope to make sense of what's going on and chart a path forward? Chris Saltmarsh is a postgraduate res...

Climate change is one of the most urgent and existential challenges to emerge in capitalism's history. It threatens to undermine the basic conditions of capitalist accumulation not to mention human life itself. And yet, emissions continue to rise. Why? Climate change is often termed the climate crisis , but what does it actually have in common with historic crisis events like the 1930s or 1970s? W...

Does the rise of populisms of both Left and Right varieties constitute a crisis in democracy? Is this a new phenomenon or has there always been a contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy? How does the erosion of democratic norms relate to other crises in the political economy? Why does the Left seem so incapable of effectively confronting this multitude of challenges? Michael Br...