From REcovery to DIScovery-opening the debate on alternatives to financialisation

Whether the UK is in recovery or not depends on who you ask. For some, recovery has been achieved because economic growth is restored, albeit still relying on personal debt, consumer spending and asset-price inflation. For others, a continued dependence on finance-led growth is not recovery because there is no rebalancing away from the UK's dependence of finance and services toward manufacturing, creative industries or revitalizing the small and medium-sized enterprises. For still others, the very concepts of GDP growth, recession, and recovery are remnants of an old paradigm that cannot account for unpaid labour in the home, the ecological limits of growth, the realities of a global economy or the potential for technology to fundamentally change every day experiences of economic life. In short, recovery is a fundamentally free-floating concept with no inscribed a priori understanding of what it entails as a public policy or political objective.
This seminars series moves the debate about the UK recovery forward by introducing an alternative 'discovery' framework. Over three years a mix of events will open-up a much needed dialogue that imagines alternatives to finance-led growth it Britain. They will promote interdisciplinary dialogue across the social sciences and create a platform for collaboration between academics and third-sector groups researching the UK economy. This offers new avenues for knowledge exchange with potentially exciting results. It is through dialogue with other researcher practitioners and stakeholder groups that new concepts, ideas and languages of progress are revealed. This multifaceted conversation will help to promote the viability of new voices offering alternative accounts of Britain's problems and new ways of thinking about how to solve them.
Recovery does not speak for itself through strategically selected indicators of enhanced production or growth; rather it is something that needs to materialise in people's lived experience of 'the economy'. With this in mind we are able to discover new possibilities for economic, political and cultural innovation. We begin by challenging the established orthodoxy of equating 'recovery' with the end of recession-or, the UK economy producing more economic outputs in one quarter than in the previous quarter. We start with the questions have yet to find answers to: how to recover, how to grow, how to stabilise the economy? While including the social dynamics of uneven recovery: whose recovery, whose growth, whose economy? The 'how' speaks to traditional social science objectives of understanding problems and potentially offering solutions; the 'whose' makes space for rethinking of recovery/discovery as everyday practice. Overall exposing and questioning the political priorities embedded-often in an unspoken way-in 'the recovery' debates.
This makes charting the degree to which key concepts enable, shape or limit particular understandings of how the UK economy can move forward possible. For example, the orthodox use in the singular of concepts like recovery, growth, production, consumption and investment do not capture the differentiated experiences of economic life across gender, racial groups, generations, or regions within the UK. To think about a single recovery rather than multiple trajectories of often competing recoveries is therefore to silence some people's experience of economic life. We can already see that GDP growth can exist at the same time as a cost-of-living crisis because of the uneven (re)distribution of the burden of recession and gains from recovery, with women taking a particular heavy share of the costs while getting a smaller share of the benefits. Importantly, it is increasingly clear that we need a long-term solution to the environmental challenges that our current global economy creates. Addressing these problems requires more than just a return to growth and more extensive debate than the news or election cycle generally permits.

This seminar series creates a much-needed platform for engagement between academic and non-academic researchers to incubate new ideas and new ways of understanding the challenges to the UK economy. This research agenda has the potential to have wide-ranging political economic and policy implications that speak directly to social welfare and economic policy goals. Efforts to overcome orthodox understandings of growth and recovery will translate into novel and creative ways to combine the lived experience of growth and recovery with explicit policy goal such as gender equality, sustainability and competitiveness.

The potential value of our programme of research seminars can be evidenced by the wide range of beneficiaries of participation in this project:

Civil society, advocacy groups, and trade unions: this series has the potential to influence organisational culture and practice within the various participating third sector groups, in particular those that develop their research and policy prescriptions into something that influences public debate, public policy or academic research. These groups will benefit from the collaborative platform that allows them to present and develop their policy positions and collaborate with academics in the co-production of a public interest report as well as digital content. Potential participants: War on Want, Oxfam, Trade Union Congress, GMB, UNITE, Citizens Advice Bureau, Violence Against Women Trust.

Educational sector: the results of this seminar series have the potential to transform evidence-based education policy, professional practice or community service. In particular our mini-conference offers education professionals and volunteers the opportunity for information exchange through exploration of the pedagogical challenges of teaching on the economy in a rapidly changing globalized world. Potential participants: People's Political Economy, Post-Crash Economics Society, Economic Literacy Project.

Policymakers, regional and local authorities: public sector beneficiaries include policy makers working on national economic planning that are sympathetic to Andy Haldane's call for a fundamental re-thinking of finance-led growth among the political and policy elites. By hosting seminars in the North of the UK we can explicitly aim to address the geographical rebalancing of the UK economy; therefore, we will provide fruitful avenues for Regional and Local Authorities to engage in debates and benefit from our findings. Potential Participants: Lewisham and Lambeth Council, Sheffield council, South Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP).

Think tanks: research and advocacy institutes will work with us to develop innovative methods of knowledge exchange and/or co-production of outputs. Potential participants: NESTA, ippr, New Economics Foundation, Resolution Foundation.

Cultural commentators/press, general public: one aim of the project is to explore and translate jargon around discussions of austerity and the Recovery. The general public and the press will both benefit from exploration of an alternative language, one that brings down barriers to real communication about issues and reduces distance between the public and the economy. Potential participants: Aditya Chakrabortty (the Guardian); Carl Packman; Larry Elliot.

All the above will be invited to participate in various seminars offered as part of this series, in particular the two Collaborative Encounters Events. These events attempt to unpack the research process in ways that disrupt conventional representations of research as a linear, whilst at the same time posing questions about the authorship and ownership of knowledge production that are often otherwise foreclosed in conventional research. This method attempts to develop a collaborative model of cross-sector and interdisciplinary research.