Ground Level: RuPaul's Drag Race and Globalisation w/ Helton Levy and Mariya Levitanus
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 cel...
Ground Level: Cannabis and the State w/ Adam Lloyd, Gulzat Botoeva and Matt Bishop
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.
Throu...
Ground Level: Commuting and Sustainability w/ Vicki Reif-Breitwieser and James Jackson
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 lik...
Ground Level: Streaming and Surveillance w/ Eric Drott
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 imag...
Live: Is revolution necessary to stop climate change? @ PSA 2026
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 Salt...
New Thinking: Neoliberal Knowledge Production w/ Nina Lotze
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 Politi...
New Thinking: Chinese Firms in Africa w/ Elisa Gambino
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 producti...
New Thinking: Value Struggles in the Wine Industry w/ Stefano Ponte
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...
New Thinking: IPE and the Global South w/ Zaynab El Bernoussi & Bashir Saade
Why has the Global South been peripheralized in the study of international political economy (IPE)? What does this cause us to miss in our scholarship? How are sovereignties and power dynamics produced in the Global South? How should teaching IPE change?
Zaynab El Bernoussi is Associate Professor...
New Thinking: Electrostates w/ Freddie Daley
What actually is an electrostate? How do the material substances of electricity and fossil fuels shape state power? Is the US a petrostate and does this question expose the flimsiness of the concept? When we talk about electrostates, do we really just mean China?
Freddie Daley is a Research Assoc...
