School of Geography: Economic and Political Worlds Research Theme
The Economic and Political Worlds research theme is a vibrant and internationally recognised research cluster. We undertake research on a dynamic range of contemporary economic and political geographical phenomena and processes.
Our research foci include the economic geographies of finance, the financial system and financialisation; the economic geographies of fashion, creative industries and consumption; the study of the transformation of global-city regions and of the production of new economic spaces, ranging from the digital through to the remaking of national economic space.
We are characterised by the development of innovative theoretical approaches to the economic that are attuned to the cultural, political and social dimensions of economic life. This is coupled with a strong commitment to rigorous empirical research using a range of methodologies.
Key research areas
Money
Our research has analysed the changing geographies of the international financial system and the links between global finance and everyday financial lives.
By revealing the ways in which the growing power of money and finance in everyday life is geographically uneven, our research has made an important contribution to inter-disciplinary studies of financialisation and cultural economy approaches to money and finance.
Our research has also revealed the changing form, function and geographies of international financial centres in the run up to and following the financial crisis of 2007-8.
Knowledge
Research has identified and examined the geographies of new forms of knowledge and learning that play a central role in shaping the contemporary global economy.
Firstly, we focus on global elite labour markets and explore emergent and powerful actors and practices within the global economy.
Secondly, research is focusing on the disintermediatory effects of digitally-mediated technologies and the restructuring of hierarchies between producers and consumers. Empirical work in a range of settings including the music industry, China, Ukraine, the alternative economy, fashion, consumption and retail has theoretically examined the connection and/or tensions between different types of economic knowledge and regulatory policies.
Bodies
By focusing on the practices and performances of individual economic actors, our research has provided innovative insights into the ways in which everyday economic geographies shape the global economy.
Using innovative methodological approaches, research has been at the forefront of work in consumption geography in demonstrating how consumption involves the complex interplay between subjects, objects and agency in spatially variegated ways.
Our research examines how new forms of organisation associated with neo-liberalisation and the growing power of money and finance are intertwined with the production of new economic subjects and subjectivities.
Value
Our research has produced new, culturally sensitive understandings of the creation, transformation and destruction of commodity value in cultural and financial economic circuits.
The complex, variable, unexpected and contingent determinants of value attached to different material objects and bodies, as well as the relays between financial and everyday value and values are a key foci of research in the school.