Exploring the Concept of 'the Market': Combining History of Ideas and Historiographical Approaches
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: Politics and International Studies
Abstract
Public discourse surrounding the market typically forwards the image of market mechanisms as some sort of disciplinary force. Such mechanisms are thus given a will of their own and are widely believed to have the capacity to act upon that will to enforce outcomes which otherwise would not have arisen. The populist phrase 'you can't buck the market' is the perfect illustration of this way of thinking, and it feeds perceptions of powerlessness insofar as people are deemed to have lost control of their own destiny in the face of abstract but controlling market logic. Yet behind these pronouncements of the omniscience of market mechanisms there lie any number of analytical assumptions which tend not to be reflected upon at all. We are told that the market is able to assert particular behavioural priorities onto us, but typically we are not told why. The power of the image of a disciplinary force is usually enough on its own to render believable the message contained within the image about the dangers of rebelling.
The most significant of the covert assumptions underpinning such social and political passivity is that markets are able automatically to coordinate individual economic activity in pursuit of the best possible outcome. In technical language this is the presumption that they 'clear' perfectly if left alone to perform their task of matching supply faultlessly with demand. This is how the populist conception accounts for the fact of market coordination, through which myriad instances of everyday economic decision-making cohere into a functioning economic system. Unfortunately, real-world markets have a tendency to depart from the accompanying image of allocative efficiency, as was demonstrated only too vividly by the colossal allocation failures which occurred in and around the global financial crisis. Such real-world difficulties are almost certainly related to the fact that at no point in their subject field's history have economists offered an unequivocally economic solution to the issue of market coordination: solutions couched in logical and mathematical terms, yes; solutions couched in genuine economic terms, no. The so-called market coordination problem is described specifically as a 'problem' for good reason, then.
My project seeks to reveal some of the ways in which the ongoing inability to resolve the market coordination problem has been rendered increasingly unimportant for academic economists. Professional developments have occurred within both the methodology and pedagogy of economics which have allowed that problem to be almost entirely sidestepped. Methodologically, it is possible to identify a number of turning points from the 1820s to the 1930s which increasingly moved economics to become a 'science of choice', thus eliminating interest in the effects of the broader market environment in which individuals are called upon to choose. 'The market', as a substantive phenomenon of concrete everyday relationships of buying and selling, has consequently all but disappeared from economics research, albeit leaving economists susceptible to the accusation of being out-of-touch in moments of acute market distress. Pedagogically, from the 1870s onwards, students have learned to understand the fundamental economic essence of individual choice through exposure to examples drawn from a hypothetical Robinson Crusoe economy. No coordination is necessary in a one-person desert island setting, which turns the question of how markets work into a mathematically-tractable exercise in logic. Neither are moments of market breakdown ever allowed to occur, because the underlying logic drawn from the surrounding equations is always able to assert itself. This makes it relatively easy to understand why many commentators have asked for a new type of economics to be developed in the wake of the global financial crisis, one which breaks fundamentally with the mathematical framework in which the Robinson character is forced to live.
The most significant of the covert assumptions underpinning such social and political passivity is that markets are able automatically to coordinate individual economic activity in pursuit of the best possible outcome. In technical language this is the presumption that they 'clear' perfectly if left alone to perform their task of matching supply faultlessly with demand. This is how the populist conception accounts for the fact of market coordination, through which myriad instances of everyday economic decision-making cohere into a functioning economic system. Unfortunately, real-world markets have a tendency to depart from the accompanying image of allocative efficiency, as was demonstrated only too vividly by the colossal allocation failures which occurred in and around the global financial crisis. Such real-world difficulties are almost certainly related to the fact that at no point in their subject field's history have economists offered an unequivocally economic solution to the issue of market coordination: solutions couched in logical and mathematical terms, yes; solutions couched in genuine economic terms, no. The so-called market coordination problem is described specifically as a 'problem' for good reason, then.
My project seeks to reveal some of the ways in which the ongoing inability to resolve the market coordination problem has been rendered increasingly unimportant for academic economists. Professional developments have occurred within both the methodology and pedagogy of economics which have allowed that problem to be almost entirely sidestepped. Methodologically, it is possible to identify a number of turning points from the 1820s to the 1930s which increasingly moved economics to become a 'science of choice', thus eliminating interest in the effects of the broader market environment in which individuals are called upon to choose. 'The market', as a substantive phenomenon of concrete everyday relationships of buying and selling, has consequently all but disappeared from economics research, albeit leaving economists susceptible to the accusation of being out-of-touch in moments of acute market distress. Pedagogically, from the 1870s onwards, students have learned to understand the fundamental economic essence of individual choice through exposure to examples drawn from a hypothetical Robinson Crusoe economy. No coordination is necessary in a one-person desert island setting, which turns the question of how markets work into a mathematically-tractable exercise in logic. Neither are moments of market breakdown ever allowed to occur, because the underlying logic drawn from the surrounding equations is always able to assert itself. This makes it relatively easy to understand why many commentators have asked for a new type of economics to be developed in the wake of the global financial crisis, one which breaks fundamentally with the mathematical framework in which the Robinson character is forced to live.
Planned Impact
The project deals with subject matter which is at least one stage removed from the direct concern of policy-makers in search of templates for policy adaptation. My impact strategy recognises the primarily conceptual nature of my proposed research and, as a consequence, it will target engagement within the broader climate of opinion. Using Peter Hall's (1993) terminology, social science research can help to direct 'third order' policy change by allowing the wider population to challenge the language in which policy goals are conceptualised in the first place, and it is at this everyday level of thinking about the economy that I will focus my impact activities. I have identified a number of potential project stakeholders, each of whom, I suggest, will benefit from research which is capable of revealing the generically ad hoc nature of the conception of 'the market' that today dominates the way in which economic policy issues tend to be framed.
This has become a matter of increasing public prominence in the wake of the global financial crisis, as ensuing austerity measures have forced people to come to terms with more limited life chances due to market failure. Many families from disadvantaged backgrounds now routinely struggle to make ends meet because of an increasingly stretched household budget, and many young people are faced with circumstances which make it look as though their generation has been sacrificed economically. I see my role as a potential ESRC champion to connect with these people in an attempt to empower them politically with new ways of thinking about the modern economy's major institution. I will thus combine outreach and impact as a fundamental part of my project activities.
There is now widespread recognition within public debate in the UK - supported by RCUK - of the need to promote new modes of knowledge transfer to groups who might otherwise lack access to higher education. I recently accepted a position on the Advisory Board of the Political and Economic Literacy Project, a community education initiative which is about to be trialled across workplaces, community centres and youth clubs in Oxford. If the pilot is successful the scheme will then go nationwide from the same time as my proposed Fellowship will start. I have already helped with the composition of the syllabus and will lecture during the trial period on the political implications which follow from my research on competing conceptions of 'the market', before taking an even more active supporting role during my Fellowship. These activities will augment 'Schools Days' that I will run at Warwick on the back of the highly successful widening participation initiatives already in place in my department. We regularly visit schools outside of normal university catchment areas to interact with those in the 15-18 age group and have recently organised day-long events for them.
My outreach work will be linked to complementary activities designed to influence ongoing discussions amongst policy advocates about the character of markets and their aptitude for failure. The global financial crisis has focused attention on university economics teaching, particularly on the issue which unites the two elements of my project: how academic economics socialises new entrants to the field into assumptions about 'the market' which do not tackle the market coordination problem. I will interact both with ongoing economics curriculum review groups and those people who run websites, blogs, etc. which have taken a keen interest in those groups' findings. Such interest has snowballed, with film directors, cartoonists and novellists joining the fray amongst others, each having the capacity to create pieces of artwork about the current state of economics knowledge which resonate culturally and politically. More traditional users of social science research, such as learned societies and campaign groups, are part of the debate too, so it is important also to engage them.
This has become a matter of increasing public prominence in the wake of the global financial crisis, as ensuing austerity measures have forced people to come to terms with more limited life chances due to market failure. Many families from disadvantaged backgrounds now routinely struggle to make ends meet because of an increasingly stretched household budget, and many young people are faced with circumstances which make it look as though their generation has been sacrificed economically. I see my role as a potential ESRC champion to connect with these people in an attempt to empower them politically with new ways of thinking about the modern economy's major institution. I will thus combine outreach and impact as a fundamental part of my project activities.
There is now widespread recognition within public debate in the UK - supported by RCUK - of the need to promote new modes of knowledge transfer to groups who might otherwise lack access to higher education. I recently accepted a position on the Advisory Board of the Political and Economic Literacy Project, a community education initiative which is about to be trialled across workplaces, community centres and youth clubs in Oxford. If the pilot is successful the scheme will then go nationwide from the same time as my proposed Fellowship will start. I have already helped with the composition of the syllabus and will lecture during the trial period on the political implications which follow from my research on competing conceptions of 'the market', before taking an even more active supporting role during my Fellowship. These activities will augment 'Schools Days' that I will run at Warwick on the back of the highly successful widening participation initiatives already in place in my department. We regularly visit schools outside of normal university catchment areas to interact with those in the 15-18 age group and have recently organised day-long events for them.
My outreach work will be linked to complementary activities designed to influence ongoing discussions amongst policy advocates about the character of markets and their aptitude for failure. The global financial crisis has focused attention on university economics teaching, particularly on the issue which unites the two elements of my project: how academic economics socialises new entrants to the field into assumptions about 'the market' which do not tackle the market coordination problem. I will interact both with ongoing economics curriculum review groups and those people who run websites, blogs, etc. which have taken a keen interest in those groups' findings. Such interest has snowballed, with film directors, cartoonists and novellists joining the fray amongst others, each having the capacity to create pieces of artwork about the current state of economics knowledge which resonate culturally and politically. More traditional users of social science research, such as learned societies and campaign groups, are part of the debate too, so it is important also to engage them.
Organisations
- University of Warwick (Fellow, Lead Research Organisation)
- KPMG International Cooperative (Collaboration)
- British Film Institute (BFI) (Collaboration)
- Coventry UK City of Culture (Collaboration)
- International Slavery Museum (Collaboration)
- Chatham House (Collaboration)
- TAX JUSTICE NETWORK (Collaboration)
- Lloyd's Register Foundation (Collaboration)
- Her Majesty's Civil Service (Collaboration)
- University of Warwick (Collaboration)
- Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Collaboration)
People |
ORCID iD |
| Matthew Watson (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Watson M
(2017)
George Osborne's machonomics
in British Politics
Watson M
(2017)
Brexit, the left behind and the let down: the political abstraction of 'the economy' and the UK's EU referendum
in British Politics
Berry C
(2022)
Financialization, State Action and the Contested Policy Practices of Neoliberalism
in Competition and Change
Watson M
(2014)
The great transformation and progressive possibilities: the political limits of Polanyi's Marxian history of economic ideas
in Economy and Society
Watson M
(2022)
The Place of Glasgow in The Wealth of Nations: Caught between Biography and Text, Philosophical and Commercial History
in History of Political Economy
Watson, M
(2014)
Re-Establishing What Went Wrong Before: The Greenspan Put as Macroeconomic Modellers' New Normal
in Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies
Watson M
(2016)
Rousseau's Crusoe myth: the unlikely provenance of the neoclassical homo economicus
in Journal of Cultural Economy
Akhter S
(2022)
'Decolonising the School Curriculum in an Era of Political Polarisation'
in London Review of Education
Watson M
(2018)
Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks
in New Political Economy
| Description | The details of the ongoing ill health that has dogged my Fellowship are obviously also relevant here. I have continued to work as normal, but I have had to get used to the fact that 'normal' now means to me an impaired return on my level of effort compared to what I was used to before my current neurological difficulties struck. So much of my effort on a daily basis now has to be oriented simply to getting by and making sure that I can continue to lead as much of my life as possible. However, I have managed to maintain the impetus of my project research, concluding significant amounts of writing and being able to publicise new findings that follow from that writing. This has not always been exactly what I had envisaged writing when I was first made my award, or certainly not writing everything in the order and to the timetable that I had originally conceived. All of these changes to my work plan were entirely justified, though, I would argue, and they certainly received the full support of members of my advisory board who I approached to ask for their opinion. They have allowed the outer limits of my 'Rethinking the Market' project to grow organically, so that I have been able to add further dimensions to it whilst remaining focused at all times on its central themes. They have also allowed me to respond flexibly to new issues that have arisen on the public agenda but that were fundamentally unseeable at the time I submitted my application. The most obvious of these issues, of course, is Brexit. This has been such a bolt from the blue for the established political order in the UK that it would always have been worthwhile diverting a proportion of my project time to studying it even if it had little tangible relevance for the content of my project research. However, it is clearly the case that the unfolding national psychodrama of Brexit has involved increasingly ad hoc attempts to rethink the scope and the scale of the market-based relationships in which the British economy will be embedded in the future. At the level of policy, then, there could hardly be a development either more dramatic or more central to my coordinating project theme of 'Rethinking the Market'. Overall, I maintain the optimism that I have shown at each of the annual report stages, and I remain happy to report that things are going very well on the research front. The findings from the research are developing, and they are showing what I hoped all along would be the case. That is, there are some exceptionally interesting things to come out of an in-depth historiographical investigation of the way in which economic theories of the market have developed over time. I had a hunch at the start of my project that there would prove to be important spill-over effects from abstract economic theory to everyday practices. I am pleased to say that this is just what I am finding. Political justifications of the market exist side-by-side with abstract economic theories of the market, and whilst they might not use the same technical language they do very much appeal to the same themes of efficient allocation and wealth enhancement. This is where the in-depth historiographical investigation really comes into its own, because it shows that the basic market model that has dominated economics for well over one hundred years is susceptible to deconstruction at the hands of more sophisticated economic theory. Every newly beginning economics student is first introduced to a standard demand-and-supply model of the market, and it already appears familiar to them when their studies begin because they will have used the language of demand and supply before that in everyday life. But the most sophisticated mathematical treatments of the market suggest that both the demand and the supply curves are built on a fallacy. This makes the standard demand-and-supply model no less important to political justifications for using market institutions for the regulation of an ever increasing number of aspects of contemporary social life. Yet it does provide plentiful reasons for asking how legitimate these justifications really are. I have also been able to add another brand new dimension to my project research by increasingly asking how the development of economic theory in its Anglophone tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected the assumptions of the imperial economy which provided its backdrop. I have always been eager to question the assumptions (i) that there is an inherent timelessness to abstract economic theory and (ii) that its accompanying market model reflects essential economic relationships which could have been lived anywhere and in any place throughout history. A lot of the research from earlier in my career was based on the counter-assumption that to ask at an abstract level how even the most basic of economic relationships form is to ask how one is currently acculturated into accepting certain understandings about the economy. Lived experiences matter to theoretical development in this regard. But I had not thought to consider before my Fellowship research started in earnest just how deeply much of the core economic vocabulary with which we are still familiar today relies upon assumptions about how the imperial economy worked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is the lived experience of empire which therefore seems to matter most, even in today's supposedly post-imperial world. If you took away from us our basic economic vocabulary linked to notions such as 'production', 'exchange', 'commerce' and 'trade', we would find it very hard to communicate with one another in an avowedly economic register. This is how deeply a market-based framed of reference has become embedded in the way in which we express our political hopes and fears for the economy, even if we might not always be aware of how much this is now the case. Yet all of these basic linguistic markers of how to talk with other people about the economy arose in the first place from theoretical developments which were, at one level, merely re-descriptions of the conditions that were in play during the days of empire. If I am able to secure the financial support for such an endeavour through a successful future research grant, there is a lengthy book that I would like to work towards in due course. I have been making headway in relation to both of these project strands, and my findings are now already out there in the academic literature. (1) Two years ago I published a book with Columbia University Press called simply, The Market. This was an attempt to confront explicitly the issue of the spill-over effects from economic theory to everyday practices. It looked at three divergent appeals to the concept of 'the market' within economic theory. One is the theoretical account provided during the so-called formalist revolution in economic theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, attention turned to mathematical existence proofs in the search for an answer to the only ever abstract question of whether it was possible to imagine an economic system in which every product traded both now and in the future could simultaneously be bought and sold under the interest of nothing other than market dynamics, thus delivering a pure market system. This was clearly different to a second image of 'the market', where empirical studies helped to assess how close in practice real-life buying and selling activities conformed with the standard demand-and-supply diagram of introductory economic theory. And it was equally clearly different again to a third image of 'the market', which harks back to the earliest days of modern economic theory when the phrase was simply taken to mean the existence of a physical marketplace in which the commercial activities of all towns tended to be enacted. The important finding elaborated at length in my book is that not a single one of these three images of 'the market' as drawn in economic theory corresponds in any way to how the language of 'the market' has entered political discourse. It is used there to signal preferences for small government, minimal regulation and the removal of state transfer payments so that people can find their own supposed worth in the market-based relationships which act as the boundaries for their everyday lives. Economic theory is often enlisted to support such political claims, but this happens in a manner that cannot simply be read off from the allegedly supporting theory. The relationship between the economics and the politics of 'the market' is actually so tangled that it may prove to be that there is no direct relationship between the two at all. This finding will hopefully help to animate challenges to the authority that the political discourse of 'the market' is able to wield in public debates by showing that it is merely a statement of political opinion which is not as easily supported by economic theory as is so frequently claimed by its proponents. I do not underestimate, though, the scale of the change of political climate that would be required for this finding to gain significant traction. This book was not part of my original publication plans, but the interest that my broad Fellowship arguments were generating meant that it was too good of an opportunity not to divert some of my Fellowship writing time to producing it. I am thrilled to report that it has been exceptionally well received amongst my academic peers, and it has also started to attract some interest from online media sources. Inevitably, though, this has pushed back the deadlines on finishing my other writing, but as none of it is time-sensitive I thought that this was a trade-off that I was willing to engage. My book, The Market, follows closely in its underlying findings the book that I was persuaded to write by the panel who interviewed me for my Professorial Fellowship. They asked me to make a head start on my Fellowship by showing how my approach to combining historiographical and historical insights into the political uses of economic theory offers a distinctive contribution to the debate about the global financial crisis of the 2000s. This became the book that is entitled, Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World. Here, the key findings follow from the distinction I draw between economic economics and uneconomic economics. I define the former in terms of speaking directly to empirical research on everyday economic lives that are actually being led, and the latter in terms of prioritising abstract theoretical relationships and using these as a substitute for empirical research into how 'the economy' now routinely touches down in people's daily lives. I am building in this regard on an established academic tradition which has long urged economic theorists to be more cautious in presenting mathematical existence proofs as if they were actually experienced economic relations, but the conceptual distinction between economic and uneconomic economics and its use in explaining the dynamics of the global financial crisis are certainly all my own. I show how an over-reliance on driving the profitability of the economy through purely financial channels was misrepresented as being of no threat to the overall stability of the economy because modelling assumptions related to a frictionless arbitrage process were treated as if this was the way in which the financial and real economies interacted in practice. 'The market' was presented as a perfect mechanism for allocating resources between the financial and real economies, and once that assumption took hold even the possibility of a systemic breakdown was removed from the model world that was created out of economists' mathematical existence proofs. On the eve of the global financial crisis, macroeconomic policy had been conducted for quite some time on the basis of so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, in which all threats to the viability of the economic system were effortlessly arbitraged away. As we now know, such assumptions overstated the stability of the real world, which stubbornly refused to conform to the model world as the positions taken in global financial markets became more and more risky. It remains to be seen, though, whether this crisis of the real world ever truly translates into a crisis of the model world, because the response of the modellers has been to tweak the parameters of their dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models rather than to jettison them entirely and to start again from scratch. Pleasingly, there has already been quite a bit of uptake of these ideas within the relevant academic literature. (2) My findings relating to the imperial underpinnings of the standard market frames of reference of economic theory have been equally well received. Amongst my nine articles that have already appeared in print as a result of my Fellowship research, I have published two articles in New Political Economy and one in British Politics which have all already begun to garner not insubstantial attention. (i) The first of the New Political Economy articles is on arguably still the single most important finding in the history of economic theory and something that has been described by Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson as 'the most beautiful idea' in the whole of economic theory. This is David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, which is purported to show how international trade benefits all participants as long as they are left alone to allow 'the market' to determine who should produce and sell what. We are currently hearing lots about comparative advantage from politicians, policy entrepreneurs and think tanks in the rather tangled world of trade deal advocacy post-Brexit. There may be significant disagreements on how Britain's comparative advantage is best defended in international treaties, but not that it should be the focus of British negotiators' economic priorities. Against this political backdrop, I have placed Ricardo's theory back into its historical context, in line with what have always been my project goals of combining historiographical and historical insights into the political uses of economic theory. This has shown that Ricardo's description of the first-best solution delivered by 'the market' was actually only a re-description of the actual trading relationship through which Britain had trapped Portugal into becoming an accessory to its imperial project. Ricardo remained conspicuously silent on the treaty basis of this relationship, preferring instead to present it as having been born of pure market dynamics, but the parallels between Ricardo's theory and its historical backdrop are far too obvious to be merely coincidental. The supposedly market-based solution is better seen as a historical artefact of gunboat diplomacy, royal intrigue and European imperial wars, which places the deference that is still expressed today in political discourse to Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage in a completely different light. (ii) My second New Political Economy article on a related theme demonstrates how reliance in introductory economics textbooks on the Robinson Crusoe economy sits uneasily alongside the attempt by feminist and postcolonial scholars to rewrite the basic structure of Defoe's original early eighteenth-century text. The economics textbooks suggest that engaging with the economic relationships which endure on Robinson Crusoe's desert island are the most obvious means of learning fundamental economic principles and, as such, learning how to think like an economist. The basic pedagogical tools are used to show how people act economically first in a one-person economy and then in a two-person economy governed by assumptions drawn from the law of contract. However, the second person who inhabits the textbooks' Robinson Crusoe economy in order to allow such a move to be made is Friday, and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the contents of the original novel knows that the very last thing on Crusoe's mind is to allow Friday to enjoy full legal equality with him. The relationship between Crusoe and Friday on the island is governed not by the law of contract so much as by the effortless assumption of right that Crusoe exhibits as the archetypal white settler colonist of his day. The basic pedagogical tools of economic textbooks therefore look more as if they reflect eighteenth-century assumptions about empire and its related racial hierarchies rather than legal equality under the influence of contract. (iii) I have also published a piece that is of a related but by no means identical nature. My British Politics article on 'machonomics' focuses on what has happened in austerity Britain when the Chancellor of the Exchequer - in this case the former Chancellor, George Osborne - attempts to embody the persona of the archetypal policy-maker of the specialist economics literature on the theory of macroeconomic policy-making. This has long extolled the virtues of a specifically 'conservative' policy-maker whose conservatism is defined by them being more hawkish on macroeconomic policy than the median voter is. In other words, they are always willing to introduce a more extreme version of policy than the public would be of a mind to support. Osborne consistently espoused the virtue of this sort of economic theory and modelled himself seemingly explicitly on its implications. However, this was with predictable effects. In his efforts to adopt a budget surplus rule which was way beyond what the median voter would accommodate, he took money away from services which protected the most vulnerable. More than three-quarters of the burden of austerity fell on women. More than that, Osborne's adoption of the persona of the conservative policy-maker prioritised an overtly masculinised account of how the economic policy-making process works, imposing a crude masculinity as the default policy-maker response to the hurt that austerity was causing. A full list of my publications on the basis of three years of funding is as follows: Books (1) The Market, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing and New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. (2) Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Articles (3) 'Michael Gove's War on Professional Historical Expertise: Conservative Curriculum Reform, Extreme Whig History and the Place of Imperial Heroes in Modern Multicultural Britain', British Politics, forthcoming. Accepted for publication, 07.05.2019. DOI: 10.1057/s41293-019-00118-3. (4) 'New Directions in the International Political Economy of Energy', Review of International Political Economy, 26 (1), 2019, 1-24, with Caroline Kuzemko and Andrew Lawrence. DOI 10.1080/09692290.2018.1553796. (5) 'Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks', New Political Economy, 23 (5), 2018, 544-559. DOI 10.1080/13563467.2017.1417367. (6) 'Brexit, the Left Behind and the Let Down: The Political Abstraction of 'the Economy' and the UK's EU Referendum', British Politics, 13 (1), 2018, 17-30. DOI 10.1057/s41293-017-0062-8. (7) 'George Osborne's Machonomics', British Politics, 12 (4), 2017, 536-554. DOI 10.1057/s41293-017-0059-3. (8) 'Historicising Ricardo's Comparative Advantage Theory, Challenging the Normative Foundations of Liberal IPE', New Political Economy, 22 (3), 2017, 257-272. DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2016.1216535. (9) 'Rousseau's Crusoe Myth: The Unlikely Provenance of the Neoclassical Homo Economicus', Journal of Cultural Economy, 10 (1), 2017, 81-96. DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2016.1233903. (10) 'Re-Establishing What Went Wrong Before: The Greenspan Put as Macroeconomic Modellers' New Normal', Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 7 (July), 2014, 80-101. (11) 'The Great Transformation and Progressive Possibilities: The Political Limits of Polanyi's Marxian History of Economic Ideas', Economy and Society, 43 (4), 2014, 603-625. DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2014.895540. |
| Exploitation Route | I have been able to publish two books and nine journal articles during my time on my Professorial Fellowship, which provided me with three years of dedicated research time. Each has been written around a core aspect of my underlying 'Rethinking the Market' theme, and I would hope that they will all be capable of stimulating further work in the future. I will be in a better position to answer definitively the question of how my findings can be put to use by others only quite some time after the formal end of my Fellowship, which fell in February 2019, for this is when I will have more detailed evidence relating to the reception that my Fellowship writing has received. I say the 'formal' end of my Fellowship, because my great good fortune in being made this award has allowed me to lay down the foundations of multiple new dimensions in my research which will take the remaining twenty years of my career to fully flesh out. I am not sure, then, that I will ever really come to the end of its explorations. The Fellowship really has been that important for my research. I am therefore probably in a better position to say first of all how I intend to put my developing findings to use in further research, before I can begin to contemplate how others might also be persuaded to do the same. (1) The next big book to come out of my Fellowship Research will be the most important publication to date from my 'Rethinking the Market' project. Indeed, I am confident that it will be the most important publication that I have delivered on any topic to this point in my career. I have broadened the scope of what I promised in this regard on my original application, so that this book can now speak to a broader audience than I had initially proposed. It has therefore become a more ambitious publication during the writing stage, and I hope that this will eventually lead to my work attracting a wider audience across the social sciences. I am currently in the process of finishing the book, and it is written on a topic that is likely to resonate in multiple places within the social sciences, as it focuses on the methodological phenomenon of so-called economics imperialism. This is an approach to social science research which suggests that the market models of mainstream economic theory can be applied to any subject matter at all, and therefore they are able to effortlessly transgress the boundaries between one discipline and another. There are relatively few instances of people making the methodological case for economics imperialism directly in words of one syllable, but the instances in which economists' basic market models have been taken into fields beyond economics are now so numerous that any list is likely to be considerably short of being exhaustive. Social scientists typically recognise the phenomenon of economics imperialism from their day-to-day professional experience, even if they hear relatively little of an explicit case for proceeding in that manner. My next book attempts to provide a historical account of the economics imperialism phenomenon, the like of which has not been offered before. I am interested in telling that history by exploring the relationship between economics imperialism and the mathematicisation of the market concept. The result is a much messier picture than the one that is usually presented in favour of the sort of transgression which allows economics to be presented as the universal social science. Economists typically tell a progressive methodological story in relation to their own discipline, where good techniques will always come to the fore by displacing the inferior ones which have preceded them. However, once the history of the market concept is placed within the context of the history of the mathematisation of economic theory, a much more complex pattern of intellectual activity emerges. The ability to make this argument has required me to become much more familiar with the history of metamathematics - second-order debates about what makes for a valid proof in mathematical science - than I could ever have imagined when I first took up my Fellowship. Indeed, that literature played no part in the way in which I set out the research objectives in my initial application, so I have had to go through the immensely time-consuming process - but also immensely rewarding process - of learning this literature from scratch in a self-taught manner. Armed with this new interdisciplinary knowledge, it has become clear to me how differences in the way that mathematicians deal with methodological questions in the practice of proof-making have also spilled over into economics, albeit only very infrequently with explicit acknowledgement about how this might be so. The constant refrain that economics has become more mathematical over time should therefore be resisted, because it is more important to see how different metamathematical assumptions underpin parallel developments in the mathematisation of economists' market models. Co-existence of different techniques is therefore more apparent than the wholesale replacement of one technique by another. Economics is thus differently mathematised at one and the same time rather than being more or less mathematised at different moments of time. However, the image of economics becoming more mathematical over time is very important to justifications of the economics imperialism phenomenon, because within those justifications 'more mathematical' equates to 'more precision' in the underlying models, and it is the clamour for precision which leads the proponents of economics imperialism to claim that economics is fit to be treated as the universal social science. My next big book from my 'Rethinking the Market' project will therefore offer a brand new perspective on the economics imperialism phenomenon. Progress has slowed down over the last twelve months, as I have returned not only to full departmental duties as Deputy Head of Department for Research, but I have also been given responsibility for overseeing our REF submission. I have been working flat out on this whilst at the same time trying to manage the symptoms of my chronic neurological condition, and the same will also be true all the way through to September 2020 when I finally hand over the REF documents to the University. However, I already have 90% of the book drafted, and I will not envisage it taking me too much longer after the REF deadline to have sent the full version off to a publisher. Both Oxford University Press and Columbia University Press have asked me to keep them in mind when I make my final decision about who to publish with. It is currently looking like being a 150,000-word book. (2) My original intention had been to write the book about the economics imperialism phenomenon specifically in relation to the political science subfield of international political economy. There are still good reasons to do this in the future, but on reflection I thought that it was more important in the first instance to write a book of broader applicability for social scientists more generally. Moreover, this delay in writing the book specifically for international political economy scholars will allow a little more distance to develop between its likely publication date and a significant methodological dispute which erupted within the subject field at the beginning of the 2010s. It was never expressed in such terms, but this was a dispute about the acceptable limits of the encroachment of economists' market models to act as the theoretical underpinnings of all research in the subject field. In other words, it was all about the willingness of international political economy scholars to throw in their hand with economics imperialism, with those who argue for the adoption of mathematised market models doing so by using all of the standard arguments about greater theoretical precision as a means of forwarding their case. This has particularly been so for those specialising in the so-called 'open economy politics' approach to international political economy, who have invariably been the most vocal proponents of economics imperialism. Their pronouncements on behalf of economics imperialism have not focused in any way on how the underlying market models within economics have been contested on numerous metamathematical grounds and that the boundaries of valid proof-making are consequently anything other than fixed. This goes very much against the common presentation by the economics imperialists within international political economy of complete consensus amongst economists regarding faith in their market models. I am therefore in the position of being able in due course to engage the debate about economics imperialism amongst international political economists by bringing my project findings specifically into that subject field. Using what I have learnt about metamathematics it becomes possible to show that there are no stable methodological foundations for any of the different processes of mathematising economists' market models. Moreover, it is also possible to show that the most sophisticated mathematisation of economists' market models casts serious doubts on the validity of the proof-making which underpins less mathematically sophisticated treatments of the market mentality. However, in generally lacking the mathematical capabilities required for the former, it is the latter which act as the go-to models for the economics imperialists who practice the 'open economy politics' approach to international political economy. (3) In my initial application I promised to deliver another book on the use of Robinson Crusoe metaphors in the basic pedagogy of market models. As I needed to reorient my writing time during the three years of my funding to make space for the book on the global financial crisis that my interview panel asked me to produce, my Robinson Crusoe book will now have to be completed sometime after the end of the Fellowship. However, two articles on this element of my 'Rethinking the Market' research have already been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, and both have been well received by my academic peers. Their findings show that there is a much more complicated historiographical story than is normally told about how the idea of a Robinson Crusoe economy has come to be embedded as a tool for teaching basic theoretical principles in Econ 101 courses. Crusoe has been seized upon by principles writers in economics since the 1870s, as his existence in a state beyond society is thought to provide a context in which pure economic decision-making can flourish. At the very least, that is what the invocation of his desert island existence has brought to economic theory. Whilst the majority of Crusoe's life that is depicted in Defoe's original novel does indeed take place on the island, this is merely a staging post in the narrative designed to cast clearer light on the relationships in which he will be involved when he is joined on the island by other people and when, eventually, he (or, indeed, they) secure safe deliverance back home. As per my Journal of Cultural Economy article, though, it was a pedagogical trick of Rousseau's to reduce the whole of the meaningful action in the novel to that which took place when Crusoe lived in solitary confinement on the island. A deeper historical engagement with the themes of the novel centres its performative effects by contrast on the relationship between Crusoe and Friday. As per one of my New Political Economy articles, this relationship simply cannot be how it has been depicted in books on economic principles since it was first introduced there in the 1890s by Edgeworth. In the modern textbooks, Crusoe and Friday continue to learn how to live harmoniously in a two-person economy governed by pure market exchange and underpinned by formal equality under the law of contract. The novel, however, is a hymn to settler colonialism, where Crusoe's identity as a white English explorer translates instinctively in the right to subjugate Friday. In conducting this aspect of my research, I have been pushed further into the literary criticism literature than I could ever have imagined at the time of making my application, and I have learnt an awful lot about the relationship between Defoe and his fictional characterisations. The outer boundaries of my original project design have therefore expanded really rather significantly, as I have had to teach myself not only the techniques of the metamathematician but also the techniques of the literary critic. From the latter's perspective, it has become clear to me that Crusoe is not alone in acting as Crusoe does. Indeed, without any notable exceptions, all of the heroes of Defoe's novels are distinctly Crusoe-like to the extent that they share numerous of his defining traits. There is a small but important literature on Crusoe and economic theory, but none of it really looks beyond economics itself to animate its analysis. By contrast, I intend to set my book on the same relationship much more deeply within the literary criticism literature, hence adding considerably to the interdisciplinary results of my 'Rethinking the Market' project. I am sure that I can draw out in a more profound way the implications of beginning economics textbooks with the Robinson Crusoe economy by showing how Crusoe-like characteristics are shared across Defoe's various fictional heroes. This is a more challenging task, but it will better bring to the fore the imperial context in which Defoe wrote his novels and it will also better allow me to show how such assumptions remain present when teaching beginning students to think like economists by making them ask 'what would Crusoe do in these circumstances?' This in turn will extend my project findings further in the direction of connections with postcolonial critiques of economic theory. (4) I have added a concern for the legacies of empire to an additional new element of research which was unforeseen at the time that I made my application. Brexit was still a minority political pursuit at that time, and certainly not the all-encompassing political context that it is today. What eventually comes after Brexit following the end of the transition period will have such a profound effect on the way in which everyday lives are led in the UK, however, as well as so fundamentally changing the international market relationships in which the British economy will be embedded, that it was simply far too big an issue to ignore in my project research. I had to find a space for it in my 'Rethinking the Market' project, and I will continue to find a space for it in my future writing schedule. I have already added Brexit-based presentations to my Schools Days activities, in particular trying to draw out the relationship between pro-Brexit politics and an imperial nostalgia for a time in which Britain made markets in the way it unilaterally saw fit to do. I have also already published a preliminary piece on my Brexit research, which seeks to understand more about the pre-referendum political context by looking at the squabbles that took place over Michael Gove's preferred new history curriculum during his divisive tenure as Secretary of State for Education. The article focuses on the theme of 'belonging' in modern multicultural Britain and asks how the bonds of belonging are jeopardised when students are required to learn what it means to be British through the study of supposed 'heroes' of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperial mission. Over the next couple of years I intend to write a full-length book on the politics of Brexit to show how the same people who backed Gove's plan to make children of all backgrounds learn about Britishness through the perspective of white colonial heroes were invariably outspoken public supporters of the campaign to get the UK to leave the European Union. It has already become a subject of discussion that the Brexit mindset is informed by an imperial nostalgia, but nobody in the specialist literature has yet directly connected the vote to leave the European Union with the dispute over the school history curriculum. Given the extent to which the same people lined up in support of the Gove curriculum and in support of Brexit - not least Gove himself, of course - the EU referendum campaign was fought from the Leave side almost as if it was the second iteration of the so-called history wars which erupted as soon as the UK government changed in 2010. (5) I am very eager to eventually spend time writing another big book which will come directly out of my 'Rethinking the Market' research. There is an obvious language spill-over effect from economic theory into the political arena, and the most obvious transmission mechanism for this effect follows from the fact that the way in which we talk about everyday economic life mimics much of the vocabulary which underpins economic theory. Perhaps most particularly, modern economic theory has been founded on a naturalisation of market institutions, as if 'the economy' and 'the market' were coterminous entities. The language that is most often used to narrate experiences of everyday economic life also typically tends to reflect this particular market-based frame of reference. There are any number of basic elements of economic vocabulary which treat the fundamental economic experience as being that which belongs to the market realm: the ubiquity of the very concept of 'the market' is one prime example, but others are also to be found in concepts such as 'exchange', 'trade' and 'labour'. I have become increasingly interested during the course of my Fellowship with learning more about the historical context in which these concepts first entered into economic theory, so that I can understand how the concepts themselves have been infused with a particular historical experience. We might well be correct in making the assumption that economic conditions have changed out of all recognition since the earliest days of modern economic theory, but the fact that we use the same vocabulary today as we did back then means that remnants of the older historical context are still alive in our theoretical discussions about 'the economy' today. Much of the trailblazing work which delivered to us the conceptual vocabulary that we still use today arose against a specific historical backdrop. This was the intra-European struggle for empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It would be a mistake to think that the imprints of that struggle have been forever exorcised simply because international law now forbids the sorts of practices which led to empire in the first place. There are much less visible imprints that can be uncovered through historiographical study of the context out of which economic theories first arose, but just because they are less visible does not mean that they are any less important. I have already done some research in this regard on Adam Smith's most basic claims about 'the market', looking at the way in which these were influenced by his willingness to treat the Glasgow merchants of his day as role models for the new market rationality he saw developing around him. Smith was a critic of empire and a critic of the slave trade, but the Glasgow merchants of whom he spoke so fondly when relating the new market rationality to a commercial instinct were not any old merchants. They were specifically tobacco merchants, profiting from production that took place in Britain's North American colonies on the basis of slave-worked plantations. I have also undertaken similarly oriented research on David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, which remains an important touchstone both for the economic theory of trade and also for how political support for free trade is mobilised. Ricardo's mathematical model of comparative advantage redescribes in suitably abstract terms a trading relationship between Britain and Portugal which was forged during the European war over the Spanish succession and which was brought into balance through the triangular transatlantic trade route that took enslaved Africans to Brazil to work Portuguese gold mines and Brazilian gold to Britain to settle Portugal's trading debts. This preliminary work has convinced me that there is an important book to write on the relationship between, on the one hand, the time at which the central concepts of everyday economic discourse were first being developed and, on the other hand, the imperial economy which formed the backdrop of the conceptual innovation of this time. This is not a relationship that has received any attention thus far in the academic literature. But it promises to add a brand new dimension to contemporary objectives to decolonise knowledge of the economy by placing even the most fundamental aspects of our economic vocabulary under the microscope and encouraging reflection on the way in which we continue to inhabit language games that originally made sense only in relation to the imperial economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My present thinking is that I will write these future books in the following order: (1) the nearly completed book on the economics imperialism phenomenon and the mathematisation of the market model; (4) the Brexit book which ties the 2016 vote to leave the European Union to the preceding political battles over the school history curriculum; (3) the book on the influence of the Robinson Crusoe economy to the teaching of Econ 101 courses; (5) the book which seeks to place the development of market-based economic concepts within their original imperial context; and (2) the book on the economics imperialism phenomenon for a specifically international political economy audience. The findings that I have delivered from my 'Rethinking the Market' project show that there are lots of ways in which they are helping me to take my own research forward in the short and medium term. They have helped me to flesh out a whole body of work which will eventually appear on the back of the three years of funding that I was awarded for my Professorial Fellowship. The same findings have also so far been extremely well received by usually an interdisciplinary audience. This is very gratifying, and it is giving me additional confidence that they might be taken forward in interesting and innovative new ways in the future. I certainly have my fingers well and truly crossed that others will find as much to work with in my current findings as I have done. Those findings do not present a brand new language of the economy per se, but then it was never my intention that my Fellowship research would be capable of overturning a spectacularly well embedded tradition of thought. Had I set out in my original application with the promise to have replaced this tradition with one of my own then I fully expect that the funding would have been withheld on the grounds that I had set myself an unhittable target. However, my findings thus far do give substantial reasons for wishing to challenge what has become the standard acceptance of the economic language of 'the market'. They can therefore provide the grounding for lots of activist groups who wish to campaign for social rights to be protected when their continued reproduction appears to be at odds with extant market ideology. They can also begin to animate new academic research from those who would like to live in a world which differs in a fundamental fashion from today's market-obsessed existence. This was the limit of my ambition when I submitted my original application, and it still seems reasonable to believe that this ambition might be satisfied in the future. This looks as if it could be even more likely when all of the additional research enabled by my 'Rethinking the Market' project ultimately comes on-stream. |
| Sectors | Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/clusters/ipe/rethinkingthemarket |
| Description | Engagement with Corporate And Cultural Organisations on Inclusion and Diversity Issues Resulting from Wider Outreach Work |
| Organisation | British Film Institute (BFI) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | I have engaged in a number of events with Lloyds Bank and their clients about diversity and inclusion within their organisation, especially in relation to enhancing the career prospects of BAME colleagues. The conversations started following the publication of two national reports, the Parker Review and the McGregor Smith Review. The Parker Review focused on setting targets for BAME representation on the boards of British companies, whilst the McGregor Smith Review discussed organisational culture and what it means to work in an organisation whose culture is overwhelmingly white. The assumption in both instances is that internal labour markets need to be rethought, because they are failing BAME colleagues. I helped to organise and then participated in a day-long symposium with employees from Lloyds and Lloyds' business partners to discuss a wide range of inclusion and diversity issues. Lloyds are keen to continue these discussions so that further progress can be made on ideas about practical steps that can be taken in response to the 'Middle Agenda' initiated by the Black British Business Awards, again focused on the perception of malfunctioning internal labour markets for BAME colleagues. Ernst & Young have also approached me and my Department about the prospect of working more closely together on questions of retention and recruitment amongst BAME colleagues. This has developed into wider opportunities to work with Lloyds and, in particular, its Inclusion and Diversity division. It all results from their interest in the schools outreach work that I have been undertaking as a direct result of my project research, and how this might turn into something that will also serve the needs of their staff members. Further invitations have been forthcoming on the back of the success of this initiative with Lloyds to also now work with KPMG. In addition, I have been invited to lead a team from my Department to deliver the first ever explicitly schools outreach day to be run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in the summer of 2020. This will be organised to coincide with the organisation's 75th anniversary commemorations and will explore how Britain and, in particular, the British Empire, was responsible for the making and remaking of international markets. A new partnership has developed through my Colonial Hangover schools outreach project to bring RADA's Shakespeare Awards scheme to students in schools in low-HE participation areas in Coventry. Further schools outreach partnerships have also been developed with Lloyd's of London, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Film Institute. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are all working towards common goals, whilst sharing information from private and public sector alike. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but outcomes are expected to continue to flow long after the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Engagement with Corporate And Cultural Organisations on Inclusion and Diversity Issues Resulting from Wider Outreach Work |
| Organisation | Chatham House |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | I have engaged in a number of events with Lloyds Bank and their clients about diversity and inclusion within their organisation, especially in relation to enhancing the career prospects of BAME colleagues. The conversations started following the publication of two national reports, the Parker Review and the McGregor Smith Review. The Parker Review focused on setting targets for BAME representation on the boards of British companies, whilst the McGregor Smith Review discussed organisational culture and what it means to work in an organisation whose culture is overwhelmingly white. The assumption in both instances is that internal labour markets need to be rethought, because they are failing BAME colleagues. I helped to organise and then participated in a day-long symposium with employees from Lloyds and Lloyds' business partners to discuss a wide range of inclusion and diversity issues. Lloyds are keen to continue these discussions so that further progress can be made on ideas about practical steps that can be taken in response to the 'Middle Agenda' initiated by the Black British Business Awards, again focused on the perception of malfunctioning internal labour markets for BAME colleagues. Ernst & Young have also approached me and my Department about the prospect of working more closely together on questions of retention and recruitment amongst BAME colleagues. This has developed into wider opportunities to work with Lloyds and, in particular, its Inclusion and Diversity division. It all results from their interest in the schools outreach work that I have been undertaking as a direct result of my project research, and how this might turn into something that will also serve the needs of their staff members. Further invitations have been forthcoming on the back of the success of this initiative with Lloyds to also now work with KPMG. In addition, I have been invited to lead a team from my Department to deliver the first ever explicitly schools outreach day to be run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in the summer of 2020. This will be organised to coincide with the organisation's 75th anniversary commemorations and will explore how Britain and, in particular, the British Empire, was responsible for the making and remaking of international markets. A new partnership has developed through my Colonial Hangover schools outreach project to bring RADA's Shakespeare Awards scheme to students in schools in low-HE participation areas in Coventry. Further schools outreach partnerships have also been developed with Lloyd's of London, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Film Institute. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are all working towards common goals, whilst sharing information from private and public sector alike. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but outcomes are expected to continue to flow long after the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Engagement with Corporate And Cultural Organisations on Inclusion and Diversity Issues Resulting from Wider Outreach Work |
| Organisation | International Slavery Museum |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | I have engaged in a number of events with Lloyds Bank and their clients about diversity and inclusion within their organisation, especially in relation to enhancing the career prospects of BAME colleagues. The conversations started following the publication of two national reports, the Parker Review and the McGregor Smith Review. The Parker Review focused on setting targets for BAME representation on the boards of British companies, whilst the McGregor Smith Review discussed organisational culture and what it means to work in an organisation whose culture is overwhelmingly white. The assumption in both instances is that internal labour markets need to be rethought, because they are failing BAME colleagues. I helped to organise and then participated in a day-long symposium with employees from Lloyds and Lloyds' business partners to discuss a wide range of inclusion and diversity issues. Lloyds are keen to continue these discussions so that further progress can be made on ideas about practical steps that can be taken in response to the 'Middle Agenda' initiated by the Black British Business Awards, again focused on the perception of malfunctioning internal labour markets for BAME colleagues. Ernst & Young have also approached me and my Department about the prospect of working more closely together on questions of retention and recruitment amongst BAME colleagues. This has developed into wider opportunities to work with Lloyds and, in particular, its Inclusion and Diversity division. It all results from their interest in the schools outreach work that I have been undertaking as a direct result of my project research, and how this might turn into something that will also serve the needs of their staff members. Further invitations have been forthcoming on the back of the success of this initiative with Lloyds to also now work with KPMG. In addition, I have been invited to lead a team from my Department to deliver the first ever explicitly schools outreach day to be run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in the summer of 2020. This will be organised to coincide with the organisation's 75th anniversary commemorations and will explore how Britain and, in particular, the British Empire, was responsible for the making and remaking of international markets. A new partnership has developed through my Colonial Hangover schools outreach project to bring RADA's Shakespeare Awards scheme to students in schools in low-HE participation areas in Coventry. Further schools outreach partnerships have also been developed with Lloyd's of London, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Film Institute. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are all working towards common goals, whilst sharing information from private and public sector alike. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but outcomes are expected to continue to flow long after the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Engagement with Corporate And Cultural Organisations on Inclusion and Diversity Issues Resulting from Wider Outreach Work |
| Organisation | KPMG International Cooperative |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | I have engaged in a number of events with Lloyds Bank and their clients about diversity and inclusion within their organisation, especially in relation to enhancing the career prospects of BAME colleagues. The conversations started following the publication of two national reports, the Parker Review and the McGregor Smith Review. The Parker Review focused on setting targets for BAME representation on the boards of British companies, whilst the McGregor Smith Review discussed organisational culture and what it means to work in an organisation whose culture is overwhelmingly white. The assumption in both instances is that internal labour markets need to be rethought, because they are failing BAME colleagues. I helped to organise and then participated in a day-long symposium with employees from Lloyds and Lloyds' business partners to discuss a wide range of inclusion and diversity issues. Lloyds are keen to continue these discussions so that further progress can be made on ideas about practical steps that can be taken in response to the 'Middle Agenda' initiated by the Black British Business Awards, again focused on the perception of malfunctioning internal labour markets for BAME colleagues. Ernst & Young have also approached me and my Department about the prospect of working more closely together on questions of retention and recruitment amongst BAME colleagues. This has developed into wider opportunities to work with Lloyds and, in particular, its Inclusion and Diversity division. It all results from their interest in the schools outreach work that I have been undertaking as a direct result of my project research, and how this might turn into something that will also serve the needs of their staff members. Further invitations have been forthcoming on the back of the success of this initiative with Lloyds to also now work with KPMG. In addition, I have been invited to lead a team from my Department to deliver the first ever explicitly schools outreach day to be run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in the summer of 2020. This will be organised to coincide with the organisation's 75th anniversary commemorations and will explore how Britain and, in particular, the British Empire, was responsible for the making and remaking of international markets. A new partnership has developed through my Colonial Hangover schools outreach project to bring RADA's Shakespeare Awards scheme to students in schools in low-HE participation areas in Coventry. Further schools outreach partnerships have also been developed with Lloyd's of London, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Film Institute. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are all working towards common goals, whilst sharing information from private and public sector alike. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but outcomes are expected to continue to flow long after the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Engagement with Corporate And Cultural Organisations on Inclusion and Diversity Issues Resulting from Wider Outreach Work |
| Organisation | Lloyd's Register |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | I have engaged in a number of events with Lloyds Bank and their clients about diversity and inclusion within their organisation, especially in relation to enhancing the career prospects of BAME colleagues. The conversations started following the publication of two national reports, the Parker Review and the McGregor Smith Review. The Parker Review focused on setting targets for BAME representation on the boards of British companies, whilst the McGregor Smith Review discussed organisational culture and what it means to work in an organisation whose culture is overwhelmingly white. The assumption in both instances is that internal labour markets need to be rethought, because they are failing BAME colleagues. I helped to organise and then participated in a day-long symposium with employees from Lloyds and Lloyds' business partners to discuss a wide range of inclusion and diversity issues. Lloyds are keen to continue these discussions so that further progress can be made on ideas about practical steps that can be taken in response to the 'Middle Agenda' initiated by the Black British Business Awards, again focused on the perception of malfunctioning internal labour markets for BAME colleagues. Ernst & Young have also approached me and my Department about the prospect of working more closely together on questions of retention and recruitment amongst BAME colleagues. This has developed into wider opportunities to work with Lloyds and, in particular, its Inclusion and Diversity division. It all results from their interest in the schools outreach work that I have been undertaking as a direct result of my project research, and how this might turn into something that will also serve the needs of their staff members. Further invitations have been forthcoming on the back of the success of this initiative with Lloyds to also now work with KPMG. In addition, I have been invited to lead a team from my Department to deliver the first ever explicitly schools outreach day to be run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in the summer of 2020. This will be organised to coincide with the organisation's 75th anniversary commemorations and will explore how Britain and, in particular, the British Empire, was responsible for the making and remaking of international markets. A new partnership has developed through my Colonial Hangover schools outreach project to bring RADA's Shakespeare Awards scheme to students in schools in low-HE participation areas in Coventry. Further schools outreach partnerships have also been developed with Lloyd's of London, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Film Institute. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are all working towards common goals, whilst sharing information from private and public sector alike. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but outcomes are expected to continue to flow long after the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Engagement with Corporate And Cultural Organisations on Inclusion and Diversity Issues Resulting from Wider Outreach Work |
| Organisation | Royal Academy of Dramatic Art |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | I have engaged in a number of events with Lloyds Bank and their clients about diversity and inclusion within their organisation, especially in relation to enhancing the career prospects of BAME colleagues. The conversations started following the publication of two national reports, the Parker Review and the McGregor Smith Review. The Parker Review focused on setting targets for BAME representation on the boards of British companies, whilst the McGregor Smith Review discussed organisational culture and what it means to work in an organisation whose culture is overwhelmingly white. The assumption in both instances is that internal labour markets need to be rethought, because they are failing BAME colleagues. I helped to organise and then participated in a day-long symposium with employees from Lloyds and Lloyds' business partners to discuss a wide range of inclusion and diversity issues. Lloyds are keen to continue these discussions so that further progress can be made on ideas about practical steps that can be taken in response to the 'Middle Agenda' initiated by the Black British Business Awards, again focused on the perception of malfunctioning internal labour markets for BAME colleagues. Ernst & Young have also approached me and my Department about the prospect of working more closely together on questions of retention and recruitment amongst BAME colleagues. This has developed into wider opportunities to work with Lloyds and, in particular, its Inclusion and Diversity division. It all results from their interest in the schools outreach work that I have been undertaking as a direct result of my project research, and how this might turn into something that will also serve the needs of their staff members. Further invitations have been forthcoming on the back of the success of this initiative with Lloyds to also now work with KPMG. In addition, I have been invited to lead a team from my Department to deliver the first ever explicitly schools outreach day to be run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in the summer of 2020. This will be organised to coincide with the organisation's 75th anniversary commemorations and will explore how Britain and, in particular, the British Empire, was responsible for the making and remaking of international markets. A new partnership has developed through my Colonial Hangover schools outreach project to bring RADA's Shakespeare Awards scheme to students in schools in low-HE participation areas in Coventry. Further schools outreach partnerships have also been developed with Lloyd's of London, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Film Institute. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are all working towards common goals, whilst sharing information from private and public sector alike. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but outcomes are expected to continue to flow long after the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Engagement with Local Historical and Cultural Societies on Imperial Walking Tours |
| Organisation | Coventry UK City of Culture |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | My research team has started to develop alternative walking tours of towns and cities in the historic county of Warwickshire - Birmingham, Coventry, Leamington Spa and Warwick campus - all with a Colonial Hangover theme to link them to other project outreach and impact activities. A lot of effort has already gone into developing an Imperial Leamington Walking Tour, designed to show how the quintessentially English market town of Leamington Spa - famous for its 'Royal' designation and the baths which attracted Victorian nobility for its supposed healing properties - looks like it does only because of the recycling of money through the imperial economy. The built environment of the town owes much to settler colonialism and the appropriation of local economic potential to serve the financial interests of the British throughout the period of Empire, but this is a story that remains generally untold through the 'blue plaque' tours of the town and most of its official guides. To rethink the market in this context is to rethink the built environment of the town through the perspective of how an imperial market structure returned economic surpluses to be invested in grand homes and civic buildings. We chose Leamington as our first location because this is where most of our undergraduates live for two out of their three years when studying at Warwick. We are hoping to develop the technology which will allow our own students to become Imperial Leamington tour guides for their family and friends. Following discussions with Coventry City of Culture 2021, we are acting upon their request to develop a similar imperial walking tour of their city, which also just so happens to be the city within which the University of Warwick is located. This might well prove to be the most difficult of the four tours to develop, as so much of the built environment of the city had to be replaced after the infamous November 1940 bombing raids. The most obvious physical remnants to riches secured through settler colonialism might therefore have been long since lost. But we are currently - March 2020 - progressing very well with the underpinning research to show how Coventry was built through the imperial economy. Rethinking the market in this context is once again about rethinking the city's built environment through the perspective of how an imperial market structure returned economic surpluses, but this time mainly through the effects that this had on its companies' financial viability. Some very interesting stories are already emerging in this regard. One example is how the silk weavers guild organised to overturn the previous reliance on indentured labour in the city, so that both a legal and a psychological distance could be enforced with the enslavement of workers on British-owned plantations in other parts of the imperial textiles economy. Another example is how Coventry's entry first into the bicycles market and then into the automotive market revolved around commercial relationships with the British owners of rubber plantations around the Empire. The City of Culture celebrations do not begin until 2021, so we still have some time to develop our walking tour properly before launching it. A good start has also been made to developing an Imperial Birmingham Walking Tour, which currently exists in virtual form. This picks out landmark buildings in the city centre and reveals the hidden history that links the city to international market-making undertaken in the name of Empire. We have plans to construct a similar walking tour for the University of Warwick campus, which can then become an activity not only for students and academic staff, but also for all those people who visit the campus for conferences. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are responsible for developing all of the content for all of the tours. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, but the tours will be published online in open access format in due course. |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | Lecture Series for the Civil Service Fast Streamers' Seminar, 'Exploring Economics' |
| Organisation | Her Majesty's Civil Service |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | I have received what will now be repeat invitations to travel down to London to deliver sessions to the Civil Service Fast Streamers' Seminar, 'Exploring Economics'. This is an after-work seminar where attendance amongst the fast streamers is entirely voluntary. Whilst they open up the sessions to all members of the civil service, they have pitched it primarily to those who are relatively newly in post and whose own economics education at university is likely to have ended very recently. The invitations I have received have been to tell them about major thinkers in the history of economic thought who will not have appeared in their training and also major traditions of analysis which they are unlikely to have learnt about on their own economics degree programmes. I have been asked to provide them with additional intellectual resources with which they might approach the real-world puzzles which they are set on a daily basis at work, so that they might avoid becoming prey to the groupthink which develops when everyone is encouraged through their academic training to think only in one way. This is exactly in line with the research on my 'Rethinking the Market' project, so they have been very easy invitations to say 'yes' to. The goal for the future is to see whether I can roll them out into a full lecture series. |
| Collaborator Contribution | My partners have hosted the events and provided me with a ready-made audience, but I am solely responsible for writing and delivering the presentations. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, and I will only be aware of the outcomes when they are reported to me in future. |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | Tax Justice Network Campaign Against the Competitiveness Agenda |
| Organisation | Tax Justice Network |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | I hosted at Warwick the inaugural meeting of various activists brought together by the Tax Justice Network to campaign against the competitiveness agenda and, in particular, against strategies to hollow out tax revenues by appealing to the notion of tax competitiveness in standard market-based language. A number of my PhD students have also been involved in the collaboration. I have been writing blog posts for the Tax Justice Network's Finance Curse blog site for a number of years, as they hope that my Fellowship research can provide both historical and historiographical detail to underwrite their campaign. They are currently talking about setting up a fully-fledged think tank to operate in this field, and if that comes to fruition then once again I will be involved. |
| Collaborator Contribution | This is a joint venture, so we are all aiming for the same goal. |
| Impact | Current outputs relate to various blog posts that I have written, all of which have been recorded under the Publications section. To briefly recap: (i) 'Friedrich List's Role in the Pre-History of Modern-Day Competitiveness Thinking', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 11.04.16, http://foolsgold.international/friedrich-list-pre-history-modern-day-competitiveness-thinking/. (ii) 'Thorstein Veblen: The Thinker Who Saw Through the Competitiveness Agenda', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 29.02.16, http://foolsgold.international/thorstein-veblen-the-thinker-who-saw-through-the-competitiveness-agenda/. (iii) 'How Pursuing 'Competitiveness' Crushes Labor and Lowers Growth', Naked Capitalism Blog Post, 10.11.15, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/11/how-pursuing-competitiveness-crushes-labor-and-lowers-growth.html. (iv) 'The Anti-Growth Dynamics of the Competitiveness Agenda', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 02.10.15, http://foolsgold.international/the-anti-growth-dynamics-of-the-competitiveness-agenda/. (v) 'George Stigler and the 'Noble Lie' of the Perfectly Competitive Economy', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 08.09.15, http://foolsgold.international/george-stigler-noble-lie-perfectly-competitive-economy/. (vi) 'Milton Friedman's Grand Denial of the Social Responsibility of Corporations', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 31.07.15, http://foolsgold.international/milton-friedmans-grand-denial-of-the-social-responsibility-of-corporations/. (vii) 'Paul Samuelson and the Provision of Collective Consumption Goods: A Rejection of Competitiveness Logic', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 23.07.15, http://foolsgold.international/paul-samuelson-and-the-provision-of-collective-consumption-goods-a-rejection-of-competitiveness-logic/. (viii) 'David Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage: Exploring the Hidden Historical Underside of Modern-Day Competitiveness Discourse', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 15.07.15, http://foolsgold.international/david-ricardos-theory-of-comparative-advantage-exploring-the-hidden-historical-underside-of-modern-day-competitiveness-discourse/. (ix) 'Adam Smith and the British East India Company: A Perspective on Competitiveness', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 27.04.15, http://foolsgold.international/adam-smith-british-east-india-company-competitiveness-perspective/. (x) 'Slot Machine Man and the Origins of 'Competitiveness' Discourse', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 13.04.15, http://foolsgold.international/slot-machine-man-and-the-origins-of-competitiveness-discourse/. (xi) 'Stefano Pessina and the Two Sides of Speaking Up for Business', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 27.03.15, http://foolsgold.international/stefano-pessina-and-the-two-sides-of-speaking-up-for-business/. (xii) 'The False Promise of Corporation Tax Cuts', Fools' Gold Blog Post, 12.03.15, http://foolsgold.international/the-false-promise-of-corporation-tax-cuts/. These posts are currently helping writer, journalist and Tax Justice Network activist Nicholas Shaxson write his new book, The Finance Curse. |
| Start Year | 2015 |
| Description | University of Warwick Department of Politics and International Studies Widening Participation Project, the Colonial Hangover |
| Organisation | University of Warwick |
| Department | Department of Politics and International Studies |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This is a collaboration that I have entered into with my Department's Widening Participation Officer, Shahnaz Akhter. We have set up a schools outreach project that fills in some of the blanks that the national curriculum introduces into school-age students' knowledge of both the history and the afterlives of the British Empire. It challenges them in particular to connect the history of the British Empire to the imprints of the imperial legacy that still impact in some way on their lives today, especially around the issue of how international market-making took place in the past and still takes place today. Other project partners include the Warwick Arts Centre, the Belgrade Theatre Coventry and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We are running this project together with the support of Departmental resources. |
| Impact | There are no outputs as such, and outcomes are ongoing. Indeed, given the commitment of my Department, they will be ongoing well beyond the official end date of my Fellowship. |
| Start Year | 2015 |
| Description | 'Adam Smith, Enlightenment Sceptic of Empire', Talk delivered at the Nuneaton Branch of the Historical Association, King Edward's College, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, November 14th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 40 people attended an event of the Nuneaton Branch of the Historical Association, at which I had been asked to talk about project research related to Adam Smith's view on Empire. Amongst the audience were members of teaching staff at King Edward's College, Nuneaton, and they invited me to give further talks to their sixth formers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Annual Tax Summary: Speculative Design Workshop', Participant at the SPERI/UAL/ESRC Workshop, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, Elephant and Castle, London, March 19th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | Participation in discussions surrounding the Annual Tax Summary introduced under George Osborne's Chancellorship. Plans for further engagement in the future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Brexit Threats and the Future of UK Financial Regulation', Paper presented at the Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, Paris, November 9th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I was invited to speak to an audience at the Sorbonne in Paris on the thorny issue of UK financial regulation in the post-Brexit world, and in particular about the potential re-imagination of the City of London as a formal offshore financial centre. The talk led to a very animated discussion, and lots of important debate in the question and answer session. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Brexit and Democracy', Sixth Form Forum talk delivered to Years 12 and 13 at Sir John Talbot's School, Whitchurch, Shropshire, October 2nd 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | I was invited back to my old school once again to talk to their sixth formers about a matter of political urgency that has been exercising their debates during 'School Forum' sessions. Perhaps as was only to be expected given current circumstances, this issue was Brexit. More particularly, it was the extent to which young people feel locked out of discussions around what should happen next, and how they see themselves as helpless bystanders watching other people determine their futures for them, whilst they have no say in the matter. I am not so sure whether I changed anyone's opinions per se, because Brexit does not seem to be the sort of issue on which people change their minds in a routine manner. But - for the more animated students at least - they confirmed that I had given them extra reason to believe what they already believed, as well as extra confidence to speak their mind in future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Brexit and Economic Justice: From Britain's EU Referendum to Empire 2.0', Keynote Lecture delivered to the Rethinking the EU Conference, Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany, June 9th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | 120 people were present to hear my keynote lecture. There was considerable discussion afterwards regarding what is currently happening in British politics at the moment over Brexit and the UK's most likely future relationship with the single market. These conversations spilled over into the remainder of the conference, and have also continued online subsequently. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Brexit and the Economically 'Left Behind'', Talk to the Grimshaw Club Student Society, London School of Economics Students Union. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 'Brexit and the Economically 'Left Behind'', Talk to the Grimshaw Club Student Society, London School of Economics Students Union, March 23rd 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Buccaneering Britain', Paper presented to the Seminar on 'Race, Class and Nation in Modern Britain', Queen Mary University of London, June 19th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 30 people attended a research seminar on 'Race, Class and Nation in Modern Britain'. I was invited on the basis of some of the publications that have arisen from my project research. Lots of discussion followed. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Crusoe, Friday and the Homo Economicus of Econ 101 Courses', Paper presented to the Department of Politics, Goldsmiths College, University of London, February 13th 2019. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I was able to give a second talk on the day of my visit to Goldsmiths, this time with more of a mix between academics and students in the audience. I presented on some of my completed project research, and was very gratified to hear both students and staff saying that their opinions had been reshaped. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | 'Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Pedagogy' - London School of Economics Research Cluster Seminar Paper |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Paper presented to the International Political Economy and Public Policy Research Cluster, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, March 22nd 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'David Hilbert and the Mathematisation of the Market Model', Paper presented to the Political Economy Research Centre General Seminar Series, Goldsmiths College, University of London, February 13th 2019. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I delivered an interdisciplinary seminar on some of my still unfolding project research at Goldsmiths College, University of London. A very interesting discussion followed, showing how historiographical approaches to the evolution of economic theory are likely to differ depending on which discipline you use as your access point to those debates. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | 'Decolonising Political Economy Concepts, Step One - 'The Market': Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks' - Newcastle General Departmental Seminar |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | General Departmental Seminar, Department of Politics, Newcastle University, March 8th 2017 - 40 academic members of staff and PhD students were in attendance. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Decolonising the School Curriculum in an Age of Political Polarisation', paper presented with Shahnaz Akhter at the PAIS Annual Research Conference, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Academic conference, with around 20 people in attendance at the panel. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | 'Discussant for Liam Stanley's book launch: Britain Alone - Hosted by Sheffield Political Economy Institute' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Book launch discussion, with around 50 people in the call and a further 200 who have subsequently watched the live stream. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://player.sheffield.ac.uk/events/book-launch-britain-alone-liam-stanley |
| Description | 'Discussant to Huw Macartney: 'All Bark and No Bite: Bank Culture and the Political Economy of Fines', Work in Progress Workshop, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'Discussant to Huw Macartney: 'All Bark and No Bite: Bank Culture and the Political Economy of Fines', Work in Progress Workshop, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, June 16th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Fostering Diversity through Schools Outreach', Talk delivered to the Lloyds Banking Group Inclusion and Diversity Division's Future Leaders Event on BAME Experiences of the Workplace, The Shard, London. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 'Fostering Diversity through Schools Outreach', Talk delivered to the Lloyds Banking Group Inclusion and Diversity Division's Future Leaders Event on BAME Experiences of the Workplace, The Shard, London, October 31st 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Foundational Stories and Persistent Myths of Liberal Economic Theory', Keynote address delivered to the International Philosophy Politics Economics Conference, Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 'Foundational Stories and Persistent Myths of Liberal Economic Theory', Keynote address delivered to the International Philosophy Politics Economics Conference, Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany, April 23rd 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Imperial Fantasies and Marginalist Economics: Crusoe, Friday and the Myths on which Economics Textbooks Stand', Paper presented to the Global Political Economy Research Group Seminar Series, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'Imperial Fantasies and Marginalist Economics: Crusoe, Friday and the Myths on which Economics Textbooks Stand', Paper presented to the Global Political Economy Research Group Seminar Series, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, May 31st 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'In Conversation: Ben Rosamond Talks to Matthew Watson about The Market', Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, May 18th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | A talk about my new book derived from project-related research. It is now taught on the MA Programme in International Political Economy at the University of Copenhagen as one of the three books that students really need to familiarise themselves with in the whole history of the subject field of IPE. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'In Conversation: Shahnaz Akhter Interviews Matthew Watson about the Colonial Hangover Project', Coventry Belgrade Mela, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, July 21st 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The discussion - as part of the Coventry Belgrade Mela showcasing South Asian culture in the UK - was live streamed by Belgrade Theatre over Facebook. I then undertook some media interviews. I was gratified by how many people said that the discussion would cause them to think anew about matters related to the connection between local places and global markets originally enacted through the experience of Empire. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Literary Themes and Economic Models: The Novels of Daniel Defoe and the Framing of Market Agency', Paper presented to the Work in Progress Workshop, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'Literary Themes and Economic Models: The Novels of Daniel Defoe and the Framing of Market Agency', Paper presented to the Work in Progress Workshop, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, June 15th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Machonomics and the Politics of Inequality', Paper presented at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Glasgow. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'Machonomics and the Politics of Inequality', Paper presented at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Glasgow, April 11th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Memorialisation through Speech: The Politics of Apologising for the British Empire', Lecture delivered to the Schools Outreach Event 'The Politics of Memorialisation' at the British Museum, London, December 18th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 140 students from a variety of partner schools from around the country attended a special Schools Day event organised by my Department at the British Museum in London. Some very lively debates ensued following my lecture on the justification for apologising for the British Empire, and the schools involved have all reported back that it has had a very profound - and uniformly positive - effect on their students' thinking and willingness to express themselves politically. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'My Journey from Sir John Talbot's to being a University Professor', Sixth Form Forum talk delivered to Years 11, 12 and 13 at Sir John Talbot's School, Whitchurch, Shropshire, May 22nd 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | I went back to my old school - which is in a markedly low-participation area when it comes to university attendance - to talk to them about the path that I had followed from being a student at their school to becoming a university professor. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Parliament Square's Statues', Short talk given to our Shakespeare Bronze Awards Day Year 10 students, June 29th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 60 Year 11 students attended the next one of our events culminating in their Shakespeare Bronze Award. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Restating the State of the Discipline', Participation in the 1st Annual International Relations Roundtable, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'Restating the State of the Discipline', Participation in the 1st Annual International Relations Roundtable, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, March 23rd 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'Ricardo's Free Market Models and the Pre-History of Development Economics', Paper presented at the inaugural event with the Balsillie School of International Affairs between the University of Waterloo Political Economy Group and the PAIS International Political Economy Research Cluster |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 70 people attended the dual-location Zoom meeting, with a high level of Q&A afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | 'The 'History Wars': How Should the History of the British Empire be Taught in Schools?', Lecture delivered to Years 12 at King Edward VI College, Nuneaton, March 9th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 120 sixth formers at King Edward's College, Nuneaton were invited to the talk that I gave at their school. This has developed into a longer-lasting relationship, with enrichment sessions being organised around related themes. Students from the school subsequently entered our annual Colonial Hangover competition, and teachers have reported a greater degree of interest subsequently across history and politics classes in issues related to the international market-making practices of Empire. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The British Empire and the 'History Wars' over the English School Curriculum', Lecture delivered to the Colonial Hangover Day, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 'The British Empire and the 'History Wars' over the English School Curriculum', Lecture delivered to the Colonial Hangover Day, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, January 26th 2018. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Colonial Hangover Project: What Should Our Instinctive Response to the British Empire Be Today?', Opening lecture delivered to the Shakespeare Bronze Awards Day for Year 10 students run in conjunction with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, June 15th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | I gave the introductory keynote lecture to a day-long event my Department runs in association with the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art. This allows students from traditionally low-HE participation areas to study for RADA's Shakespeare Awards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The History Curriculum in English Schools: What Have Our Undergraduates Been Taught About the British Empire?', Paper presented in the Pecha Kucha format to the West Midlands IPE Workshop, University of Warwick, March 23rd 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a new initiative designed to bring International Political Economy scholars located in various West Midlands universities together in one research-oriented meeting. This will now become an annual event. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Imperial Politics of the Built Environment', Lecture given to the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 'The Imperial Politics of the Built Environment', Lecture given to the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick, August 8th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Global Apologies', Lecture/discussion session presented to the Year 12 students of the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick, August 2nd 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Year 12 students from around the country gained selection via a competitive process to study on our Sutton Trust Summer School stream at Warwick entitled the Colonial Hangover. They reported an increased aspiration to aim high in their university choices, as well as an increased interest to place what they had learnt in the Summer School into conversation with their A-level curriculum. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Imperial Commemoration', Lecture/discussion session presented to the Year 12 students of the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick, July 30th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Year 12 students from around the country gained selection via a competitive process to study on our Sutton Trust Summer School stream at Warwick entitled the Colonial Hangover. They reported an increased aspiration to aim high in their university choices, as well as an increased interest to place what they had learnt in the Summer School into conversation with their A-level curriculum. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Imperial Names', Lecture given to the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 'The Politics of Imperial Names', Lecture given to the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick, August 8th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Imperial Names', Opening Keynote Address, Colonial Hangover Conference for Widening Participation and Undergraduate Students, University of Warwick. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 'The Politics of Imperial Names', Opening Keynote Address, Colonial Hangover Conference for Widening Participation and Undergraduate Students, University of Warwick, June 30th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Statues (in Coventry)', Widening Participation school visit talk delivered to Year 11 students at Lyng Hall School, Coventry, October 19th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 20 students who had undertaken the Shakespeare Awards with us invited me back to their school to talk to them specifically about statues in Coventry. They went away determined to do more research of their own about who gets to appear on statues in their city and, crucially, given the devastation of the city in the November 1940 bombing raids, why their city's statues do not resemble the plethora of commemorations of settler colonists and military men who seem to dominate statues elsewhere. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Statues', Lecture delivered to our Coventry and Leamington Spa Widening Participation Year 10 students on their Houses of Parliament visit, Portcullis House, Westminster, July 10th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | This was the final part of our three-stage activity for academic year 2017-2018 in association with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and their Shakespeare Awards scheme. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Politics of Statues', Lecture delivered twice to the University of Birmingham School Sixth-Form Applicants Open Day, Birmingham, July 11th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 80 students over the two talks heard me speak. Importantly, so did a number of teachers from the school, who reported the intention to introduce more content of a similar nature to their enrichment lessons in the future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Postcolonial Writing Back to the Robinson Crusoe Economy', Masterclass Lecture and Question and Answer Session delivered to the Department of European and International Studies, King's College London, February 14th 2019. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I was able to explore new angles on some of my published project research in front of an audience who had been attracted to a seminar series on decolonising the curriculum. I gave a version of one of my papers on the continued significance of 'Crusoe' and 'Friday' metaphors to the basic pedagogy of orthodox Econ 101 courses, but exploring it from the literary criticism angle of the postcolonial writing back to established 'classics' of the English language novel. The resulting discussion was fascinating, and often a real eye-opener - it seems - for all concerned. New strategies for innovative teaching methods are now being discussed with colleagues from King's. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | 'The Said, the Unsaid and the Unsayable in Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage', Paper presented to the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, May 17th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Formal academic paper on project research delivered to c.30 people at the University of Copenhagen. Much interesting discussion ensued immediately after the session, and this has continued virtually in the period of time since then. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'The Storytelling Dimension of Neoclassical Models of Market Exchange: Crusoe, Friday and the Myth of Agential Equality', Paper presented to the Political Economy Research Group Seminar Series, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'The Storytelling Dimension of Neoclassical Models of Market Exchange: Crusoe, Friday and the Myth of Agential Equality', Paper presented to the Political Economy Research Group Seminar Series, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, May 16th 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | 'To What Extent is Empire Still With Us Today?', Lecture/discussion session presented to the Year 12 students of the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick, July 30th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Year 12 students from around the country gained selection via a competitive process to study on our Sutton Trust Summer School stream at Warwick entitled the Colonial Hangover. They reported an increased aspiration to aim high in their university choices, as well as an increased interest to place what they had learnt in the Summer School into conversation with their A-level curriculum. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | 'Windrush, Brexit and the Racialised Language of British History', Presentation delivered at the Lloyds Bank Inclusion and Diversity Division event commemorating Black History Month, 'A Mile in My Shoes: The B in BAME', Chatham House, St James's Square, London, October 23rd 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | 150 members of Lloyds staff were invited to their Black History Month event organised under the auspices of their Inclusion and Diversity division. I spoke about white privilege and how it affects them on a day-to-day basis in both the internal and external markets in which they operate. I was very gratified by how well my speech was received, and also in relation to the energised discussions which carried on until late into the evening at the behest of the participants amongst Lloyds staff. Participants reported to me that they had learnt lots that was new and that they were going to seek to apply this new knowledge - plus its wider implications - in their behaviour in future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Adam Smith and Me, the British East India Company and Me |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 40 school-age students attended the launch of the Colonial Hangover project |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Adam Smith on Empire |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Lecture plus Question and Answer Session, Warwick Global Development Society, University of Warwick, December 8th 2016 - 70 students in attendance |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | After-Show Discussion, Dumbshow's 'Electric Dreams' (Camden People's Theatre, London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On May 6th 2015 I participated as one of the panel members for the after-show discussion held by the Dumbshow Theatre Group following a performance of their new play, 'Electric Dreams', at the Camden People's Theatre, London. This was a play that took shape during a two-week residency at the University of Warwick in January 2015 and for which I was able to offer advice on the political content of the script. I appeared on the after-show discussion panel alongside Michael Bryher (Director/Actor/Writer, Dumbshow), Nicola Cutcher (Actor/Writer, Dumbshow) and Ryan Shorthouse (Chief Executive, Bright Blue Think Tank). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://electricdreamsdumbshow.tumblr.com/post/125174653356/post-show-talk-at-camden-peoples-theatre-... |
| Description | Black British History and the National Curriculum in English Schools |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Talk delivered to the Humanities Society at the Joseph Chamberlain College, Birmingham, October 6th 2016 - 65 students plus 8 teachers in attendance |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Chair and Introductory Comments at the Book Launch of Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts's Handbook of the International Political Economy of Gender, University of Warwick, April 24th 2018. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a book launch for a new addition on to a Handbook Series which I co-edit. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Closing Roundtable Participant at Tax Justice Network Annual Research Conference (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | On June 26th 2015 I was one of the participants on the closing roundtable of the Tax Justice Network's Annual Research Conference, 'Should Nation States Compete?'. The roundtable was entitled, 'The Competitiveness Conundrum', and the other participants were Will Davies (Goldsmith's University, London), Ronen Palan (City University, London) and Naomi Fowler (Tax Justice Network). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Paper presented to the IPE Masterclass, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, October 27th 2016 - nigh-on 200 undergraduates and a handful of postgraduate students were in attendance |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Textbook Economics Pedagogy |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Presentation delivered at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Baltimore, MA, February 24th 2017 - 40 conference participants were present |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Department of Politics and International Studies Post-Election Roundtable (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On May 12th 2015 I appeared on the PAIS Post-Election Roundtable in my Department. This event was run as part of the Festival of Social Sciences held to celebrate the University's 50th Anniversary. I was invited to speak about the economic and welfare dimensions of the General Election campaign and the economic and welfare implications of the result. I was on the panel alongside my professorial colleagues Wyn Grant, Mike Smith, Richard Aldrich and Shirin Rai. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/ipe/rethinkingthemarket/publications... |
| Description | Discussant to the Panel 'Exploring Alternative Growth Models' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 30 participants at SPERI conference, Sheffield |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Discussion with the Performance Artist, Victoria Melody (Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This was a one-to-one discussion, as Victoria was looking for advice on how she might be able to conceptualise the market relationship that will feature prominently in her next project. She has a three-year plan to work on a show that attempts to trace the origins of the human hair used in the increasingly lucrative western market for hair extensions. We have not had further contact since the original meeting in November 2013, although I was told by Victoria at the time that this is the normal way in which she works. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| Description | General Departmental Seminar Presentation (Oxford) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On November 23rd 2015 I delivered a paper to the General Departmental Seminar of the Department of Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. The paper is entitled, 'Exploring Ricardo's Silences: Re-Historicising the Theory of Comparative Advantage'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Global Economic Governance and the Bretton Woods Institutions |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 60 school-age students from Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College, Birmingham, were provided with a lecture on some of the topics related to their A1 exams |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | IPE Cluster Seminar Presentation (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On June 4th 2015 I presented a paper at the IPE Cluster Seminar Series at the University of Warwick. The paper was entitled, 'Trapped in Other People's Histories: IPE and the Austro-German Methodenstreit'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | IPE PhD Student Reading Group on Adam Smith (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I was asked to lead a roundtable discussion of Adam Smith's work for PhD members of the International Political Economy Research Cluster that I direct at Warwick. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Introduction and Post-Event Discussion, Department of Politics and International Studies Film Club (Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Eight-five students attended the screening of the film, Four Horsemen. Around forty then stayed on for the post-film discussion. The latter was scheduled for an hour, but due to the enthusiasm of the students ended up lasting a further forty-five minutes on top of that. Many of the students reported that they will think differently in future about how to watch documentary films that try to capture particular moments in time for the world economy. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Introduction to the Colonial Hangover Project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Keynote lecture to the Widening Participation Schools Day on the Colonial Hangover, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, January 19th 2017 - 75 school-age students in attendance |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Keynote Address delivered to the Workshop, 'Education Meets Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Precarity' (Hendon) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | Around forty people were in attendance to hear my talk, which was entitled 'Taking the Classroom into the Community' and focused on political economy community education projects in the wake of the financial crisis. Discussions of the themes of my paper ensued throughout the rest of the day in all of the drink and meal breaks. I was invited to act as an ongoing advisor for one such political economy community education project whose members were in attendance on the day. This is the People's Education Project London. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Keynote Address, New Directions in International Political Economy Conference (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On May 13th 2015 I delivered the opening keynote address to the public roundtable which started the three-day New Directions in International Political Economy Conference at the University of Warwick. The conference was organised as part of the University's Festival of Social Sciences being held to celebrate its 50th Anniversary. The title of my talk was, 'Beware of Qualifying Adjectives'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/ipe/rethinkingthemarket/publications... |
| Description | Keynote Lecture for Think Higher Day for Year 12s, King Edward's College Nuneation, 'How Should we Deal Today with the Legacy of the British Empire', January 30th 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | As with some of the other recent entries, a smart phone app was used to ensure that the students felt they were a constant presence all of the way through the presentation. They were able to vote in real time on a series of questions I posed to them about the continuing political controversies of market-making activities associated with the British Empire, and they were also able to reflect on how they thought the group as a whole had voted before I showed them the results. 55 students were in attendance. On the back of this presentation I have been approached by the team from Think Higher - all of whom were in attendance - about running more events for them in the future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Keynote Lecture to Political Studies Association's Schools Day, June 6th 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 40 school-aged students attended to talk about the effects of Brexit on British democracy, especially in relation to democratic oversight of Britain's market-making activities. I trialled a new interactive element for the presentation, allowing the students to use an app downloaded to their smart phones in order to be 'commenting' on all of the questions I asked them. On the basis of the success of the day, further schools have asked to participate in my Department's schools outreach activities. The PSA also asked for me to front other Schools Days for them in the future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Keynote Lecture to the Political Studies Association Schools Day, 'How Should we Deal Today with the Legacy of the British Empire', January 17th 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | As with some of the other recent entries, a smart phone app was used to ensure that the students felt they were a constant presence all of the way through the presentation. They were able to vote in real time on a series of questions I posed to them about the continuing political controversies of market-making activities associated with the British Empire, and they were also able to reflect on how they thought the group as a whole had voted before I showed them the results. 40 students were in attendance. On the back of this presentation, I have been approached by the Political Studies Association to lead on their first ever summer school, which they hope to run at Warwick in the summer of 2021. I have also been approached by the teachers of other schools with a request that we add them to our Department's schools outreach programme. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Keynote address to online Paris Workshop on Reading Economics as Political Theory - 'The Political Context for Ricardo's Free Market Models' - September 24th 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I was invited to give a keynote address to an interdisciplinary audience interested in the reach of economic ideas beyond economic theory. The event took place online due to ongoing coronavirus restrictions. The session lasted for an hour overall, twenty minutes for my presentation and forty minutes for the subsequent discussion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Letter in the Guardian, June 12th 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I was one of what the Guardian described in its front-page report on June 13th 2015 as "77 of the best-known academic economists" to sign a letter criticising UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's plans to enshrine in law permanent budget surpluses. The letter accuses Osborne of ignoring "basic economics". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/12/osborne-plan-has-no-basis-in-economics |
| Description | Liverpool Business School General Departmental Seminar (Liverpool) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Around 30 members of Liverpool Business School's academic faculty came to listen to me present a paper on my project findings. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Market Models, Metamathematics and Economic Theory: How the Market Concept Came to Mean Politically Anything You Want It To |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Paper presented at the General Departmental Seminar, Department of European and International Studies, King's College London, October 5th 2016 - 30 in the audience |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Opening Keynote Address delivered to the IPE Ö/Øresund Inaugural Workshop (Malmö) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | There were almost one hundred people in attendance. My keynote lecture lasted for forty minutes, with an additional forty-five minutes of Q&A immediately following and then further ad hoc discussions with other workshop participants throughout the day. I have been part of an email group seeking to incorporate the IPE Ö/Øresund group into a more obviously international network of scholars. I am expecting further possibilities for this sort of international collaboration to emerge in the future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/watson/podcasts/?podcastItem=malmo_keynote_address.mp3 |
| Description | Opening Keynote Lecture delivered at the first Amiel and Melburn Trust Residential School (Eastbourne) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Forty primarily young people from across the activist community in the UK were invited to the first Amiel and Melburn Trust Residential School to discuss the possibility of mobilising around new economic formations that would deliver enhanced justice. I gave the opening keynote lecture, fielded questions formally for thirty minutes afterwards, continued those discussions informally with individual participants for the remainder of the evening and stayed around for the whole of the weekend in an attempt to build networks. Three documentary makers working closely with Open Democracy have approached me to help script a short film on community education programmes which focus on empowering self-learning about the encroachment of market norms into everyday life. This will be as part of their Precarious Europe project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Opening Paper to Tax Justice Network Annual Research Conference (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | On June 25th 2015 I presented a paper at the Tax Justice Network Annual Research Workshop, 'Should Nation States Compete?'. The paper was entitled, 'Following in John Methuen's Early Eighteenth-Century Footsteps: Ricardo's Comparative Advantage Theory and the False Foundations of the Competitiveness of Nations'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Outreach Event, 'Austerity Britain: Where From and Where To?' (Coventry) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a public outreach event bringing together members of my Department with a host of anti-austerity activists and campaigners from the Coventry and Warwickshire region. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association (Dublin) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | I presented a paper entitled, 'How Not to Rethink Economy: The Rehabilitation of Orthodox Economics Opinion in the Wake of the Financial Crisis', and I also participated in the ensuing panel discussion. Further academic collaborations seem likely to ensue following the success of the panel. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association (Manchester) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | I presented a paper entitled, 'The World According to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis: Radically Conservative, Socially Empty, Financially Unstable', as well as participating in the overall panel discussion. On the back of this presentation I was invited to deliver the Opening Keynote Address at the first Amiel and Melburn Trust Residential School in Eastbourne in May 2014. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/watson/podcasts/?podcastItem=the_world_according_to_th... |
| Description | Paper Presented at the Department of Politics and International Studies General Departmental Seminar (Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Forty-five people were in attendance to listen to me talk about the main implications of my book, Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World, and how its findings fit into my ESRC Professorial Fellowship project. The event lasted for ninety minutes in a formal sense, but the discussions then spilled over into further informal chats. A number of Warwick postgraduate students have fed back that the presentation has changed their thinking and also, as a consequence, has had a direct influence on the way in which they were visualising the argument for either their MA or their PhD thesis. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Paper Presented at the International Institute of Social Studies Seminar Series, 'Crises, Continuity and Change' (The Hague) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | Sixty people - academic faculty, PhD students, MA students - were in attendance. The session lasted for two hours all told, including the Q&A and the broader discussion. The International Political Economy community in the Netherlands is still in its nascent stage, and further activities will be necessary in an attempt to engage it in international collaboration. I will be back in The Hague at the end of October 2014 to attend a further workshop which has this aim. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/watson/podcasts/?podcastItem=mat-thehague.mp3 |
| Description | Participant at the Workshop, 'Global Reordering and Bretton Woods: Compromise, Dissensus and Europe's Regulatory Role' (Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | I acted as the discussant on the panel, 'Conceptualising Global Economic Governance', and I was a participant throughout the two days of the workshop. Extensive academic discussions ensued. Further academic activities are now planned on the back of the success of the workshop. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Participation at the Inaugural History and Theory in International Relations Workshop (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | This event was held at the London School of Economics and was hosted by the Department of International Relations. I presented a paper during the opening session called, 'The Misreadings of Conceptual History within IPE', and I was a participant throughout the whole day of the workshop. The group will be meeting regularly in the future to further the lines of discussion laid down at the inaugural meeting. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Participation in Workshop, 'Feminist Challenges to Critical IPE' (Manchester) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | I was a discussant on one panel and a participant throughout the workshop. Extended conversations ensued. Further academic discussions are anticipated. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| Description | Pathways to Higher Education Day for Liverpool Football Club's Academy (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | My Department hosted Liverpool Football Club's Academy for a two-day event, at which I presented some findings from my ongoing Fellowship research in an attempt to place their understanding of the market environment in which they live their own lives. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Pathways to Politics Presentations - February, March and July 2015 (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Around twenty students from local schools attended our Pathways to Politics day, and I provided one of the breakout sessions in each of these three events. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Paying for the State: Taxation and Citizenship |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 60 Year 9s and 55 Year 12s at the Rainhill Academy, Rainhill, Liverpool |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | PhD Masterclass - London School of Economics |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'PhD Masterclass', International Political Economy and Public Policy Research Cluster, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, March 22nd 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Photographs, Family Histories and the Colonial Hangover |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Paper presented at the Coventry Mela, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, July 23rd 2016 - 60 people attended, plus 100s saw the accompanying photographic display during the week of the Mela |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Post-EU Referendum Question Time-style Roundtable Discussion |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 50 Year 10 students at Rainhill Academy, Rainhill, Liverpool |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Post-Show Discussion of David Edgar's 'Trying It On', Warwick Arts Centre, October 8th 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Around 80 of the audience for David Edgar's 'Trying It On' stayed for the post-show discussion, which I chaired. The other participants were David and Dr Shahnaz Akhter. The discussion revolved around the central theme of the play, which is whether the 20-year-old David would recognise the 70-year-old version of himself and vice versa, given how the two sit on very different sides of the process through which progressive politics now has to find its place within the general marketisation of everyday life. Further collaborations with David Edgar are now planned. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Presentation at an 'Academics Meet Practitioners' Workshop on Neoliberalism, Fraud and Moral Economy (Leeds) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | There were around twenty people at the workshop. My paper kicked off proceedings, and it set the agenda for some of the discussions that then continued throughout the day. It was entitled, 'The Expulsion of the Moral Economy Tradition from Economics Proper: 'Economy' as a Set of Practices Versus 'Economy' as a Logic of Order'. The insights of my paper - drawn from my ongoing ESRC project - were taken up in particular by John Christensen, Executive Director of the Tax Justice Network. Further discussions have ensued between me, John and Nicholas Shaxson (an author also associated with the Tax Justice Network), about the possibility of starting a network that would campaign against the implied market logic of pushing tax rates ever further downwards in a competitive race-to-the-bottom. This initiative is likely to be kickstarted properly in the next six months. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Presentation to Civil Service Fast Streamers' Seminar, Exploring Economics: 'Karl Polanyi and The Great Transformation' - February 13th 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | 30 members of the Civil Service Fast Stream were in attendance, to hear me talk about Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation. More broadly, they were in attendance to hear me talk about a key interlocutor in the history of economic thought who will not have appeared on the syllabus of their own recently-concluded undergraduate economics degrees. A number of participants at the seminar told me afterwards how it has provided them with fresh insights to tackle the challenges that they are set on a day-to-day basis, allowing them to think about those problems through something other than an orthodox economics mindset. I have been invited back to talk to them again. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Presentation to Online Political Economy Lockdown Seminar Series, 'A Failure of System or a Failure of Nerve? Adam Smith's Conspicuous Soft-Pedalling on the Imperial Adventures of Glasgow's Eighteenth-Century Tobacco Merchants' - May 11th 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Presentation of paper, 'A Failure of System or a Failure of Nerve? Adam Smith's Conspicuous Soft-Pedalling on the Imperial Adventures of Glasgow's Eighteenth-Century Tobacco Merchants', to the Online Political Economy Lockdown Seminar Series, 11.05.2020. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Presentation to Political Economy Research Group, University of Cambridge - 'Seeking Refuge in Mathematised Free Market Models? The Febrile Political Backdrop to Ricardo's Principles' - University of Cambridge - January 26th 2022 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a presentation to the Political Economy Research Group Seminar Series, run out of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Delivering another version of my previous Paris paper allowed me to hone my argument further, especially as the questions I was asked following the presentation took me in a very different direction compared to those in Paris. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Presentation to Virtual Workshop on Adam Smith - 'Adam Smith and the Glasgow Tobacco Merchants' - Newcastle University - May 21st 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Presentation of a paper, 'Adam Smith and the Glasgow Tobacco Merchants', to the Virtual Workshop on Adam Smith, Newcastle University, 21.05.2020. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Presentation to the Glasgow Competition Talks Seminar Series - ''The Market': The Economics and the Politics of a Key Domain of Legal Thinking' - University of Glasgow - October 14th 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I was invited to present an overview of my project research on 'the market' to an audience of competition lawyers at the University of Glasgow. The ensuing Q&A session took both me and the audience into unexpected areas of investigation, leading to changed ways of thinking for all of us. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Presentation to the SPERI/PSA Workshop on Rethinking Economic Policy - 'The Re-Found Art of Economics' - November 26th 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I presented a paper on the political dimension of economic modelling, focusing on the lost art of economics during the global financial crisis but the apparent re-found art of economics during the Covid crisis. I received invitations for future collaboration on the basis of my paper. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Presentation to the This Is Tomorrow Workshop with China Plate Theatre Company (Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Six artists in residence visited my department along with the two artistic directors of the China Plate Theatre Company. Discussions continued all day about how academic work might be translated into artistic forms to reach new audiences. I spoke about my research on how to conceptualise 'the market', in particular in relation to the market distresses experienced during the recent financial crisis. I got very positive vibes on the day about how the presentation of my research themes was sparking new ideas amongst the artists in residence. However, I have not heard anything since the original meeting in March 2014 about potential future collaborations. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Public Presentation to District 1210 Annual Conference, Rotary Club of Great Britain and Ireland (Llandudno) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Over 500 people were in attendance at the Rotary Conference for District 1210 at the Venue Cymru in Llandudno. I was invited to give a talk on fair trade and the way in which the making of fair trade markets differs on the ethical dimension from the making of many other commercial markets. I had lots of people come up to me at the end of my talk to tell me how my presentation was going to change their shopping habits in the future, as well as subsequent confirmation from a number of people that this is exactly what it has done. I ended with a challenge to the organisers of future Rotary conferences to see what they could do to ensure that at least some of the food and drink at comparable events was fair trade. The incoming District Governor approached me at the end of the conference to say that he was going to think very seriously about how he would try to meet my challenge at next year's District 1210 Conference. However, I have not yet heard whether I will be invited back to the conference to act as some sort of monitor of their achievements. I was also approached by the President of Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland, Peter King, to exchange contact details. He seemed interested in the possibility that I might give a repeat performance at the RIBI Conference in Belfast in April 2015 and that my challenge could therefore become more deeply engrained in Rotary practice. No confirmation has yet been forthcoming, however, from his end. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Public Speaking Engagement to the Political Philosophy Club, London |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Thirty people drawn from a variety of professions attended a public talk held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, on September 30th 2014. An hour's lecture was followed by an hour's formal Q&A session, plus extended informal discussions afterwards. The feedback was all verbal on the night, plus via extended email conversations afterwards, because it seemed inappropriate given the nature of the audience to ask for written feedback. The vast majority of attendees all made some comment along the lines that I had changed the way that they visualised the relationship between economics and the market economy. The title of the talk had been, 'Markets, Markets Everywhere, But Not As You Might Think'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Raced Markets Workshop Paper Presentation (University of Warwick) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On December 10th 2015 I delivered a paper to the Raced Markets Workshop held at the University of Warwick, as part of a 'Key Conversations' session with Professor John Holmwood from the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. The paper is entitled, 'Robinson Crusoe and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://racedmarkets.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/thinking-race-through-economics-a-conversation-between... |
| Description | Roundtable contribution to a book launch, 'Karl Polanyi in the History of Thought Tradition', King's College London, October 23rd 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 40 people were present at the roundtable to discuss the launch of Christopher Holmes's book, 'Polanyi in Times of Populism: Vision and Contradiction in the History of Economic Ideas'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Schools Outreach Lecture, Whitchurch Shropshire, 'Imperial Nostalgia and Brexit', June 25th 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 65 school-aged students attended and joined in with a discussion of the way that nostalgia for Britain's unilateral right to make markets during its imperial heyday helped to inform the climate of opinion which led to Brexit. The teachers present responded very positively to how this required the students to exit their comfort zone and to really think about how they position themselves in relation to the world, and future invitations to return to the school - my old school, as it happens - were secured. Students reported having clarified their thinking, and even in some instances having their thinking reshaped on the back of the group discussion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute General Seminar (University of Sheffield) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I was invited to give the General Seminar paper on February 25th 2015, and around forty members of Sheffield faculty and PhD students attended. The paper's contents mirror the underlying intellectual themes of my Fellowship, and it was entitled, 'Deep History of Economic Thought as a Methodology of 'Unlearning': Liberating IPE from the Textbook Account of the Methodenstreit'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Sixth Form Forum Talk delivered to Year 12 Students at Sir John Talbot's School, Whitchurch Shropshire: 'Sir John Talbot's and Clive of India' - October 1st 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 65 sixth-formers were engaged at my old school, Sir John Talbot's Comprehensive School in Whitchurch Shropshire. When I attended the school, one of the houses was named 'Clive', after Clive of India, who was born nearby in North Shropshire. The students were unaware of this, nor that the contemporary anti-colonial politics of name-changing had nothing to do with the fact that 'Clive' is no longer the name of one of the school's houses. This led to a broad discussion of what to do with names that might today give offence because of their association with imperial-era atrocities, as well as how they would view the statue of Clive which stands in the main market square next time they are in Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire. Lots of the students reported either changed opinions or brand new opinions on matters that they would not have previously considered. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Sixth-Form Forum Talk, Sir John Talbot's School, Whitchurch Shropshire: 'How Should we Deal Today with the Legacy of the British Empire' - November 12th 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | As with some of the other recent entries, a smart phone app was used to ensure that the students felt they were a constant presence all of the way through the presentation. They were able to vote in real time on a series of questions I posed to them about the continuing political controversies of market-making activities associated with the British Empire, and they were also able to reflect on how they thought the group as a whole had voted before I showed them the results. 70 students were in attendance. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | The Changing Look of the Market Model in Mainstream Economics: Gérard Debreu and the Influence of the Hilbert Programme |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 12 academics at a workshop at the University of Birmingham |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | The Colonial Hangover Project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | China Plate 'This Is Tomorrow' programme bringing together PAIS academics and a number of theatre makers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | The Politics of Silence in Liberal Economic Theory: What David Ricardo's Theory of Global Free Trade Still Does Not Tell Us 200 Years On |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Presentation to the C2G2 General Departmental Seminar Series, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, December 7th 2016 - 25 academics present |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | The Price of Citizenship |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Talk delivered to 30 Year 12 Students at the PAIS Pathways to Politics Widening Participation Day, November 24th 2016 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Two Lectures to the Sutton Trust Summer School, University of Warwick: 'Restorative Approaches to the Legacy of Empire' and 'Empire and the Politics of Heroes' - July 30th and 31st 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 18 lower-sixth students attended the Sutton Trust Summer School stream on the Colonial Hangover at the University of Warwick. The participants reported getting a keener sense of how the politics of empire still affected the way in which they were able to self-identify today and also reported wanting to become more politically active in the future on the back of these sessions. Subsequent evidence has shown that they have heightened their aspirations for the type of university they would be willing to apply to study at in future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | University of Birmingham Undergraduate Masterclass |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | On October 29th 2015 I delivered a presentation to an Undergraduate IPE Masterclass in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. I was joined at the Masterclass by Adrienne Roberts from the University of Manchester and Liam Stanley from the University of Sheffield. The topic we were asked to address was 'How To Do Research in IPE', and I illustrated my arguments via an ongoing paper that seeks to put the historical back-story of gunboats, royal intrigue, European imperial wars and the transtalantic slave trade back into David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://bham.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=c4848b2b-8b04-4a19-9e9b-4110c446cd03 |
| Description | University of Birmingham Undergraduate Masterclass |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Roughly 120 University of Birmingham came to listen to me talk at a roundtable event discussing how the participants first came to IPE. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/watson/podcasts/?podcastItem=how_i_came_to_ipe.mp3 |
| Description | Walking Tour of Leamington Spa for Sutton Trust Summer School Students, July 31st 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 18 students were taken on the Imperial Leamington Walking Tour that I have developed with a number of research partners at Warwick: Shahnaz Akhter, Ben Richardson, John Morris, Victoria Carasava and Darius Stasiulevicius. They reported that they will now be looking at their home towns very differently having been provided with a number of insights about what to look for when trying to spot the legacy of imperial market-making within the built environment. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Warwick University Food Co-op Roundtable on the Ethics of Food Trade (Coventry) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Around sixty students and staff at Warwick were in the audience at a roundtable discussion of the politics of food ethics. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Zoom book launch of the Oxford University Press Handbook on Politics and Performance - 'The Market: Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices' - April 21st 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I gave a paper on my chapter in the Handbook to the Zoom book launch, following by Q&A. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |